Reservation about Devouring Frida

In many parts of the text Lindauer seems to be fervently looking for new truths about Frida. As a result, her conclusions are usually onedimensional. This clashes with Frida's oeuvre, which consists of many subtle nuances, conceptual shifts, and layers of political and personal meaning. Lindauer's analysis of Frida's Four Inhabitants of Mexico (The Square is Theirs) (1938, Private Collection), is an interesting example. The four figures depicted are typical of Mexican popular culture and were inspired by pieces in Rivera's arts and crafts collection. The young girl included in the work is Frida herself, as evidenced by her likeness to her self-representation as a child in her house at Coyoacan in the Family Tree (1936, New York, Museum of Modern Art). This opens up the possibility of an autobiographical decoding of the painting that ought to be incorporated within the political one. Frida's obsession with the idea of human origins, with her own procreative powers, and her conflicting relationship with her own mother (represented by the Nayarit figure in the painting) and with Diego (embodied by the Judas/traitor figure), symbolically reflect Frida's preoccupations with the future of her beloved country arrived at through personal references.

In Chapter VII, Lindauer's effort to glorify the artist as an avant la lettre feminist reaches its peak. She disputes Martha Zamora's statement that Frida typed speeches and letters for Rivera because it does not consider that she may have made contributions to the text. She also complains that even during the 1930s and 1940s, when Frida was starting to exhibit her work(check out paintings by Frida Kahlo) worldwide, the newspapers and journals noted her exotic ethnic look more than her art, a trend that continues to this day. She writes, "The Frida-look as a fashion commodity accentuating the seductiveness of her persona completely obliterates any suggestion that Kahlo was a producer of socially, politically meaningful paintings" . The fact remains that the Frida's narcissistic construction of Frida's ethnic look and identity, personality revealed in her recently published diary  and in the numerous self-portraits she created, and the clear dichotomy that she established between the colorful and perfectly elaborated costumes and hairstyles and her suffering but restrained face, are evident in her work. Frida's paintings make obvious the objectification of woman in patriarchal society, and that is precisely one of her most valuable contributions to the interpretation of Mexican culture. To denounce the constrained position of women in twentieth century Mexico, through open and bold self-analysis, is a political statement that reflects admirable personal courage, and which is of profound historical significance.

My main reservation about Devouring Frida has to do with the fact that, in order to revert the psycho-biographic approach, which according to Lindauer is to blame for the mythologization and commodification of Frida, she takes on an exclusively socio-political perspective. Frida's mastery resides in the fact that, with her self-referential angle, she addresses some of the most controversial issues that Mexican society usually prefers to silence: the social constructs of gender roles, homosexuality, infidelity, motherhood, abortion, exploitation, and, above all, human suffering. Frida's work is, as Breton stated, "a ribbon around a bomb,"  not because her art is pejoratively debased as "feminine," but because of her remarkable capacity to unveil the most private feelings and events, make them public, and in doing so, she subtly exposes the suspicious social prescriptions that shaped them. Frida's works should not be devoured. Instead the subtle flavors they offer should be leisurely savored.