Last updated October 2, 2025
Frida Kahlo at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit with less enthusiasm and more a sense of obligation, intending to view, in person, some of the works of one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. In fine arts, Kahlo is completely unavoidable, in some portion because her fame has been buoyed upward through a general link to the societal effort to emphasize women artists in a sphere of culture that has been traditionally over many, many centuries, dominated by male painters. Another unavoidable aspect of of Kahlo is that she bridges over strongly into celebrity culture where being famous becomes a kind of perpetual motion machine with fame generating fame because one is famous.
At a certain level the pantheon of institutional celebrity icons are reinforced by all of the general levers of society as an endorsed, approved and certified personality. None of this means a genuine sense of quality is present, and though Kahlo's paintings are splashed all over art magazines, text books (and skate-boards, see below) and of course any general history of 20th century art, she also has a leg up due to a relationship to revolutionary politics and her association with another genuine figure of importance, Diego Rivera, the Mexican painter of murals in America and Mexico who was twice married to Kahlo.
In reproduction in books and magazines (or on the internet) Kahlo's work suffers the same way many paintings do, that is, becoming more flat looking than they really are, and emphasizing a kind of creeping coarseness that simplifies elements and, most damaging, makes the subtle elements (usually coloring) completely invisible.
I've been going to museums nearly all of my life and the phenomenon of how a painting looks in print (and I have a mountain of art books) and how it looks in person is an experience I've encountered time and again, and its the same here with Kahlo's paintings. What was a flat and perhaps even amateurish piece in print becomes a vibrant and multilevel piece in person, and the reflective and coloring attenuation caused by a layer of varnish or glazing is something that is frequently lost in photography. Instead of seeing what the painter actually painted and looked at on their easel the image is altered by the photographic lens and especially in this digital age by the color balancing process of an algorithm which strips away elements, or more likely, simply cannot capture those elements. As a consequence, when fine artists emphasize to a buyer who is purchasing a print of one of their painted works that "you understand you're purchasing a reproduction photo of the artwork, not a true copy of the artwork" it isn't just the usual caveat emptor of the marketplace, but a sad warning that you cannot clone a painting with the tools presently within the grasp of 21st technology.
All that said, seeing Kahlo in person is a perfect representation of how "the real thing" is well separated from dulled reproduction. In person the works often burst out with vitality that helps to bring out the other visual elements that she uses, such as an emphasis on traditional painting techniques and composition, not just brush strokes but speech scroll/banderole inserts with captions or messages as used in hundreds years old medieval European art. Considering how tragicomic this juxtaposition is, but possibly not intended, adds shadings to her paintings.
What also stands out in an enclosed place with so many of her images gathered together is, regardless of what individual images represent, there is a continuous parallel story happening in the paintings which chronicles her life. At the center of her almost endless self-focus is a general theme of creeping destruction mainly derived from the catastrophic injuries from a bus accident in 1925 that left her in constant pain. This event finds place in so much of her art so that her paintings (and drawings) begin to take on a sequential aspect, not as plain as, say, Goya's The Bandit Maragato series, but all the same a continuing story of physical struggle and decline as the injuries take their long-term toll.
[Above] The VMFA Frida Kahlo Gift Shop - that's three skateboards on the distant wall with her 1940 Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird plastered across the three boards. As I was wandering around the exhibit I heard an employee telling a security guard that they were almost sold-out of the skateboards, and there were larger items, apparently a large throw-wrap or something similar, that was also sold out. The irony of Kahlo, a dedicated communist who had Leonid Trotsky as a houseguest and was an admirer of Stalin, now an engine of capitalist icon-making, is not lost.
The exhibit was crowded with people and the majority were females. I saw what is the typical pairing at museums: a woman studying images, going from one to another, while a male companion tawdles along, not reading the placards glued to the wall near the frame describing details about a painting. Some of these placards were industrously seeking to add to the "mythos" of Kahlo by imagining how elements in her paintings "may refer " to something else that then forms relationships and meanings not actually evident in the paintings. A need to splice together biography from these "maybes" in an exhibit titled Frida: Beyond the Myth is hard to ignore.
The exhibit did not have the majority of her output on hand, but featured a far more vast number of photographs of her that seemed to range from random candids of her life, to images that seemed like that of a 21st century fashion star featuring the same expressionless style, in photo after photo, that gives away no particular emotion, as if the subject isn't really looking at the camera but is only looking inward at the image of themself.
There were a number of video recordings projected high onto the walls of the different rooms of the exhibit, and people would stop and pull out their phones, holding them high in the air to record the videos as if it were a live performance. One of these videos showed a youngish Frida climbing a ladder while Diego Rivera stood by, one of his murals captured midway of execution. But it is Frida's action of using the ladder that stood out, because as you learn more of her story, you realize this was a unique event and segregated to a part of her life before the difficulties of her injuries and the pain management of those injuries (doctor-prescribed drugs and her own use of alcohol) turned living into a tortured, bedridden affair from where she painted, received visitors, and at the end of her life attended a major solo exhibit in Mexico City of her work from a bed carried into the gallery. She died aged 47 in 1954.
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Ellie Stathaki discusses Faculty of Philosophy building in Novi Sad, Serbia; the Housden House in London; the Johannes XXIII Church in Cologne, Germany; and several more, all with photos.
Detailed image – oil on canvas by Theodore Gericault - 1813-1814. Mounted Trumpeters of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard Oil on Canvas, National Gallery of Art - click on image to enlarge
Police in Italy search for couple that sat on museum artwork ....and crushed it – The Local Italy
"Palazzo Maffei described it as "every museum's nightmare" and told AFP on Monday it had made a complaint to the police..."
Framed Portrait of Pocahontas by Richard Norris Brooke begun 1889, completed 1907.
Richa Franks portrait - 1735
- detail
Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Buffalo head close up for 1917 bronze by Alexander Philmister Proctor. National Gallery of Art.
Photo of children drawing on digital tablet "Paint'n'Play" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC
The controversy of authorship around the famous Vietnam War era photo "Napalm Girl" photo – le Monde
More art pages in the Archives