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Fetishizing Frida  POPULAR INTERPRETATIONS OF Frida Kahlo’s paintings make ample reference to the artist’s social position as a Mexican woman married to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, and to the fact that she and Rivera both created works of art during the postrevolutionary decades. But, as I have argued, the complexities of the political, historical, and social contexts in which Kahlo worked have been divorced from her paintings and instead fervent attention has been paid to her private life. Clearly Kahlo’s life makes for a dramatic narrative and is itself a sensational context within which to place her art. As her name has risen out of obscurity following her death in 1954 and into the art history canon, art museums, and documentary films during the 1980s, and then into popular culture in the 1990s, the drama of her life has become zealously coupled with her paintings. Indeed, there often is little distinction between Kahlo and her paintings, which converge into a single entity, Frida’s-lifeand -art. For example, in a 1992 review of Herrera’s abridged biography and catalogue raisonné, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, and Malka Drucker’s less “sordid” biography, Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph of her Life and Art (consciously written without references to the artist’s sexuality or drug and alcohol use in order to serve as an “inspiration” for an audience of “young women”), Roger Cardinal notes “the kinship of biography and art” in both publications.1 The “Frida Kahlo Home Page” on the World Wide Web introduces the artist by explaining that her “art was influenced by the pain she suffered throughout her life,” which she concretized “by adding such things as thorn necklaces and nails to her portraits.”2 In a review of the 1991/92 traveling exhibition Pasion por Frida, which displayed objects related to academic scholarship, creative inspiration, and popular fashion/kitsch, Robert Cauthron states, “Kahlo suffered terrible physical hardships. Polio in childhood and an auto accident in her youth shattered her body and ruined her health for the rest of her life. Miscarriages frustrated her desire to have children and wounded her spirit.”3 And, he asserts, “All of it found its way into her paintings. In her self- Fetishizing Frida 151 portraits, Kahlo would present her torso opened up for inspection while tortuous medical instruments lurked nearby. . . . The torment of a woman who lost a child in the womb took literal shape on the canvas.”4 In some respects, the historiography of Frida Kahlo is nearly as dramatic as her life story. Rescued from oblivion, with the social and political significations of her paintings erased, she became exalted as a “life and work that match the sensibility of our times,” according to Peter Plagens’s 1991 Newsweek essay about Kahlo’s popularity, which he terms “Fridaphilia.”5 In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the historiography follows, and indeed exemplifies, paradigmatic art history production in which artists and art, as Griselda Pollock argues, are “evacuated from history . . . [and] history from art history” through “psychobiographical” interpretation.6 In other words, at the same time that the product (painting) becomes synonymous with the producer (painter), the artist is reduced to personal, psychological, and biological histories constructed parallel to, but separate from, social histories. My discussion in previous chapters both analyzes and counters traditional art historical practice. For example, in the first chapter I demonstrate that Kahlo’s relational role as Rivera’s wife overshadows critical examination of women’s public and private resistance to social prescription. The second chapter discusses how an obsessive focus on Kahlo’s physical and emotional health implodes masculinist classifications of “woman” and disease and uncritically circumvents an analysis, which I present, of how her paintings may be used to resist social/medical/aesthetic oppression of women. In the third chapter, subverting patriarchal gender dichotomies, I consider Kahlo’s paintings as surrealist not in terms that restrict them to a masculine-surrealist classification but rather by weaving in and out of “classic” characterization of surrealist practice and production, thereby resisting strict categorical containment, blurring the boundaries with which categories are distinguished, and impacting the very core of surrealist definition. And in the fourth chapter I assert that despite acknowledgment of Kahlo’s Tehuana dress in relationship to a particular (though overly generalized) political trend, it largely has been reduced to personal motivation; and I investigate how her self-representation in Tehuana clothing relates to a specific political...

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