She was a genius before she was a refrigerator magnet, an ace manipulator of society and media nearly a century before social media came into existence. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahloachieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far beyond Mexico’s borders, although nothing like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her indelible image recognizable everywhere.
Yet, despite the many biographies, documentaries and biopics, there remains much to learn about this often misunderstood artist, a sexual pragmatist who conducted affairs with both men and women, a proto-feminist who invested her art with an autobiography filled with struggle and pain. She was also an ardent Communist who sometimes fudged her date of birth to align with the start of the Mexican Revolution, and an irresistibly magnetic seducer, especially whenever a camera was around.
In a welcome though unexpected convergence, an array of new books and exhibitions about Kahlo have suddenly appeared this spring, adding insight and depth to our understanding of a woman who would seem among the most overexposed artistic figures of all time.
While it seems clear that artists like Tracey Emin have fallen under the influence of her audacious self-disclosures; that designers — like Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy and Jean Paul Gaultier — have drawn inspiration from her style; and that entertainers like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé shrewdly adapted the lessons pioneered by a publicity-friendly solipsist who anticipated the Instagram era by many decades, Kahlo remains in some ways an enigma.
In “Mirror, Mirror,” a portrait-survey that opens this month at Throckmorton Fine Art in Manhattan, Kahlo is revealed to have been an image wizard as canny as her spiritual descendant, Madonna.
“Frida did not miss an opportunity to be photographed by anyone and everyone,” said Norberto Rivera, the photography director at the gallery. “She created this image to hide the pain,” he added, referring to the lifelong aftereffects of severe injuries Kahlo suffered in a streetcar accident when she was 18. Through self-portraits that unsparingly depict her physical travails and that make frank allusion to a tumultuous emotional life, Kahlo inadvertently vaulted herself into that strange constellation of bright-burning, ill-fated stars, alongside James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.
So extensive is Frida Kahlo’s fame it’s difficult now to credit the fact that, at an auction of Latin American art held by Sotheby’s in May 1985, a painting depicting the artist as a hunted deer pierced by arrows, which was offered as the star lot, failed to sell. A decade later, another Kahlo painting was featured on a cover of a Sotheby’s catalog. This portrait, of the artist with a parrot and a monkey, was hammered down quickly for more than $3 million, at the time a worldwide record for a Latin American artist. Five years later, a 1929 Kahlo self-portrait sold to an Argentine collector for $5.1 million.
In under two decades, aided by a well-regarded biography and a soapy biopic, Kahlo had undergone transformation from a compelling cult figure to a universally recognized symbol of artistic triumph and feminist struggle. Somehow along the way she also became a centerpiece of a kitsch marketing bonanza. The “Fridamania” that elevated Kahlo to near-mythic dimensions also transformed her — brooding gaze, elaborate Tehuana coiffures, signature mono-brow — into an image emblazoned on sneakers, T-shirts, tote bags, coasters, cosmetics, even tequila and beer.
“I remember buying as a gift Frida Kahlo Converse sneakers at 10 Corso Como,” said Robert Burke, a luxury consultant, referring to the high-end Milanese retailer. “Though that was fun and good, there’s only a certain amount of times an image can be used before it starts to fatigue and degrade.”
Yet counter to Mr. Burke’s assertion, Frida Kahlo suddenly seems anything but exhausted as a subject.
“Fridamania shows no signs of relenting,” said Graham W. J. Beal, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and curator of “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” which shrewdly examines Rivera and Kahlo’s pivotal though largely forgotten sojourn in the Motor City, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint the labor mural “Detroit Industry.” At the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in Florida, “Kahlo, Rivera and Mexican Modern Art” revisits the relationship between these protean artists, locating them equally and squarely at the center of Mexican modernism.
Fine catalogs accompanying each exhibition add to an ever-expanding Kahlo library, and yet in certain ways it is the newly published “Frida Kahlo: The Gisèle Freund Photographs,” that offers the most intimate insights into her life and working process. Its 100 rare images document a friendship that the Magnum photographer conducted with the couple in the last years before Kahlo’s death; both Kahlo and Rivera shine forth from these domestic images.
Complementing the revelations of the Freund book is “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” opening May 16 at the New York Botanical Garden. For this surprising exhibition, the Tony Award-winning stage designer Scott Pask traveled to Mexico City to immerse himself in the world of Kahlo and Rivera, returning to recreate in the leafy Bronx the grounds of their home, La Casa Azul.
A singular dwelling built by Kahlo’s father in what were then the outskirts of Mexico City, Casa Azul became the anchor of Kahlo’s and Rivera’s married lives. They filled it with their astounding collections of ex votos, folk art and important Mesoamerican sculpture, and also with fellow Communist Party members, varied lovers, artist friends and a menagerie including parrots, monkeys and a pack of hairless dogs called xoloitzcuintli.
“There are a lot of people that have Frida refrigerator magnets that have never seen a Frida painting,” Mr. Pask said. “When you see the house and the beautiful emotive space of the garden, you understand that the art, the love and the life are so intertwined.”
His rendition of a volcanic stone pyramid Rivera constructed in the garden to display his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts is Mr. Pask’s most theatrical gesture. But his more subtle accomplishment may be the evocation of “this atmosphere Frida surrounded herself with, incorporating the botanical influence of the markets of Mexico, her gardens, the fruits and plants and animals she lived with into the prism of her work.”
The results are so singular it is little wonder Kahlo remains a figure of fascination.
“Clearly, she has become this major icon,” said Bonnie Clearwater, the director of the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
Her point is underscored by the strangely compelling 2013 book by the Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi documenting Kahlo’s wardrobe and belongings, images of which later found their way into the hip Berlin glossy O32c. (A fetishistic regard for objects that touched Kahlo’s body is not unique to Ms. Ishiuchi; on loan to the Throckmorton Fine Art show will be one of the orthopedic corsets illness required Kahlo to wear, “authenticated” in the manner of saintly relics and decorated with a hammer and sickle by her.)
Unlike Che Guevara, who when he became a T-shirt and a poster was scarcely identifiable as “the leader of the Cuban revolution,” wrote Gérard de Cortanze, Kahlo’s French biographer, in an email, “Frida Kahlo remains Frida Kahlo.” If his gnomic remark is not supportable in any real biographical sense, there is little doubt Kahlo continues to exist as a potent figure of myth.
“I’m constantly fascinated by the numbers of teenagers who buy my books about Frida,” Mr. de Cortanze wrote, referring to “The Lovers of Coyoacán,” a novel fictionalizing Kahlo’s brief though torrid affair with Leon Trotsky. “It’s not the creator of the Red Army that interests young readers. It’s what Frida thinks and lives, how she drinks, makes love, cooks for friends, swears like a trooper.”
For those readers, he said, Kahlo is “a sister, a friend, a woman ceaselessly in search of her autonomy.”
In the telling of Ms. Clearwater, the artist Julian Schnabel not long ago traveled to Fort Lauderdale to dedicate a painting, a gift he made to the institution.
“All Julian kept saying was he couldn’t wait to see the Kahlo,” Ms. Clearwater said. “Who in the world would have thought very macho Julian Schnabel had been influenced by her?”
Yet, as it happens, the Brooklyn-born Mr. Schnabel also spent part of his youth in Brownsville, Tex.; from there in the ’60s he made a pilgrimage to Mexico City to visit the Museo Frida Kahlo, located inside her birthplace at La Casa Azul.
“He told me he was blown away by the emotional side” of Kahlo’s work, by her ability to transmit emotion through her work, Ms. Clearwater said.
“If Julian had not said this to me, I would never have thought of him in those terms,” she added. “And yet, when you look at paintings like ‘Untitled (Goodbye Mike Kelley),’ you understand them as prayers to those you love and those who died.”
Like many of Kahlo’s spiritual descendants — who record the minutiae of their lives on social media in existential gestures that are, as much as anything, about the fact of their own occurrence — the artist was intent on leaving marks that testified to her existence.
“This continues to hit a nerve with people,” Ms. Clearwater explained. “The paintings are Kahlo’s way of saying: ‘This is how I thought. This is what I lived. Remember me.’ ”
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