How the ubiquity of Frida Kahlo’s image is ruining her legacy

How the legacy of a political activist/artist is being erased by her popularity

The 1938 portrait features a young girl fashioning a pink and white huipil — a tunic women from Mexico often wear— and holding what looks to be a yellow marigold flower, or tagete, in her hands. A white grimacing mask covers her face like an exterior skull and another brown, bloody-looking mask lays next to her on the ground looking like a beheaded monster. The sky is a bleak palette of blues, greys and browns.

It’s a sombre painting. The masks — both of which are traditionally worn on El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) — are used to represent the young girl hiding from her inevitable fate. The flowers are the same type used to decorate a loved one’s grave. The symbolism takes on an even bleaker meaning when we learn it is a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. The sad fate depicted in the painting is no longer theoretical; it represents something real, something more: the inevitability of chronic illness, sexism and heartbreak that the artist would battle throughout her life.

The impending dread we glean from Girl With A Death Mask is at odds with much of what we think we might know about the legendary Mexican artist. This seemed especially apparent last week, on the 64th anniversary of her death. Instead of honouring and remembering Kahlo’s true legacy — her politics, her feminism, her activism, her art — we further contributed to its erasure with the continued commercialization of the “selfie queen’s” image.

You probably know her for the unibrow (sported as a logo by white girls on their fall denim jackets) and her “narcissistic” self-portraits. But there is so much more: she was a disabled (by polio as a child), bisexual woman, who married Diego

Rivera, but had affairs with Josephine Baker and Leon

Trotsky. She loudly supported socialist movements, and yet, managed to become the first Hispanic woman to be featured on a U.S. postal stamp.

But while her life was grand, her legacy has gone in a distinctly different direction. Selma Holo, art history professor and director of the Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, said that when Kahlo was finally able to emerge from under the shadow of her famed muralist husband Rivera, it took her on an unfortunate turn to fetishization. “In the fetishization, she also became commodified. With that being the case, you begin to see (things like) buttons with her unibrow.”

In the years since her death, Kahlo’s face has become less of a political symbol and more of a commercial one. “Frida Kahlo? Oh yeah, I have a t-shirt with her face on it from my trip to Cancún!” Kahlo’s contemporary relevance rings similarly to that of the Argentine Marxist doctor Che Guevara. Guevara’s profile on a poster, with facial features edited to nothing but enhanced shadows and minor detail, has gone from representing the stoic face of political revolution to just another part of Western pop culture — widely seen on the dorm walls of stoner college kids.

But the onus for the phenomenon doesn’t merely rest on the shoulders of frat boys and woo girls. Museums and gallery exhibitions have also contributed to the fetishization frenzy over her life. In Mexico City’s municipality of Coyoacán — where Kahlo was born, grew up, lived with Rivera and eventually died — you’ll find the Casa Azul, a museum dedicated to her life and work. Fridamania can also be experienced at MoMA’s Mexican Modernist gallery in New York (featuring a portrait and a mirror next to it), or at Hungary’s first-of-its-kind exhibition that opened a week ago exhibiting bold pink blush, bright red lipstick and loud flowers atop other icons like Amy Winehouse, Lisa from The Simpsons and Beyoncé. British Prime Minister Theresa May was flaunting the face of a communist on her wrist during the Conservative Party Conference speech, which many suspected was an attempt to claim the feminist label. Who can forget the time that Frida Barbies were banned in Mexico because Mattel Inc., manufacturers of Barbies and Hot Wheelz, commercialized her image without her family’s approval. Those with even more thirst for all-things-Frida can have fun with tutorials on last-minute Halloween costume DIYs and white-washed filters that can be found on Snapchat.

So, what if an artist becomes a global phenomenon? Is that not a good thing? In today’s social media climate, the result of glorification can leave little space for actual education. For Kahlo, her fame seems to have caused little political impact, and instead, provided direction for those looking to achieve self-worth — or at least a surfacelevel version of it.

The parallels of her rise in popular culture with the prevalence of Instagram can’t be ignored. Both have contributed to and fed off an increased importance attributed to selfworth. But while posting selfies is a perfectly acceptable form of boosting one’s confidence, does equating Kahlo’s rebellious and revolutionary acts to your selfies not come across as somewhat vapid?

You could say using a hashtag to promote Kahlo-inspired selfies is good thing. At least we’re loving ourselves and at least it’s a woman who was unapologetically herself – Latina, hairy and loud. But when people don’t know the background of what they promote, it puts the subject at risk of becoming a fragmented version of themselves, Holo said. “Everything became compartmentalized and broken down. She becomes cheapened and partitioned, and she was a very whole, complicated and integrated kind of person. It does a disservice to the wholeness of who she was as an artist.” Kahlo isn’t alone in facing this type of expunging. The Impressionists, Holo said, fell victim to the phenomenon too. “They are reproduced on everything — on paper towel rolls, on napkins, on kitchen towels, on sheets, on plates.” As this happens with Kahlo over the decades, her fans have become less of a help to her cause and more of an erasure of the progress she made. “The extent to which (Kahlo) is reproduced and sold is bound to make her become tedious in some ways to others. It’s overkill.”

At the age of 18, Kahlo was in a terrible bus accident that fractured several ribs, both legs and her collarbone. She was impaled by an iron handrail. The pain from this incident — combined with her childhood bout of polio — would go on to inspire several of her most successful paintings. You can see it in her self-portraits: the tears resting below her eyeducts and a stern gaze delivered by dark brown eyes.

In the Netflix comedy special “Hannah Gadsby: Nanette,” the Australian comedian with an art history background tells the audience that we shouldn’t romanticize disability. But that doesn’t mean we should separate the artist from the art. It suggests that the things Kahlo suffered are an important part of what enabled her to contribute what she did to the world — and that shouldn’t be neglected, whether it be disability, sexual orientation, political beliefs and so on.

The unibrow on our magnets, t-shirts and notebooks have weaponized Kahlo’s legacy against her — pushed forward by a virtuesignalling world that’s often just in it for the opportunity to claim “wokeness.”

Her fame is deserved, Holo said, but it came with a cost. “I do think she’s a great artist, and to the extent that people might be moved to learn more about who she is and the paintings that she did, and even about her life — I think that’s great. I just don’t know whether a button will bring them to that.”