It began, at least for the world at large, with the 2002 biopic that starred Mexico's very own Salma Hayek as the tortured Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hollywood's imprimatur made it officially cool to climb aboard the bandwagon of Fridamania, and the rush to cash in hasn't ceased since: Vogue and Harpers Bazaar ran Frida-themed fashion spreads that same year, Madonna started collecting some of her under-appreciated (and presumably under-priced) paintings, and a trendy Mexico City hotel unveiled a Frida Kahlo suite priced at $550 a night that featured a refrigerator emblazoned with a larger-than-life likeness of the deceased artist decked out in a trademark indigenous costume. Now the cultural establishment of Frida's native land has, however belatedly, decided to welcome her into Mexico's rich artistic pantheon on the centennial of her birth: a major retrospective exhibition modestly entitled "Frida Kahlo 1907-2007: National Homage" opened last month in the local equivalent of Carnegie Hall, Mexico City's ornate Palace of Fine Arts, to great fanfare and fawning reviews in the national and international news media.
One wonders what Frida herself might have made of this rather self-conscious tribute to an artist who spent most of her all too brief adulthood in the shadows of her more celebrated, on-again off-again husband Diego Rivera. The chronicallly ill Kahlo did stage exhibitions of her distinctive portraiture in New York and Paris, but the only solo show of her paintings inside Mexico took place in 1953, a year before her death at the age of 47. In real life there was nothing remotely Hollywood-esque about Frida, a card-carrying member of the Mexican Communist Party who made her last public appearance at a demonstration protesting the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of a left-wing government in neighboring Guatemala. For those of us who live in Mexico City, it is a bit unseemly to behold her unibrowed visage adorning so many posters and glossy magazine covers. Cubans must have similarly mixed emotions every time they see Alberto Korda's legendary snapshot of Che Guevara presiding at a 1960 press conference in Havana. Before his death, Korda sued the Swedish vodka maker Absolut to halt its plans to use his iconic image of Che in a forthcoming promotional campaign. Korda won his case, and let's hope the relatives of Frida and Diego will display similar backbone if and when some high-rent cosmetics manufacturer comes up with the bright idea of invoking Kahlo to market eyebrow pencil.
