Queen of kitsch

WHEN FRIDA KAHLOdied in 1954 she was known as a successful artist with an operatically tragic personal history. Some aspects of her life were familiar, such as her two marriages to a more famous painter, the glamorous international bohemian circles in which she had moved, her leftist politics and her debilitating and long-term medical problems. She was a figure of interest but someone familiar in her native Mexico with limited resonance outside informed groups in the wider world.

And there, for the best part of 20 years, her reputation remained. Until she was rediscovered by feminist art critics in the 1970s, she was a curiosity, a bit-part player, a figure of a discrete historical moment, and the creator of slightly