Frida can't paint.

Talking with Natalie last week, I said something really fast that I've been feeling for a while, and it felt good getting out. I said Frida Kahlo was a horrible painter.

It was at the most recent retrospective of her work at the Philadelphia Museum that I really started questioning things. I caught it on its last day and the show was packed, everyone with there audio tour headset clamoring for position near the next work the show's curators deemed important enough to talk about. And it was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. I've known Frida's work for so long and have yet to get tired of the blunt force trauma you can get from fully immersing yourself in her painful all-life-is-sorrow world. I've seen the majority of her paintings before in past exhibitions, back to the huge Latin American survey MOMA had in the early 90's, and the idea of seeing the "real" paintings was still important to me.

Until I saw them.

I was the overcome by the feeling that the actual paintings on the museum wall were not showing me any more than what I could see in the multitude of reproductions, artspeak for pictures of paintings, that have fed me for the majority of my life. In investing so much in the symbolic language that Frida called her own, and in the circumstances from where it came to be, I paradoxicly found myself distanced from the actual paintings themselves. And at that distance they began to seem crude and dry, as if the juice had been sqeezed and all that remained was the disgarded husk.

Now for my credentials: it's arguable that the work of Frida Kahlo was the prominent influence in myself becoming an artist, a.k.a. crazy and broke. Her work showed me the power of self-directed crazy at work; the exorcism of personal monsters that become inseparable from their host, exposing, owning, accepting, and ultimately using your monsters like a pimp whoring out his bitches.
Now, maturity has brought me the understanding that there was no redemption in her actions; as opposed to what that slop-filled melodramatic faux-biopic a few years back would lead you to believe. Those who knew her usually describe her as full of life, as a feisty spitfire, defiant in the face of all that befell her (and trust me, it was a lot).
But it all just adds up to the sad-clown syndrome for me. A brave face, elaborate costuming, a put-on bravada, all to conceal a lot of pain and fear that stayed with her all the way to her death; her last painting, a still-life where a watermelon half has the words "Viva la Vida" scrawled in its juicy pink flesh, has as much death as it does the life it so brazenly celebrates; the melon's pulp a clear reference to Frida's own vulnerable insides which was so often violated, both by accident and the frequent medical procedure. Being her last painting, its message has been taken as her epitaph, her motto that supported her through all her miseries. But I never felt comfortable with its inherent optimism. To Frida, life will go on a long time without her, and it will be filled with the same pain, and blood, and dead things that she knew intimately in her own. And it is this level of honesty that I have designated as the pinnacle of modern artistic achievement, for me anyway.

So, what the hell does all this have to do with Frida's painting ability? Well, nothing, and that's the point here. Frida Kahlo and the images she produced were so much more than the physicality of the work. It ultimately doesn't matter that the majority of her painting are flat and as visually predictable as a paint-by-numbers. Her greatest painting influences were Mexican retablo painters and her twice-married husband Diego Rivera, and her style combined the flat design-based visual architecture of Rivera's mural work with the awkward naiveté of the religious folk paintings. In both practices, paint is secondary. Frida used it to fill the spaces between what was going on in her psyche.

And that's ok with me.

In fact, it's possably the greatest testament to her work, to the world she created, where she cast herself as the tragic heroine whose sole purpose was to be subjected to all the sorrows that life can bring, and to endure. Nothing more.

It only took me almost 20 years to realize that the paintings themselve were only a supporting character in her play.