Frida Kahlo: Representation of the Accident (undated)
tate.org.uk [1]
I.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Frida Kahlo and wouldn't have gone to Tate Modern's current exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon (25 June 2026 - 3 Jan 2027) if it wasn't top of the Little Greek's list of things she wanted to do on her birthday ...
And so, despite certain reservations - not so much about the artist and her work, but the highly commercial, punter-pleasing nature of the exhibition itself - off we set on a grey and drizzly Tuesday morning to Bankside, only stopping first for coffee and croissants at the Royal Exchange (as you do) ...
II.
There's a combination of reasons why I have never been entirely taken with Frida Kahlo and her work.
Firstly, there are those elements of dreamy surrealism and folksy magical realism that seduced André Breton, but which I find irritating after a while; too many symbols, Mozart.
Secondly, her concerns to do with gender, postcolonial identity, the female body and its experience of pain, revolutionary Mexican politics, etc., are ultimately not mine and whilst I'm vaguely interested in what she has to say about these things, I don't want them forced upon me in painting after painting.
Also, how many self-portraits by the same artist can one reasonably be expected to find interesting: at what point does it all become a wee bit repetitive and reveal both technical limitation and narrow thematic focus [2] when an artist simply paints her own boat?
Kahlo only produced around 150 works and of these over a third feature her own monobrowed likeness and whilst she certainly had a distinctive (and not unattractive) look, it's not one I find as endlessly fascinating as many people today clearly do [3].
III.
The exhibition was spread over ten rooms, each with a different title and theme. A standard adult ticket was priced at £25—or £64 if you wanted a two-course lunch in the Level 6 restaurant (where I highly recommend the grilled octopus, even if the onglet steak left me underwhelmed).
Writing in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones is quick to point out that the exhibition only features thirty-six works by Kahlo herself and that it is supplemented not only with photographs and archival materials (including several Tehuana dresses), but by a wide range of works produced by contemporaries and those who have since been influenced by her art, image, and legend, helping to manufacture the Frida Kahlo myth-cum-global-commercial-brand.
Actually, Jones says the show is "padded out with responses by lesser artists" [4], but that's a bit unfair in its sweeping dismissiveness of artists that include monumental figures like Diego Rivera and influential contemporaries like Judy Chicago. To be honest, I enjoyed seeing some of their works more than I did looking at Kahlo's own.
In fact, unlike Jones - and unlike The Observer's art critic Laura Cumming, who also argues that the Tate exhibition woefully sells Kahlo short [5] - I was pleased to discover that this was not merely an exhibition by Kahlo, but an exhibition about her and, in particular, about how the world succumbed to Fridamania.
Ms Cumming complains that the artist's own work is singularly missing from the show, but I think she's missing the point.
The clue to the exhibition is right there in the title: The Making of an Icon. The curators [6] aren't trying to give us a pure and predictable retrospective; they are documenting the exact process by which Kahlo has disappeared beneath multiple interpretations and mass-produced merchandise - it's le crime parfait, as Baudrillard would say [7].
Since Kahlo is now present everywhere, her ringing absence in the galleries is no longer an issue.
Notes
[1] As is well-known, Kahlo was severely injured in a bus crash when she was eighteen (1925). And perhaps my favourite image in the Tate exhibition discussed here is this one in which she restages the accident with a rag doll and toy horse-and-cart. As Jonathan Jones says, there's a primal quality to Kahlo's memories of this devastating event and this picture suggests it marked the end of childhood innocence and pain-free joy. Photo by Stephen Alexander (20 Oct 2026).
[2] To be honest, I'm not overly concerned by these things. That is to say, I don't much care about so-called technical deficiencies in her work or even if her range of external reference was narrow and this led to repetition and self-obsessiveness.
But ultimately, unlike Madonna, I just wouldn't want one of her works hanging on my wall - they simply don't hold my interest for very long, with one or two exceptions, such as the miniature oil on tin plate painting titled in English 'Girl with a Death Mask' (1938), that really charmed me at the exhibition (a print is available in the Tate shop).
[3] It is worth recalling that Kahlo remained a relatively unknown figure until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and an assortment of feminists, queers, political activists, etc., all began to see themselves reflected in her life and work.
[4] Jonathan Jones, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon review', The Guardian (22 June, 2026).
[5] Laura Cumming, 'Frida: The Making of an Icon sells a great artist short', The Observer (25 June 2026).
Among several criticisms - mostly aimed at the cack-handed portraits by other artists on display and members of the viewing public who dared hold up smartphones in order to record their own Instagram homages - Ms Cumming complains that "what is singularly missing from this show, first to last, is the artist's own work". I will address this point in the main text.
[6] The exhibition was curated by Tobias Ostrander and Beatriz García-Velasco. The show was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
[7] I'm thinking here of Jean Baudrillard's argument in The Perfect Crime (Verso, 1996), where he refers to the extermination and vanishing of reality.
Interestingly, Jonathan Jones notices how, in the Tate show, Kahlo as "a real person who made intensely autobiographical work" suddenly disappears only to be replaced by "homages, restagings, deconstructions and, finally, merchandise", but he fails to understand why this is symptomatic of the times in which we live and ends his review by simply defending her true greatness.
