LONDON—By most counts, Frida Kahlo is the most celebrated female artist of the 20th century.

Yet, having gained posthumous Hollywood-enhanced fame, Kahlo's mass popularity has centered as much if not significantly more on her tortured, complicated personality and life story than on the gripping work that has influenced a generation of female artists.

So when the Tate Modern announced it planned a major retrospective of her work, the subsequent elation by devotees and groans from professional art cynics was no surprise. The show, the curators assured, would shift the focus away from Kahlo's persona onto her paintings a next-to-impossible feat on a certain level, given the works' autobiographical nature But did it work?

Here's a round-up of what the London papers have to say:


Rachel Campbell-Johnston, the Times (gives the show 3 stars out of 5):

"It is easy to see why Kahlo became the heroine of a burgeoning 1970s feminist movement. But this show sets out to move beyond biographical interpretations, to rescue her from the clutches of ideology It emphasises her engagement with revolutionary Mexican politics, her role in the formation of her nation's identity. It emphasises her awareness of Modernist traditions, placing her in a wider artistic context."

"Yet how much point is there in seeing the actual paintings? Kahlo had an almost colour-by-numbers style Apart perhaps from the drawings and the earlier paintings, her mostly small, methodical canvases are disappointing in that you cannot read anything into them that you could not from a good reproduction in a picturebook."


Adrian Searle, the Guardian:

"Kahlo's importance - she has been called the most famous female artist in history - and the substance of what she made are inextricable. We are stuck with her and, dare I say, struck with her: smitten and more than a little infatuated"

"Kahlo's self-appraising and self-dramatising portraits lead us inexorably to the woman beyond the painting: to her biography, to the movies, to the current excess of what has been called Fridamania, the cult of Frida Kahlo. This might be good for business at the Tate, and for Hollywood and franchise sellers of Kahlobilia, but it makes looking at her art a complicated business"

"This trend is probably irreversible in the modern, personality-driven culture industry But perhaps this phenomenon is no one's fault. Someone once said that the artist's greatest invention is themselves, and Duchamp once remarked: 'The artist I believe in; the art is a mirage.' If so, Kahlo's art is a frequently beautiful and often painful mirage, the product of a necessary self-invention."


Jackie Wullschlager, the Financial Times:

"So great, in a post-feminist era, is the myth of her life that the first surprise at Tate Modern is how very small her canvases are. Spread sparsely across the large white galleries, which do no favours to such domestic-scale works, they are often packed with confusing detail and demand intense examination rather than provoking the 'wow' effect of museum-size canvases"

"Wall and catalogue descriptions make much of Kahlo's divided heritage, the fluidity of shifting identities, even of equilibrium reached But the paintings speak more loudly. Like those of Munch or Van Gogh, they scream pain, pain, pain - not of the body politic but of the unchanging mortal condition that Kahlo represented in such an extreme way: the mind trapped in a body that can never fulfil its richly imaginative, troubled dreams or desires."

Sue Hubbard, The Independent:

"So what is her legacy? How important is she as an artist? Her rather flatly painted canvases have little to do with the ideas of gesture and surface explored by mostly male artists within the modern art movements of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century, borrowing as they do from popular and native Mexican art. "But, as in Sylvia Plath's poetry, there is something atavistic about her imagery that continues to speak directly to the most vulnerable and wounded parts of many women. By becoming her own subject, she mirrored the then-current interest in Freud, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, as well as reflecting the changing role of women in contemporary society no woman had previously painted such personal images of their own sexuality as had Frida Kahlo. In so doing, she opened the door for artists such Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego and Tracey Emin to mine their own psychosexual histories."