Director – Ali Ray – 2020, 2026 – UK – Cert. U – 93m, 101m
*****
The tragic yet resonant life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and her transformation into a modern, cultural icon – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, May 19th
As dour piano chords play, a title announces that Frida Kahlo held only three solo exhibitions in her lifetime. This is contrasted with an auction where “one of her most complex self portraits” The Dream (The Bed) / El Sueño (La Cama) (1940) auctions for a starting price of $22m and selling for $47m. As of November 2025, this was the highest ever value for a work by a female artist achieved at an auction.
Now, in 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tate Modern, London collaborate on a major exhibition entitled Frida: the making of an icon, on Friday, June 19th. Exhibition on Screen’s Special Edition of their 2020 film concludes with ten minutes of newly shot footage of that exhibition.
Frida works at a writing desk as she reads (voice: Diana Bermudez) reads the latter she is composing. You notice the ornate rings on her fingers, her lavish earrings, the green and yellow jungle design of her print dress as she talks about “too much pain… It will take me years to get out of this mess I have in my head. That’s why I’ve decided to tell you everything now.”
The camera moves around her library / studio, with its emphasis on wood, as the editing interjects images from her art – a vertical red, protrusion resembling an umbilical chord descends into her open mouth, an ominous skull sits atop cooked food including a roast chicken in a still life, surgical scissors cut a blood vessel. And more.
While the film stays firmly within widely held art history parameters, this viewer immediately thinks of such auteur film directors as David Cronenberg or Mexico’s Guillermo Del Toro, who traffic in this type of imagery. The documentary does mention Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) in which Salma Hayek played the artist.
We slowly zoom in on a severe portrait of the artist as various (female) voices talk in soundbytes about her significance. Frida Kahlo was born, a narrator (Anna Chancellor) tells us, in 1907, in a fashionable suburb of Mexico City in what would become known as the Casa Azul – the Blue House. Biographer and historian Hayden Herrara fills in some background. Frida’s mother was of Spanish / Indian descent, and a Catholic, her father a German immigrant. He helped her to practice athletics after she suffered a Polio attack in childhood; his favourite of three daughters, he almost treated her like a boy.
The young Frida, “rambunctious, mischievous and fun”, got into Mexico City’s National Preparatory School, the best school in the city, where she fell in with a group called Las Cachuchas which, according to Gannit Ankori, Professor of Art History, Brandels University would go on to become the cream of writers and philosophers. Her schooling was training her to become a doctor. A chance collision in a bus, in which many people died, fractured her spine in 1917 and caused her considerable additional injury, including the piercing of her pelvis by a metal rail. The accident was a defining moment that would shape the rest of her life.
Faced with appalling medical bills, she abandoned her medical career in favour of politics, joining the Communist Party, where she started spending time with artist Diego Riviera (voice: Gabriel Porras), a key figure in a new and revolutionary art movement Muralism, formed in the wake of the 1910 Revolution. 10 years of civil war overthrew 30 years of dictatorship. Carlos Phillips Olmedo, Director, Dolores Olmedo Museum, explains that this art reflected both the new government and the new social movement. Against images of Rivera’s mural The History of Mexico (1923-35), Olmedo informs us that Diego painted murals in public buildings. The revolution changed Mexico, adds Hilda Trujillo, Director, Frida Kahlo Museum. Mexican and pre-Hispanic art inspired the new art movement. It was an attempt to adopt the culture before colonialism by the Spanish.
Rivera was a larger than life celeb, notorious for his numerous love affairs, and he was to have a profound effect on Frida, not least because his personal wealth could pay for her medical bills for the rest of her life. After they married in 1929 and travelled to the US, her paintings changed. In San Francisco in 1930 , she adopted the clothing and persona of the Mexican Woman or Tijuana, a sartorial identity, representing strong, matriarchal, anti-colonial Mexican society.
Her portrait of Luther Burbank shows the clear influence of Surrealism, the manifestos for which were widely discussed in Mexican art circles of the time. The artist represents the scientist, who had considered his life mission the hybridisation of plants to improve the global food supply, as a man plant with his roots extending into a corpse buried under the ground. Overall, though, she found the U.S. “ugly and stupid.”
Two months into a pregnancy, she considered abortion. Her heavily traumatic painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932) shows her naked on the bed, bleeding onto the sheets from the womb as the spirit of the child she has lost ascends into the space above her, trailing a red umbilical cord down to her. Other cords link her body to objects representing the failure of her body. Miscarriage and vaginal blood had never before been represented in painting. Unlike Renaissance religious paintings depicting Madonna and child, this is an anti-birth scene.
Herrera notes that Frida hated Detroit, and made Diego return to Mexico, where architect Juan O’Gorman, a student of Le Corbusier, had designed them two adjacent modern houses with an upstairs bridge between the two. They separated after Diego embarked on an affair with her younger sister Cristina; Frida became exhausted by hospital visits for abortion and bone treatment, and moved into her own apartment.
Henry Ford Hospital also reference retablos, naive paintings designed to help people through bad times on their personal faith journeys. Kahlo herself was not a Catholic, according to retablos artist Alfredo Vichis Roque, but she collected these images obsessively to steep herself in the accompanying folk culture. A newspaper article seemed to resonate with her own emotional state, and she painted an image of a prostitute stabbed to death by her boyfriend, complete with bloody fingerprints all over the frame. Her work later gave Roque the courage to paint without censorship and without rules.
She finally began to sell works on the back of a solo exhibition in New York and her inclusion in a group show of Mexican artists in Paris. At the same time, Diego began divorce proceedings.
Around a third of her paintings were self-portraits, and around the time of her divorce in 1939, her paintings became more prolific. She became more housebound at the Casa Azul and underwent more surgery. Fulang Chang and Self (1937) presaged how she had learned from posing from her father how to sit for photographs. Yet if her pose is fixed in the three quarter portraits, the elements around that pose change. The clothing. The animals from her personal menagerie – dogs, spider-monkeys, and more, for instance in Self Portrait with Single Monkey (1945).
She had a relationship with pioneering colour photographer Nickolas Muray, who did a lot of work in advertising, and for whom she painted Self-Portrait with Dead Hummingbird (1940). This portrait and Muray’s portraits are not three quarters but rather facing the camera, and it’s believed that Kahlo worked from these photographs at this point in her career.
Kahlo associated the intense gaze in her self-portraits with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1483-85). She constructed different images of herself – the Botticelli, the Mexicana. Self-Portrait to Dr. Eloesser (1940) juxtaposes an austere, brown nun’s smock and a necklace of thorns, with obvious Christian allusions, with a more carnal and sensuous earring of a hand and a braid of colourful flowers in her hair. In self-portrait with cropped hair (1940) she sits as an androgynous presence, clad in a man’s suit.
She and Rivera remarried in 1940, and she made it work by not asking too closely about other women. Her surgeries increased in frequency, perhaps with an element of Munchausen syndrome attention-seeking, and found their way into her portraits. The Broken Column (1944) shows her wearing an orthopaedic brace on her torso, something she hated. Nails cover her torso and face representing pain, yet despite tears, she gazes defiantly at the viewer. The landscape behind her is cracked, desolate. Yet it is also green, the colour which for Kahlo symbolised hope.
Kahlo’s worsening physical condition saw her world slowly close in on itself, and her paintings become ever more complex. Despite everything, her enduring love for Diego remained a constant theme. The Love Embrace of the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xolotl (1949) uses yin and yang opposites – male and female, day and night, sun and moon. Xolotl is the dog deity who guards the underworld. The picture is stuffed with Christian and Hindu symbolism. A series of embraces embody Kahlo’s statement that “love is the basis for all life.”
Her second solo exhibition took place in 1953, organised by Diego and a number of her friends. Confined to her bed on doctor’s orders, she had the bed moved to the gallery for the opening night. She died at the Casa Azul age 47 in 1954. Shots of small, colourful, Mexican tourist boats give way to Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951) and Viva la Vida, Watermelons (1954), as we hear her affirm that painting was the single element that got her through an otherwise difficult life.
Says Ankori, Kahlo provides a vocabulary where the human condition, pain, trauma, becomes communicable. If the female body, disability, gender fluidity, identity are very much current today, Frida Kahlo got there the best part of a century before. Zavala laments the way the artist has been idolised in popular culture, which has been to the detriment of her work as a painter.
Which is ironic, given that the new exhibition appears to celebrate that very process. Mari Carmen Ramirez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston talks about how it looks at Frida’s transformation from local artist to today’s global brand through a combination of iconicity, myth and consumer culture.
Interim Director of Tate Modern Catherine Wood talks about how artists, communities and activists proclaimed Frida as important – before museums did. Ramirez notes that various biographies, including the one by Hernandez, bought the artist to a whole new audience in the 1970s, artists and activists who came out of the whole student movement in Mexico City and from the Civil Rights movement in the US. Kahlo declared herself left-wing, of mixed race, bisexual – the perfect fit for the new, countercultural generation.
The show also includes numerous works by intergenerational artists – Astrid Hadad, Chicano women artists like Carmen Lomas Garza and Amelia Mesa-Bains. Tobias Ostrander, Tate External Curator adds: the Chicano movement referenced her as a brown skinned heroine, a fights for workers rights, with artist Rupert Garcia turning the Muray photograph into a Warholesque silkscreen print.
Chicano murals show how the Chicanos saw Frida as one of their own. She was admired for representing topics never previously covered – miscarriage, the dark side of maternity, sexual violence against women, gay identity. In 2000, Mary McCartney photographed Tracey Emin as Frida. In 2001, Yasumasa Morimura photographs himself as Frida with the thorn necklace and hand earring. The final section of the show features hundreds of books and commercial products inspired by Frida’s image.
While the new bookends bring the 2020 version of Exhibition on Screen’s filml up to date by referencing the new exhibition, there’s a peculiarly dislocating effect by using them to frame everything else here. Nevertheless, this remains a compelling examination of a pioneering artist who, in her day, took art to places that few, if any, other artists had previously taken it.
Exhibition On Screen: Frida Kahlo is out in cinemas in the UK from on Tuesday, May 19th. Check your local cinema for details or click here.
The exhibition Frida: the making of an icon is at Tate Modern from Friday, June 19th.
Trailer: