Subtexts The life of Frida Kahlo gets the graphic novel treatment
Frida gets graphic
Since her death in 1954, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has become a folk hero and a commercial industry, her face plastered on refrigerator magnets and tote bags. Her dramatic love life is legendary: She was married to muralist and renowned ladies’ man Diego Rivera, and she had affairs with both men and women. Most people know she painted mostly self-portraits and that she favored traditional Mexican dress. And yet Kahlo remains an enigma, her legacy part truth and part invention. She had her own ideas about how she wanted to be perceived, including saying she was born in 1910 instead of 1907. This fib is usually attributed to her wish to have her birth coincide with the start of the Mexican Revolution, but María Hesse, the writer and illustrator of the graphic novel Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Life, notes that in fact, Kahlo began school a few years late because of childhood illness, and her parents were the ones who first lied about her age so that she wouldn’t seem so far behind her classmates.
In a format Kahlo herself might have employed and would no doubt have appreciated, Hesse shades in missing elements of the artist’s biography by focusing on what Kahlo might have felt about turning points in her life. Hesse’s drawings, which include reinterpretations of some of Kahlo’s most famous paintings, are simple and charming, and the text introduces a welcome level of complexity to Kahlo’s life that is often missing from the popular narrative.