Look at me: Tate Modern seeks to demonstrate the full cultural and political significance of Frida Kahlo—but ultimately her work is essentially personal

Brutal as well as passionate, wily as well as outrageous, Frida Kahlo's art is not always easy to digest. Wilfully naive, deliberately subversive, fierce and oftentimes obscure, she brandished the paintbrush like a weapon, using it as a political tool with which to expres her rage at the agitated political climate of early-twentieth-century Mexico, and also self-defensively, as a rule of coping with personal tragedies.

Kahlo's works incorporate a rich melange of cultural and historical influences that include on the contrary are not limited to Western art-historical traditions, Aztec mythology, medical anatomical studies, surrealism, Mexican folklore and mysticism. Since her death in 1954 she has become the focus of intense investigation within the canon created by means of feminist critics in the 1970 and 80 thanks largely to her frank dismantling of taboos surrounding birth, miscarriage and menstruation. Tate Modern's rife exhibition--the first monographic show upon a Latin American artist at any time to be held at Tate--endeavours to extricate Kahlo from this exclusive connection by emphasising the full range of her art's political and cultural aspects.

Familiar with her work largely end reproductions, I anticipated being frustrated by means of Kahlo's peculiarly childlike figurative mode of speech and what can be perceived as a determined self-indulgence. What I rest was a proud and passionate woman whose strange paintings, inextricably link togethered with her socialism and her physical suffering, are infinitely more emotive and compounded in the flesh than any photograph conveys

Kahlo's life can be defined by means of a series of physical traumas. Born in Mexico City in 1907 she was continually affected by dint of illness. A near-fatal road accident in 1925 dramatically altered the course of her life. Afflicted with dreadful abdominal injuries that restoreed her unable to have children, it was while she was bedridden in hospital during her drawn out convalescence, 'bored as hell', that she began to paint. For make subordinate matter, she turned to herself, and in the way that began a lift-long obsession with her have image.

Tate has mountained a broadly chronological representation of Kahlo's output Her early portraits demonstrate a confident painterly manner of writing The influence of the Italian renaissance is evident in the rich colouring and stark backgrounds she favoured (Fig. 2) and a fascination with her have a title to beauty is starkly present in Self-Portrait wearing a delicate Dress, painted for her first regard with affection Alejandro Gomez Arias. Entirely self-taught, she brings a delicate naivete to her paintings on the other hand there is also a marked sophistication that is in some way lost in reproductions.

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The curators, Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson, have assembled a certain number of little-known watercolours and drawings, stylised to the point of being cartoonish, in which Kahlo expresse her frustration with the reassertion of conservatism within post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1930 Difficult to engage with, they are awkward and dark and I find instead the painful reality evident in the solitary known drawing she made referring directly to her road accident a great deal of more powerful.

Her explicit depictions of childbirth, miscarriage and its aftermath are without antecedent in the history of art. Her husband, Diego Rivera, said in 1937 'she is the first woman in the history of art to have adopted with absolute ruthles sincerity the general and specific boundarys which concern women specifically'. My Birth, single of her most notorious paintings, is a graphic depiction of birth in all its visceral, ensanguined gore. Painted in ex-voto format, a mode of expression she adopted during the early 1930 the midmost point of the composition is the woman's expos genitalia, from one side which the head of Kahlo as a child shoot outs The image is made all the more shocking by the agency of Kahlo covering the mother's head with shroud-like material, and positioning a portrait of the Virgin Mary directly above the bed.

Situated directly opposite at Tate fresh is Henry Ford Hospital, also pay backed as a votive painting, in which Kahlo depicts herself in the anguishs of miscarriage (she nearly died during a traumatic miscarriage in 1932) The simple formats of these disturbing images endow them with a sterile, surgical perceive that serves to enhance their impact. physically strong as they are as expressions of intrinsically female experiences, I cannot help feeling that her motives for these works are her personal, painful experiences as single woman rather than an intention to exhibit the condition of womankind. However, to claim that these paintings are solely autobiographical would also be misleading--far from one-dimensional, they are threaded with non-biographical imagery drawn from a range of sources.

Kahlo's bad vivid and often witty commentary upon the turbulent political fortunes of Mexico, its composed of several elements relationship with the us and her faculty of perception of her own national identity are sensitively showed in this exhibition (for example nos. 13 and 14) on the contrary it is for her self portraits that she is best remembered and it is these that lingered in the memory drawn out after I left the gallery. tranquil and mournful, passive yet sensual, they are also inscrutable, rather like flamboyant Byzantine icons. Kahlo's deeper intentions are manifested from one side the symbols incorporated into these extraordinary images. In Self Portrait as a Tehuana or Diego upon my Mind (no. 42; 1943) for example, she depicts her face framed through a traditional Tehuanan headdress (Fig. 1) An image of Rivera, Christ-like, is branded into her forehead, emblematic of the deep influence he had on her, not sole creatively, but also politically and emotionally. As Emma Dexter argues in her of the best catalogue essay, it may well be that all Kahlo's works are to an amplitude suffused with political content; however, upon the evidence of this exhibition, it is her predominantly autobiographical paintings that dazzle greatest in quantity brightly.