DRAWING ATTENTION
As the V&A shines a spotlight on Frida Kahlo, Hannah Betts celebrates the artist’s powerful use of cosmetics
How Frida Kahlo’s make-up became part of her self-image and her art
‘Her face was not pretty, perhaps, by established norms, but she possessed – and even radiated – a strange and alluring beauty… She had a special skill for applying make-up… She knew how to transform herself into a sensational beauty, irresistible and unique.’ These are the words of Olga Campos, a psychology student who made a study of Frida Kahlo five years before the Mexican artist’s death at the age of 47.
The founder of surrealism André Breton remarked that Kahlo’s painting was ‘like a ribbon around a bomb’. The same might be said of her cosmetic rituals. Beyond the sensuous pleasure she took in dressing up, Kahlo’s adornment was a means of attracting attention to herself and thus her work, when the world would rather focus on the creations of her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.
As the title of the V&A’s new exhibition – ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’ – indicates, her beauty became both strategy and subject. The co-curator Claire Wilcox observes: ‘Of her small oeuvre of paintings, about a third are self-portraits.’ Together with her mastery of the photographic pose, they allowed Kahlo to establish herself as the icon she remains to this day. In doing so she redefined notions not only of beauty, but of gender, disability and art itself.
The V&A’s exhibition will be the first outside Mexico to focus on objects discovered at the Blue House, the home in which Kahlo was born, worked and died. At her death in 1954, Rivera sealed off the bathroom containing her personal effects. It was opened in 2004, revealing a Sleeping Beauty-style treasure-trove of drawings, documents,
photographs, clothes, medical corsets – even a false leg shod in a resplendent scarlet boot. Over 200 of these items will be displayed, alongside a selection of paintings on which they shed light.
The Blue House’s cosmetic relics reflect the crucial place of make-up in the creation of Kahlo’s personal and professional selves: a Revlon blusher and powder puff, an ebony eyebrow pencil, a lipstick in the shade Everything’s Rosy and Guerlain’s bronzily balsamic Shalimar. (Kahlo also wore Chanel No 5 and Shocking by Schiaparelli.) She may have been a Tehuana in dress, but her grooming was pure Hollywood.
The elements of her idiosyncratic beauty are so familiar that even non-enthusiasts can conjure them. As Wilcox inventories: ‘Raven hair, tinted lips, rouged cheekbones, conjoined eyebrows and an upper lip distinctly moustached.’ The brows ‘became her unique signifier, a shorthand for self ’, not least compared with the slender crescent moons favoured in the period. However, it is the moustache that Wilcox deems most radical. ‘Brave even now,’ she says. ‘Depilatory creams were available, but her fine brushwork imbues her facial hair with a delicate, unapologetic beauty.’ Meanwhile, the carmine ruddiness of Kahlo’s lip and cheek reflected her obsessions with blood, health and fever.
To recreate her look, begin with the brows: try Bobbi Brown’s Brow Pencil for depth. Our heroine didn’t sport mascara, merely sooty Talika powder. However, imitators will benefit from Dior’s new mascara, set off by its jet Khôl High Intensity Pencil.
On the cheeks, Lancôme’s Blush Subtil in Rose Indien imparts exquisite vivacity suggestive of a fetching feverishness. Daub lips with Marc Jacobs’ Le Marc Lip Crème in Scandal (rosy lipstick on a dark mouth rendering it darker still). Nails follow suit in Leighton Denny’s Infatuation. One may not want to go as far as sporting a braid, but much can be achieved with a centre-parting and a floral headband.
Kahlo’s passion for powder and paint will be an inspiration to those who find solace and self-expression in the arching of an eyebrow, or the angling of a cheek. So central were the cosmetic arts to Kahlo’s sense of self that her nurse recalled knowing that the end was nigh when her patient forsook these rituals. As one of the catalogue’s essayists remarks: ‘Kahlo’s dresses and tresses were such an integral part of her identity that for her to abandon these aspects of her being was a harbinger of her death.’
‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’, sponsored by Grosvenor Britain & Ireland, will be at the V&A (www.vam.ac.uk) from 16 June.