FRIDA KAHLO at Tate Modern

Finally made it to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern with Owen at a 7pm admission time. As usual, the experience of looking at paintings, more often than not, sideways on and edging between people got a bit wearing after a while. But hang around long enough and you get there eventually.

It was a wonderfully illuminating experience to finally see so many of her famous paintings. More often than not they are smaller than one would expect which makes them more intense. Three 'shock' works: MY BIRTH, HENRY FORD HOSPITAL and A FEW SMALL NIPS are all in one room and are riveting for this very reason. The starkness of the images is what makes them such painful viewing.

I was reminded when walking around the rooms of the Barbican exhibition of Carrington's work 10 years ago. Kahlo was by far the more important and successful artist but there seemed quite a few points of reference to both of them. The reluctance of either to see themselves as strictly professional painters (giving paintings away to friends and lovers as gifts), their bi-sexuality, their early deaths and the insular vision of their art, painting what they knew and saw and lived.

When I got home I watched one of the extras on the US dvd of FRIDA which is an onstage interview with director Julie Taymor. She is asked by a woman in the audience why the film focused on the love story of Frida and Diego Rivera and seemed to neglect her political and feminist leanings. Taymor eloquently argues that you cannot have a discussion of Kahlo without the relationship with Rivera which was the inspiration for her art. Similarly one cannot discuss the life of Carrington without acknowledging her profound love of Lytton Strachey. Julie Taymor then pointed out that when Frida was first championed as a feminist icon during the 1980s it was not just as a victim of physical pain but for the perceived emotional neglect by Rivera. This triggered in my mind the way Virginia Woolf was similarly viewed and lauded in the 1970s as a feminist victim of the sexual abuse of her step-brothers.

But as when reading Woolf's writing, when looking at the art of Kahlo I don't look upon them as the work of victims. Even in Kahlo's darkest work there is an ironic humour and a strong sense of self which makes one fully believe their friend's reminisces of their being such positive life-forces.

Kahlo's best work as a visual rendering of Woolf's closing lines from THE WAVES "Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding".