Frida Kahlo is now the most successful Latin American artist that the world has ever seen. However, when she died in 1954 she was almost unknown.
Tim Niel's film explores the life and afterlife of the iconic painter and includes interviews with Frida's friends and family, Tracey Emin and Salma Hayek, who plays Kahlo in a new feature film.
DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
BBC Four: Why do you think there's so much interest in Frida Kahlo at the moment?
Tim Niel: She's a very modern figure. Frida Kahlo's art is very straightforwardly autobiographical and that is a very "now" quality to have. It's the biggest difference between Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, whose work is absolutely driven by a political agenda. Frida Kahlo's the reverse. It's all about herself - the suffering she experienced when she was miscarrying children, the suffering she experienced from Diego's constant philandering. So the first thing that makes her popular now is that autobiographical aspect. It makes it easy to decode her work.
BBC Four: Has the Frida cult got more to do with the tragedy of her life than her art?
TN: It is much more to do with the biography. The traditional way for Frida Kahlo to trap a cult member is the art itself. But as soon as you've seen Self Portrait with Shawn Hair, where she's cut her hair off and is dressed as a man, or My Birth, which is a double death with her head projected from a mother's vagina - as soon as people see a picture like that and it's rung a bell they then go out and discover this soap opera she lived through. There are so many aspects to her biography which people can identify with.
BBC Four: Did you find perceptions of her in Mexico much different from the UK or US?
TN: In Mexico her life is recounted in almost magical realist terms. There was a writer who was present at her last exhibition in 1953, the year before she died. He said things like, "She lay on the bed like a smiling corpse and we showered her with flowers and kisses. All the sick, the lame and crippled came to the exhibition." Once you've got a base of people in Mexico describing a life in those kinds of terms then you've also got a life that is going to be mythologised, strangely inflated, distorted - it's more the echoes you hear than the real sound.
BBC Four: Did you have any other major revelations while making the film?
TN: We started making the film with one question in mind: why is it that when she dies in 1954 she isn't particularly well known. She was the famous wife of Diego Rivera, not a famous painter in her own right. But she has an afterlife where she becomes the most successful Latin American artist the world has ever seen.
What now seems stranger is that Diego Rivera was ever regarded as highly as he was. Frida Kahlo's work, whether you like it or not, is resonant and challenging. Rivera's pictures of the poor are just symbols. If you look at Frida Kahlo's pictures of Mexico they show things like her as a three year old standing beside a skeleton, a Judas figure which is used in Day of the Dead celebrations and a piņata. That picture is only 30cm square but says much more about being Mexican than anything Rivera ever painted. What Kahlo is saying is that there are these curious sets of different ages and times and traditions sitting in your head and they're all of equivalent status. What Rivera did was much less mysterious.
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