Next to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Frida Kahlo’s gaze is the most inscrutable and captivating in all of art history.
In self-portrait after self-portrait, the Mexican artist—through her fixed, unibrowed stare— examined and commented upon her culture, sexuality, and the often tragic, sometimes sensational events of her life. “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone,” she once famously said, “and because I am the person I know best.”
Kahlo’s art, and the complicated reasons behind it, are the focus of the much-anticipated exhibit, “Frida: Beyond the Myth,” opening at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday, April 5. Any assemblage of Kahlo’s work is an event celebrated by the art world as well as mainstream audiences. While she only had a handful of exhibitions during her lifetime, Kahlo has emerged as a titanic figure in popular culture, as celebrated for her feminist, gender-fluid lifestyle as her paintings.
“Everybody knows who Frida Kahlo is,” says Dr. Sarah Powers, exhibition curator at the VMFA. “Everybody knows what she looks like. She’s had this whole mythology that’s built up around her. The exhibition is unique in that it’s not just pulling together a bunch of Frida Kahlo paintings and works on paper, it also seeks to tell you where it all came from.”
“Frida: Beyond the Myth” will only be shown in two institutions in the U.S., the VMFA and the Dallas Museum of Art. It was co-assembled by Dallas Museum curators Dr. Agustin Arteaga and Sue Canterbury, and features more than 60 paintings, drawings and photographs, many rarely viewed in the U.S. This includes intimate viewpoints and images from those who knew the artist best—like her father, a professional photographer whose work in portraiture greatly influenced her.
“The exhibit shows that, I think, her greatest work of art was the construction of her persona,” Powers says. “It’s almost performance art. Here, in this exhibit, we get to know a little more of the personal life behind this persona.”
While Kahlo had a difficult journey, starting with a tragic trolley accident that should have killed her, she was also prone to exaggeration, even outright fabulism.
“Through this persistent self-fashioning, Kahlo was, in essence, the architect of her own myth—a myth that she was ultimately devoured by,” says Canterbury in a statement from Dallas. “It is only through the eyes of those around her that we are able to get closer to who she really was, seeing her as she was seen and not only as she saw herself.”
“The exhibition is unique in that it’s not just pulling together a bunch of Frida Kahlo paintings and works on paper, it also seeks to tell you where it all came from.”
“Though Kahlo is beloved for her vibrant and emotional paintings, there is still much to learn about who she was as a person,” Arteaga says in the statement. “Through this exhibition, we hope to peel back some of the layers to reveal more about the individual who continues to captivate audiences here and around the world.”
Although she would claim her birthdate as 1910—the year of the Mexican Revolution— Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born in Mexico City three years earlier. Burdened by polio as a child, she had aspirations to become a doctor but suffered a horrible trolley accident at age 18 that left her in pieces, bedridden for months.
“Had she not been through the accident and survived it, we wouldn’t have the Frida Kahlo that we have today,” says Powers. “That was her moment in which she decided that she was going to turn toward art.”
Kahlo taught herself how to paint during her convalescence (she was never formally trained), and was known best during her lifetime as the wife of famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He was twenty years older when they married in 1929. “Now she has totally eclipsed him in terms of fame,” Powers says. “But you cannot overstate the fame that he had, not just in Mexico but worldwide, and here she was trying to become an artist in her own right, married to this superstar. There are so many dichotomies you can put between them… the contrast of them physically is almost comical.”
As the exhibit spells out in word and image, the couple’s union was tempestuous—they would divorce in 1939 and remarry a year later—fueled by fighting and extramarital liaisons. “There have been two great accidents in my life,” Kahlo would say. “One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” The corpulent Rivera was a serial womanizer, while Kahlo had numerous affairs with both men and women.
But Powers says that the duo had an unbreakable bond. “He encouraged her. There were various infidelities and betrayals, but the foundation of their relationship wasn’t passion, but a passion for art—and a partnership in creativity.”
“Frida: Beyond The Myth” features more than 30 key Kahlo works, including three iconic self-portraits, admittedly the selling point of the exhibit. But it also contains rare early works that are just as fascinating, Powers explains. “There’s so much that’s revealed in the paintings that are not self portraits, these incredibly dense narrative paintings that tell a story. People don’t know that she didn’t hit her stride in terms of self portraiture until the mid-1930s. So we have a whole body of work from the time she started painting in 1926 to the mid-’30s that isn’t necessarily portraiture.”
One of those is the striking, and somewhat macabre, “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale,” a painting meant to commemorate the last days of a socialite and aspiring Hollywood star who had taken her life [by jumping off the Hampshire House building in New York City]. “It had been commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce, the managing editor of Vanity Fair. She thought it would be a posthumous portrait she could give to Dorothy Hale’s mother. Instead, this was a painting of this poor woman dead in a pool of her own blood.”
The exhibit also contains a drawing Kahlo made that illustrates her accident. Often reproduced in books, the actual work is rarely displayed, Powers says. “You can see in her work that kind of endurance, perseverance, and what it took to survive something like that. Art becomes not just something she did while recuperating, this becomes her survival.”
To kick off “Frida: Beyond the Myth,” the VMFA is also hosting ¡FridaFest!, a day-long festival on April 5 that will include art, food, and music from Spanish-language bands such as Bio Ritmo, Mariachi America RVA, Mexican Folk Jerocho and Miramar. It kicks off a summer long series of side events relating to the exhibit, including an April 25 appearance by Kahlo’s biographer, Hayden Herrera, an April 26 screening of “Frida,” the 2002 Hollywood biopic of the artist starring Salma Hayek,” and the showing of a new documentary on the artist, also called “Frida,” directed by Carla Gutiérrez, on June 20.
It speaks to Kahlo’s influence and fame that the VMFA has already sold more than 10,000 advance tickets to the exhibition. This doesn’t surprise Powers. Although she died in 1954, Kahlo’s bold, sexually fluid character and striking work speaks to modern audiences, she says.
“She has such enormous appeal and means so much to so many people. We’re not talking just Mexican culture, or women, or any segment of people who claim her as their own,” she says. “We are exploring her mythology, how it was constructed, and showing that it was very much a mythology of her own making. This wasn’t something that was done to her. She constructed it.”
“Frida: Beyond the Myth” is on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from April 5-Sept. 28, 2025. Admission is $20 (free for VMFA members). For more information, and for a list of the side events, screenings and lectures, go to the VMFA website.
