The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

The past decade has seen Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's emergence as a major international figure. In 1990, Diego y yo (Diego and I) was the first Latin American work of art to be sold for more than $1 million. In May 1991, a 1947 self-portrait surpassed that figure, fetching $1.65 million at auction. The pop singer Madonna, who purchased Mi nacimiento (My Birth) for an undisclosed amount, wants to play the part of Kahlo in a film of her life. Kahlo's self-portraits turn up in the most unexpected publications and places, disseminated by the winds of consumer fashion and commercial promotion. It is difficult to say whether the political positions in the debates of our time being attributed to her in absentia would raise the artist's famous eyebrows in amazement or in boredom. Today the name "Frida" is spoken in a manner so casual--a manner never used in speaking of "Pablo," "Diego," or "Georgia" (Picasso, Rivera, or O'Keeffe).

Clearly the name "Frida" has become a symbol with transcultural value, signifying different things to different people, and in a variety of contexts. Becoming a symbol amplifies the artist's fame; at the same time, the process creates many imaginary Fridas who are as varied as the interpretations generated by her extremely personal work. The intimate nature of Kahlo's work helps to explain many of her admirers' express identification with the suffering and turbulence that marked her life. The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo, edited by Erika Billeter, will have no effect on the personally directed interpretation of Frida Kahlo's work, but it does come to grips with the problem raised by the dissemination of her art in the United States and throughout the world. Billeter's book uses luminous reproductions and enlightening essays that tend to place the Mexican artist's life in context at a moment in Mexican history and at a point in the development of a Hispanic American country's artistic consciousness.

Present-day discussion of Frida Kahlo's work revolves around two basic problems. One is that the personal pain that Kahlo always knew how to portray in her paintings seems to conflate femininity with the romantic idea that art results from suffering. This conjunction gives rise to a Frida whose art affirms what the playwright Dolores Prida, for example, points to in her own work, namely the patriarchal myth that to be a woman is to suffer and to accept suffering. In adopting and venerating Kahlo as a cult figure...