Frida: Beyond the Myth at Richmond, Virginia’s VMFA

Frida’s signature greets museum visitors.

By KEVIN M. ANZOLLIN May 15, 2025

In her tragically truncated life, Frida Kahlo was often shadowed by the behemoth fame and personality of her muralist husband, Diego Rivera. Now, over 70 years after her death, Frida is larger than life; her biography has become fodder for Hollywood features and endless children’s books, while her likeness finds itself on a cavalcade of knickknacks—coasters, t-shirts, or snow globes. Kahlo, who strived against her own fragmented body in order to hone her craft, now finds herself, her identity, and the larger meaning of her art constantly divvied up in the marketplace. The artist and icon has become shorthand for female empowerment, global south spirituality, or even a whole country—Mexico itself.  

Two current exhibitions in the US—one in Chicago and one in Richmond, Virginia—venture to make meaning out of the ubiquitous artist whose entire oeuvre totals a modest 143 paintings. While the Art Institute of Chicago exhibit focuses on a single month of Kahlo’s life, the show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art tasks itself, and museum patrons, to look “beyond the myth.” Both are successful in their own way, and serve to reaffirm Kahlo’s tangential yet fruitful association with Surrealism. The VMFA exhibition, located in a medium-sized city whose Latino heritage is not nationally recognized, is particularly strong. The Richmond show will be the sole location on the East Coast and one of only two US museums to host the exhibition. By focusing on Frida’s friendships, the artist’s offhanded yet brilliant sketches, and even some creative ephemera, the show definitely proves how Surreal being Frida must have been. VMFA’s “Frida: Beyond the Myth” eschews the artist’s most lauded works and, in turn, offers an intimate portrait of Frida’s consistently phantasmagorical everyday life. 

From the VMFA’s giftshop.

From start to finish, the show’s guiding principles and timbre are amazingly congruent. For example, the design of the space at the VMFA is crucial to the patron’s overall experience. Drawing inspiration from Casa Azul, Kahlo’s iconic residence in Mexico City, the exhibition’s architecture evokes the doorways and colors of the Kahlo family’s Coyoacán residence. Furthermore, the gallery's lighting is a tad less than expected—perhaps a subtle homage to the colonial interiors of Frida’s Mexican abode. 

Upon entering the exhibit, viewers are first greeted by Frida’s signature, scrawled across the wall in marigold orange text. The first major work on display is Kahlo’s Self-portrait in Velvet Dress (1926), her first of many subsequent self-portraits. The show indeed signals the personal along with the painterly. Of course, Frida’s self-portraits are some of her most well-known works. If one knows absolutely nothing else about Kahlo, we at least know how she drew herself. Of her 143 total paintings, 55 are said to be self-portraits. While the Three Grandes of Mexico’s twentieth-century—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—offered a heroic vision of the nation’s rich collective history. Kahlo’s work, alternatively, offers again and again the fragile but necessary voice of the sole being—the individual that suffers, that inuits, that feels.  

Intriguingly, only two more of Kahlo’s self-portraits are found in Beyond the Myth, among them, one of the artist’s late works, Self-Portrait with Loose Hair (Fig. 3). Rather, the exhibit centers on much of Kahlo’s less known work, photos of the artist taken by colleagues in her orbit, and the artfully miscellaneous objects that made up her day-to-day life. 

Frida’s first self-portrait.

Museum-goers see photographs of Frida by Julien Levy (1906-1981), Dora Maar (1907-1997), Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993), and Nickolas Muray (1892-1965). This last photographer, who was Kahlo’s on-again, off-again lover, is especially featured. His adoringly color-drenched images of Frida remain some of the most renowned; they are also some of the most reproduced. Levy’s photographs, in turn, capture Frida —her actual physical being—as a Surrealist objet d'art, even an objet du désir. Always aware of her own corporeal fragility, Kahlo, presents herself as one of Surrealists’ fragmented bodies.  

The VMFA’s exhibit offers us enough of the chimeric mementos of the artist’s life that, when appreciated together, add up to nothing less than life lived Surrealistically. This is how the New York Times first remembered Kahlo in her 1954 obituary. The interpretation remains the most cogent. 

Not only did Kahlo explore self and psyche like the Surrealists—she also played their games. Thus, on display at the VMFA is the notebook-sized exquisite corpse that Frida drew, a product of the Surrrealists’ favorite parlor game. The exhibit succeeds in putting that which could be deemed ‘marginalia’ at front and center. We scribbly brilliant The Dream or Dream-like Portrait II from 1932. We also see a shell-studded tchotchke that Kahlo gave to her husband, Diego, on the occasion of their anniversary. Also included is Allá cuelga mi vestido from 1933 and Sobreviviente from 1938 (Fig. 4). Toward the end of the show, we see Kahlo’s Sun and Life from 1947, seemingly a fantastical meditation on her—and our—morality. 

Kahlo’s Sobreviviente from 1938.

To recognize Kahlo as a Surrealist is to appreciate her art as more than just a curio piece, and understand her persona as more than a one-trick pony. She was not just a token woman among Mexico’s brawny muralists. She, too, belonged to communities: Revolutionaries, Mexicans, and Surrealists. 

In this sense, the VMFA show is about Frida—of course it is. But it’s also about her milieu. This midcentury moment was the time when, pace historian Mauricio Tenorio, Mexico was understood as a type of “Brown Atlantis”—a place where revolutionary thought was fomented, where everyone wanted to hobnob with Frida, and the Pan-American Highway could finally take us there. Few locations worldwide embraced Surrealism with so much enthusiasm as did Mexico. Our southern neighbor played host to some of the movement’s most notable figures—André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Wolfgang Paalen, Benjamin Péret, and Remedios Varo—while back in Paris, Aztec statuettes and tools were showcased alongside Surrealist artwork. André Breton, poet, essayist, and ringleader of everything Surreal, referred to Mexico as the “Surrealist country par excellence.” Renowned painter Salvador Dalí is quoted, more trenchantly, as describing Mexico “more surrealist” than even his paintings. 

Nevertheless, Mexico’s relationship with Surrealism was complex during Kahlo’s day: as the movement arrived during an era of Revolutionary nationalism, its inherently internationalist ideals faced skepticism. While Surrealism undeniably emerged as a revolutionary force in response to World War I, its internationalist essence often had to be moderated in Mexico by nationalistic concerns, while still maintaining a political edge. Kahlo, perhaps wary of being labeled as part of a degenerate artistic trend, carefully avoided this classification.

In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton defined the movement as attempting to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” With the VMFA’s exhibit, viewers get a glimpse of one of the twentieth-century’s powerhouse artists working through her life’s daydreams, hopes, and nightmares. That the museum shop at the VMFA ultimately can’t avoid stocking the pervasive trinkets associated with the Frida cult is unfortunate but expected.   

Finally, in this sense, the exhibition’s title is somewhat misguided. The epic character of Frida’s now grandiose mystique is never questioned. Nevertheless, the show succeeds in humanizing her by underscoring the personal, the private, and the quirky uncanniness of her extraordinary every day. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been “Frida: Beyond Appearances.” 

The show runs through September 28, 2025. WM