“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” – Frida Kahlo
In a documentary almost overstuffed with valuable insights into the life and art of Frida Kahlo (though parsing the distinction seems to miss the point of the icon), one that stands out is just how indifferent she was to the larger world’s indifference to her art during her lifetime. As we’re told at one point in the film’s crisp voiceover (after note is made that Kahlo was all but ignored by the art-world), it was “an obscurity that did not matter to her. She painted, she said, for herself.” That said, she counted some of the 20th century’s greatest artists and thinkers as friends or colleagues.
A lot of professional creative people make the same claim, but with Kahlo the statement rings utterly true. You can feel the truth of it in the work itself. Hers was a vision both singular end electric, and while there are many readings that can – and are – given to her work, what is clear immediately (whether you are a fan or not) is that she was channeling a source so powerful she didn’t need any other validation. Her art was the validation of her aesthetic, radical and generous politics, and an inner world shaped by all manner of external pain.
Born just before the Mexican Revolution to a German Jewish immigrant father and a mother who was a depressive, hysterical devout Catholic, Kahlo was exposed to art at a young age, working as her photographer father’s assistant as a young girl. But she was also steeped in a newfound collective pride in Mexican history and culture following the revolution. Her own work is emblematic of folk traditions put to her own distinctive use.
Suffering a horrific accident at the age of 19 (following a brutal bout of polio as a young child), her physical existence was defined by excruciating pain. It was matched by the heartache of her passionate, turbulent life with the great muralist Diego Rivera, love of her life. All of it went into her art, as did a worldview shaped by a rigorous education; as a teenager, she debated Marx, Hegel and Kant with high school schoolmates. Her politics and larger worldview can be summed up in the following quote in which she assessed America (which she dubbed Gringolandia): “The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”
Director Amy Stechler does an exemplary job, filling the documentary with loads of vintage photos, newsreel footage, images of Kahlo’s own powerful work, and pungent memories from those who knew her. The writer Carlos Fuentes tells an especially great anecdote about attending an opera only to have the music (Wagner) upstaged by Frida making her way to her seat, her jewelry clanging so loudly it overshadowed the musicians.
The thing about Kahlo, unlike so many contemporary artists and celebrities, is that she wasn’t really angling for anybody else’s eye with her . Her self-absorption (a neutral term, here) was about trying to make sense of the hand she’d been dealt, both individually and in a world rife with bigotry, inequality and injustice, trying to turn all of it into art.
Shortly before her then-impending death, she wrote, “I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return.”
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
