Bonnie Lander Johnson on the strange 21st-century cult of Fridolatry
This summer we took our children to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum where, with hundreds of thousands of others, we hoped to delight in Kahlo’s mad floral scenes and stare through glass at her prosthetic legs and perfume bottles.
Fridolatry is nothing new. For decades Frida’s face has appeared on Barbie dolls, bags and calendars. At the V&A, a stream of women and girls, their pale hair tied up with ribbons and flowers, sought to imitate Frida’s style. Kahlo’s tortured self-portraiture seems to invite imitation, promising to those who follow her a life of meaning, in which beauty is the fruit of suffering and the artistic concentration on the self is a valiant struggle out of obscurity, physical pain and emotional neglect.
