With London’s V&A opening a major retrospective on Frida Kahlo, Marianna Cerini seeks the essence and legacy of the influential Mexican artist and feminist icon
Mexico City’s Blue House, the home Frida Kahlo shared with her muralist husband, Diego Rivera, is a moving celebration of the life and work of the influential Mexican, one of the most acclaimed artists and feminist trailblazers of the 20th century. Kahlo’s personal belongings lie seemingly untouched in the rooms in which she lived her creative, tumultuous, and all-too-short life. Downstairs, her wardrobe is on display behind glass cabinets. There are colourful, bright dresses and sweeping, full-circle skirts, maxi shawls in boisterous prints, and necklaces inspired by Mexican folk craft. And there are more sombre items: body casts and corsets, which Kahlo had to wear for the rest of her life after a near-fatal bus crash left her heavily debilitated when she was 18, and a prosthetic leg she decorated with an embroidered red lace-up boot and a bell, which Kahlo had to use after losing her leg to gangrene in 1953.
This month, some 200 of these revealing artefacts will be leaving Mexico for the first time, to be shown at the V&A in London in a major retrospective—Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up. On display will be make-up, clothes, and jewellery, but also photographs, intimate objects, and that defiant prosthetic leg. It will be “a picture of Frida’s life—the way she constructed her identity through the actual objects,” co-curator Claire Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at the V&A, told Dazed magazine. It will also poignantly reveal the tight intersection of style, tradition, and progressivism that has come to define the influential visionary. “Kahlo created her own distinctive style,” says the exhibition’s other curator, Circe Henestrosa, head of the school of fashion at Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts. “As a bohemian artist, a Tehuana, a hybrid persona, she used art and dress to express herself.”