Frida: Beyond the Myth

by Charles McGuigan 04.2025

The VMFA hits another one out of the park with its latest exhibit—Frida: Beyond the Myth, which will be on display through September 28 in the Altria Group and New Market galleries. This exhibit features more than sixty works of and by Frida Kahlo, many of which have rarely been seen outside of Mexico.

From the moment you enter this space, Frida engulfs you in an embrace that will never cease its pressure on your soul. It is a visual embrace that sparks all the senses and commands you to know this woman who spoke clearly and forcefully through her still lifes and self-portraits, and finely wrought paintings that spring from the subconscious and weave a stark personal reality with threads of ancient Mesoamerican myths.

Frida’s life, vividly reflected in her artistic output, was riddled with pain. At age six, Frida contracted polio, which caused her to walk with a limp. In recovery, she was isolated from her peers, and often alone and in bed, where throughout her life she would frequently find herself.

Then, on the cusp of adulthood, she and her first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias, were in a terrible bus accident. He was unscathed, but Frida almost died on the spot. She suffered a shattered pelvis, a broken spine, a fractured collar bone, broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and her right leg was broken in eleven places. Plus this: her very womb was speared by a steel handrail that skewered her abdomen exiting through her vagina.  (Due to this injury, Frida would miscarry at least three times, and would never bring a baby to term.)

For many long months after the accident, Frida existed in a sort of pupal stage, bed-ridden, cut off from the world, supine in the chrysalis of her bedroom. Alone with her thoughts, she considered her own mortality and the fragility of life. She wrestled with existential questions, and would ultimately emerge as an artist and an activist.

During that time her parents designed a small easel for their daughter. Her father, a photographer by trade, gave her a set of paints. He positioned a mirror above her head so she could see herself, and Frida began creating her first self-portraits, along with paintings of her friends and sisters.

By the end of her convalescence, Frida’s eyes opened wide, observing the injustice of greed. She joined the Mexican Communist Party, and among her closest friends was Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary.

Within that same year she met Diego Rivera at a party. He encouraged her as an artist and in short order they became lovers and within a year the pair were married. Diego was a womanizer and a booze hound with quite a temper. The couple would divorce and then remarry a year later, staying together until Frida’s early death of a pulmonary embolism. just months after her right leg was amputated from gangrene. She was just forty-seven years old.

One of the many spectacular things about this exhibit is its chronological order which permits the viewer to actually witness Frida’s life unfolding, year by year, like the petals of an exotic flower. The vast majority of the works in this exhibit are photographs of Frida from a very early age (a family photo shot by her father Guillermo two years before she was stricken with polio) all the way up to her 1954 death portrait taken by Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The most iconic of all the Frida Kahlo photographs are the color portraits made by Nickolas Murray, many of which feature the artist clad in huipil blouses and enagua skirts. These colorful ensembles are worn by women who dwell along the Tehuantepec Isthmus in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Frida chose this traditional style of dress for a variety of reasons. Her mother hailed from that region of Mexico. What’s more, Tehuantepec is a matriarchal society and the center of Zapotec culture.  And then there’s this: these skirts and blouses were not mass produced in a factory; they were handmade by actual human beings. To top it all off, this fashion of dress, which became Frida’s personal style signature, was a bold affirmation of the artist’s love of her homeland.

All great artists are revolutionaries. They borrow from those who preceded them, infuse their work with personal world experiences, and then go beyond all convention to create something utterly new. There’s a painting of Frida holding one of her pet monkeys that has the feel of a Renaissance Madonna with Child. Her monkeys, the artist admitted, did symbolize the children she was unable to bear.

I had planned to spend an hour at the exhibit, but when I checked my phone for the time, three hours had already passed. Each painting will draw you in and tell you what it is saying, if you allow it to. (Men really need to pay attention: AND JUST LISTEN.)

You can see some of Frida’s artistic influences in her work. Her self-portrait in a velvet dress gives a significant nod to Modigliani. The extreme attention to the detail of a single magnolia leaf reminded me of Henri Rousseau. There’s a strain of Max Ernst in her surreal moments at the easel. And in the still lifes you can almost feel a gentle tug from Georgia O’Keeffe, who was a friend of Frida’s, maybe even a lover. Where Georgia used the petals of flowers to express the wonders of the female anatomy, Frida seems to have preferred ripened tropical fruit.  

For a solid hour I stood mesmerized in front of My Dress Hangs Here. It was painted in 1933 when fascism was spreading like a wildfire around the globe. It was the same year Hitler came to power, a time of upheavals and a steady march to a new world order. At that time, Frida and her husband were traveling throughout America from San Francisco to Detroit and then New York City.

While her husband worked on a mural at Rockefeller Center, Frida was hyper-focused on this painting that is an indictment of American values, or lack thereof. Take time to really examine this piece, every square centimeter. It is packed with symbols of an America that embraced the almighty buck over the needs of its citizens. What you will not see is a single vestige of the natural world that Frida so loved, that was already under assault by industrialists and the petroleum industry (no accident that there is a pair of over-sized gas pumps rising above much of the cityscape.)

Dominating the backdrop of the painting are the dreary rectangular towers of skyscrapers and the cylindrical smokestacks of industry. Frida’s dress is the focal point of the painting, but there is no Frida occupying it. Her soul has fled back to Mexico. What remains of her is suspended on a hanger from a line strung between a toilet and a golf trophy, both of which occupy places of honor atop classical pillars.

Behind the toilet are America’s conception of feminine beauty, represented by Mae West, and faith illustrated by a reconstructed Trinity Church that contains a stained glass window depicting a cross paired with a massive “S,: transforming this symbol of Christianity into a dollar sign like the incongruity of a prosperity gospel.

And beneath it all, underfoot of the wealthy, is a collage of photographic images depicting scores of the poor in breadlines and in protests, or marching off to another war. There are scores of carefully placed images as complex in their meaning as the elements you might scrutinize in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

It’s been often said that Diego Rivera’s art eclipsed Frida Kahlo’s work. And maybe that was true in her lifetime. But time’s passage—always a good indicator of what makes great art—tells another story.  

Frida’s power as an artist and an agent of change continues to illuminate the darker corners of the human condition. In today’s America of retrograde motion, her images shine a blinding spotlight on the rampant misogyny that is stripping women of their civil rights. These paintings urge us to consider how people of color, particularly Latinos, are being detained without due process simply because of their accents, their names, or the amount of melanin in their skin.  Her artwork also invites us to consider the horrors of unchecked capitalism, where CEOs routinely make over $100 million a year, while the minimum wage hovers frozen in time at a paltry $7.25 an hour, and fourteen million children living in the richest country in the world go to bed hungry every single night. Frida Kahlo, a lover of all that is good in creation, trains our vision on politicians who would allow timber companies to clear cut millions of acres of forests in our sacred national parks, or leaders of industry who care more about making profits than they do about life on the only planet that we will ever call home.