Kahlo show under fire for ‘promoting communism’

A RIGHT-WING pro-government newspaper has criticised a Frida Kahlo exhibition at Hungary’s National Gallery for “promoting communism”.

Its criticism comes as part of a wider national debate on culture and cultural policy since Viktor Orbán, the nationalist prime minister, won a third consecutive mandate in April.

Mr Orbán’s supporters and pro-government journalists have argued in the past weeks it was now time for a shift in culture towards conservative values to end what they call a dominance of Leftist-liberal artists.

In an article headlined “This is the way communism is promoted using state money”, the Kahlo exhibition in Budapest was listed in the Right-wing newspaper Magyar Idők along with other galleries, artists and exhibitions.

“You won’t believe it but Trotsky has emerged in Budapest again, this time from Frida Kahlo’s bed,” it wrote, referring to her affair with Leon Trotsky, a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, during his later exile in Mexico.

Kahlo was affiliated with the Communist Party of Mexico and is said to have decorated her bed-head with images of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

The Kahlo exhibition, the international musical Billy Elliot and a string of gallery shows have found themselves under fire in the newspaper. It said there was “no aesthetic problem” with the exhibition of the “Mexican communist painter”, which has drawn up to 3,000 visitors a day. The National Gallery declined to comment.

Kahlo has become one of the 20th century’s most famous artists in the decades since her death, and her work draws huge interest.

Galvanising the debate about cultural policy, Mr Orbán said major changes lay ahead and his third election victory was “nothing short of a mandate to build a new era”.

“An era is determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs,” he told hundreds of supporters. “This is now the task we are faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.”

Since Mr Orbán was first elected in 2010, his Fidesz party has rewritten Hungary’s constitution and gained control of state media, and businessmen close to him have built empires.

Mr Orbán has successfully challenged western liberal taboos, winning the 2018 election with a strong antiimmigration campaign and by focusing on the importance of national pride and unity, and a “strong Hungary”.