Say "Frida" in Mexico City and people know who you mean. As with many well-known artists - Dali, Picasso - one name is enough. Frida Kahlo, however, is often referred to by her first name, a bit more like a saint than a revolutionary artist. In fact, images of Kahlo - on everything from bus stops to tequila bottles to credit cards - are giving the adored Virgin of Guadalupe a bit of competition as the most-pictured woman in Mexico City. And indeed if Kahlo, who was an ardent communist and atheist, was ever going to be beatified, 2007 would be the year.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of her July 6 birth and, as a result, "Fridamania" has taken hold of her native Mexico City. Numerous events and exhibitions will celebrate one of the country's most admired painters, including the biggest exhibit of her art ever displayed. Presented in the exquisite art-deco interior of the Palace of Fine Arts, the show features almost a third of her total output - 65 oil paintings, 45 drawings, 11 watercolours - including many privately owned works rarely shown in public.
As I wandered through the exhibition, it was evident that the crowds - mostly locals of all ages - were enthralled as they filed past some of her most famous paintings, such as The Two Fridas and Self Portrait with Monkeys .
In the rooms filled with her personal photos and letters (each of the letters hung from the ceiling in glass frames), people talked animatedly about her preference for traditional Mexican dress, her politics and, of course, her eyebrows (which family photos reveal to be inherited from both her Hungarian Jewish father and Spanish-Mexican mother).
My primary thought after touring the exhibit was that Frida Kahlo was cool. She had style, chutzpah and extraordinary talent; all this despite a lifetime of physical pain and a husband, artist Diego Rivera, who considered himself "unfit for monogamy."
"I suffered two grave accidents in my life," Kahlo once said. "One in which a streetcar knocked me down ... the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worse."
Kahlo began to paint at 18 while recovering from a horrific streetcar accident that shattered her pelvis and spine and then married Rivera - a renowned painter, 22 years her senior and a self-confessed philander - three years later. It was a tumultuous marriage, filled with infidelities. Kahlo herself took numerous lovers of both sexes.
These "accidents" became the focus of much of Kahlo's art. She hid nothing, frankly depicting her own life, sorrows and indignities in intense, often disturbingly surreal images of bright colour and flattened forms, a style inspired by the folk art and history of her beloved Mexico. Her work is refreshingly individual and of its place.
And unlike much in pop culture, there is enormous substance behind all the Frida hype. She is big business in Mexico City; there is even a Frida Kahlo Corporation (http://www.fkahlo.com), created by Kahlo's niece in an attempt to control the Frida "brand." This, however, has not seemed to limit the abundance of Frida-themed T-shirts, handbags, ashtrays, etc., that sell like hot tamales in shops and markets around the city. Not bad for an artist who during her lifetime had just three exhibits (only one in Mexico) and was mostly considered the wife of Diego Rivera.
Well, not any more.
"Mexico is a very macho culture and Diego has always taken the limelight," explained Georgina, a university student from Mexico City I met on my flight to Mexico. "But Frida was a big promoter of women's rights and now it's her everyone talks about. Diego is now Frida's husband."
Regardless of who is more prominent, as I explored Mexico City, it was evident that Frida and Diego were intertwined in both life and in art. (In an interesting contemporary link, the Palace of Fine Art's Kahlo exhibit is co-curated by Rivera's grandson, Juan Coronel Rivera.)
Frida appears in many of Diego's works around the city. She is a young Socialist revolutionary in Rivera's mural of the history of Mexico at the National Palace. In Rivera's Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in The Almeda Park (1947) at the Diego River Mural Museum, near the Palace of Fine Arts, Frida is portrayed as his ideal wife, standing between Calavera Catrina, the Mexican symbol of death, and a young, already chubby Rivera (he was called the elephant to Kahlo's dove). At the exquisite Dolores Olmedo Patino Museum, which has 157 works by Rivera and 30 by Kahlo and is set in huge landscaped grounds scattered with peacocks and xoloitzcuintle (regal-looking, hairless dogs that date to the Aztecs), visitors can see two nude portraits, both dated 1930: one of Frida and one of Dolores Almedo, Diego's patroness and lover.
