A woman looks out at us – her body is frontally positioned – and is set against a verdant forest of varying shades of yellow and green. Sitting on her shoulders is a cat, with piercing eyes, who looks as though it is about to pounce, and a monkey, who is doing something with its hands. Look closer and you’ll notice that it’s tying – or loosening – the necklace of thorns that wraps around her neck (and over her shirt), piercing her skin with blood dripping down.
While the thorns look painful, her expression remains patient, stoic, and calm despite what seems like enduring pain. Hanging off the branches is a hummingbird – a symbol that usually represents joy and resilience. Known for their ability to hover in one place, hummingbirds can evoke emotional healing, and the strength to endure difficulty.
But look at it again, and notice that it’s not white, orange, or iridescent, but black: like it’s burnt or lifeless. How does that change the way we think our protagonist might feel – despite the strength she exudes, or the beauty that surrounds her?
Her hair is held together by an infinite loop of purple – with dragonflies and butterflies hovering above. When I look at this portrait I see both beauty and suffering, but also an ability to shift pain into something full of vitality. The hints of blue sky could symbolise hope, and, while she is suffering, she is still there.
The woman I am talking about is Frida Kahlo.
This is Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940 – on view at Tate Modern – and painted when she was about 33 years old.
Since her death in 1954, Kahlo’s face has become one of the most recognisable in history: identified by her strong features, dark eyes, and monobrow. But who was she?
Born in July 1907 in Mexico City, Kahlo was raised in the blue house or Casa Azul. The daughter of a Mexican mother, and a German father – heritages she explored in her work – Kahlo was especially close to her father, not least because he was a photographer and introduced her to art and his library of books, but because they shared empathy with each other’s suffering. He had epilepsy, and she had Polio, a disease contracted when she was six that left her with one leg shorter than the other.
While the bullies nicknamed her “pegleg” at school, Kahlo never played the victim, and dreamt of being a doctor.
But in September 1925, this came to an end when a bus she was riding crashed with an electric train, and burst into 1000 pieces. It is known the handrail thrust through Frida’s pelvis and she was found lying in the street, unclothed, coated in blood but also gold powder from a tub that someone on the bus had been holding.
This extraordinary pencil drawing shows a memory of what she experienced. How does one capture the before and after of something that altered their body – physically and psychologically – forever? It’s almost like grief: how can life ever be the same again?
Kahlo’s spine broke in three places, plus her collarbone, ribs, pelvis, leg, shoulder and foot – but her greatest fear was that this would bind her to her bed, away from the action of the Mexican revolution.
So Frida’s mother affixed a mirror to the top of her bed, and gave her paints.
She began by decorating the plaster corsets, with images of butterflies or unfulfilled wishes, and then turned to herself – painting fearlessly and honestly: her battle with death, miscarriages, her Communist beliefs, being a woman and an artist, her love of nature, and more.
Kahlo died in July 1954. One of her last public appearances was at her second ever solo exhibition (and first in Mexico), in 1953, where she was driven in by an ambulance, arriving on a stretcher bed just so she could see her work.
Her final painting, made eight days before her death, is titled Viva la Vida, translating to Long Live Life, of half and whole succulent watermelons, brimming with vitality.
Her final diary entry reads, “I hope the exit is joyful – I hope never to return – Frida.” She was 47 years old.
25 years later, a new movement was afoot: the Women’s Liberation Movement, which helped catalyse a revival of her work.
In New York City, where the movement was rife, a young Cuban-born artist, just 30 years old, was inspired to dress up as this Mexican artist and revolutionary. Her name was Ana Mendieta.
The costume party was hosted by artist Mary Beth Edelson, and the brief was to go as your favourite artist. Louise Bourgeois went as herself!
But let’s go back to Mendieta: what would she have seen in Kahlo? What affinities would she have shared? When speaking to Mendieta’s niece Raquel, she explained to me that Mexico was like a surrogate home: “the first place she’s travelled where people look like her, talk like her.”
Born in pre-revolution Havana in 1948, Mendieta – like Kahlo – had a split in her life. But it was physical and emotional in a different way. When she was a child, Fidel Castro came to power and her father was imprisoned for counter-revolutionary activities. Along with her sister, Mendieta – at age 12 – was sent to America, settling in Iowa, on a scheme, along with thousands of other minors, called Operation Peter Pan.
Mendieta remained separated from her parents – and birth country – for years, scars she would later go onto explore in her work, when, at the University of Iowa graduate art program she began to use her body. Transitioning from painting – a medium shown for one of the very first times in the Tate show – she said, using her body, that she could finally feel the magic “running through her”.
Between 1973 and 1980, Mendieta, using “the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools”, created more than 200 ephemeral ‘sculptures’, which she called Siluetas (silhouettes), and captured these works through film or photography.
She began this series during a trip to Mexico in 1973, where she was inspired to make life-size ephemeral works exploring notions of existence, resurgence and renewal.
Through methods of burning, carving, planting and more, she moulded the outlines of her body onto the soil across the US, Mexico and, from 1980, Cuba.
Her first Silueta in Yágul, an archaeological zone in Oaxaca, Mexico, is of Mendieta lying in an Aztec tomb covered in weeds and grasses (above).
Looking at it, I see a figure emerging from or returning back to the land. Like the plants around her, she too is a living and breathing organism, and reminds me where we all come from. Although personal, like Kahlo, there is a universality to Mendieta’s work. Like Kahlo, it challenges conventional representations of women and also speaks to notions of human healing: both in respect of the rift between her home country and America; as well as the powers of nature; the redundancy of borders; and, in a feminist realm, shows the freed woman leaving her imprint on the soil: a canvas free from patriarchy.
What does it mean to be a woman artist in a history that has prioritised a very narrow viewpoint? How do you break through; to where and to who do you look?
The other artist who uses her image so prominently is Tracey Emin. Born in Croydon in 1963, and raised in Margate where she relished the lights of Dreamland but also where she experienced abuse at a young age, Emin went onto study at Maidstone College of Art, then the Royal College of Art, and is known for her practice spanning painting, sculpture, film, textile and more – and is still making the art that we will one day talk about.
Like Mendieta, she dressed up as Frida Kahlo – this time for Mary McCartney in 2000, wearing a traditional Mexican dress, and, fittingly, pictured in her bed.
This was taken in October 2000, two years after Emin’s iconic work My Bed – a place and subject that continues to hold many significances across her career: from the work that unapologetically showed the results of a three-day breakdown and was a raw portrait of womanhood or the human experience, transforming the idea of the ‘self portrait’ in art – despite the ‘absence’ of the body. But, also, more recently: where she has spent time recovering from cancer.
The Bed was of similar significance to Kahlo: where she began painting, but also a key subject – especially her work Henry Ford Hospital of the physical, psychological and emotional effects of a miscarriage.
Appearing minuscule in comparison to the oversized hospital bed, with looming railings that appear almost like prison bars, Kahlo lies down, naked, her belly swollen and her backside spindled in a pool of blood. Tears pour from her eyes, as she clutches an umbilical cord that links her to the foetus, and other motifs like a snail, or a flower or a cast.
In this work, both artists present the reality of what women endure, but they have often been billed as ‘radical’. But why? Is it because it is not conventionally beautiful? Is it because they are showing the truth?
It’s an interesting dichotomy that these artists portray. On the one hand their work is so raw, it can be disturbing, but disturbing is a great way because ultimately it’s about the human experience. To confront it is to understand it.
I think that’s what we see here: artists, who refused to hide experiences that had often been excluded from history. By making this visible, they transformed individual suffering into something universal, allowing generations of viewers to recognise themselves in the work.
At a historic moment, all three artists are exhibiting at Tate Modern.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life is on view until 31 August 2026.
Frida: The Making of an Icon is on view until 3 January 2027.
Ana Mendieta runs from 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027.
Go! Love Katy xx
Frida Kahlo was radical by any standards, so why shouldn't she be described that way? Communism is a radical ideology. And the long torment she suffered during her short life was radical. I'm sure she would have embraced the term.
The nerves in the spine are capable of yielding the most extreme pain the body can experience. Her glazed eyes in the first portrait shows this, and the stillness of the face is the one that comes when a person's pain is too great for screams.
It is a stillness no one should have to enter, but alas, some do. She lived it for decades. And even embarked on pregnancies in defiance of it. She never succumbed.
Oh, Tracey portraying the rich girl Kahlo wounded in her bed. Love that photo! These three artists have true relevance in my life.