It was October 2017, and Theresa May was at the midpoint of her deeply awful tenure as Britain’s prime minister. Like every British prime minister from 2010 to 2024, May was a member of the Conservative Party. She’d spent the last few years slashing the national budget for schools and mental health services, expanding police surveillance powers, creating what she called a “hostile environment” for undocumented immigrants, and failing to reach a Brexit deal that anyone was particularly happy with. But when she took the stage at the Conservatives’ 2017 party conference, it was her fashion choices that sparked headlines. On her right hand, May sported a chunky, oversized bracelet made of small portraits—all of Frida Kahlo, the iconic Mexican artist who died in 1954. Today, none of what May said in her convention speech is remembered. But the Kahlo bracelet is. It inspired a wave of media speculation from Vanity Fair to the London Review of Books, which only intensified when the prime minister wore the bracelet again to a European Union summit the following year. Both times, people had one question on their minds: why would someone like May, whose politics are firmly right-wing, wear the image of someone like Kahlo, who spent her life and career as an avowed communist?
It’s not as strange as it seems. In the 71 years since her death, Kahlo has enjoyed a huge boom in popularity—a phenomenon art historians call “Fridamania” or even “Fridolatry,” which has given her “global pop culture status that challenges the likes of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.” She’s one of very few 20th-century painters to reach that status, and an entire cottage industry of gift-shop kitsch has sprung up around her, just as it has for figures like Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dalí. Along with bracelets like May’s, you can now buy earrings, coffee mugs, jigsaw puzzles, smartphone cases, novelty socks, and lip balm emblazoned with Kahlo’s face—and stranger items, too, like a ceramic cactus pot or a three-piece spice set. There was even a Frida Kahlo Barbie doll in 2018, which was banned from the Mexican market after Kahlo’s great-niece sued Mattel for using the artist’s likeness without permission.
Kahlo’s art and persona have become a globally recognized brand—but in the process, her radical politics have been obscured, if not outright erased. She’s remembered as a “feminist symbol of daring creativity,” as one recent book puts it, as someone who was “stoic in the face of struggles” related to chronic illness and disability, and even for her bisexuality. But the “daring” she’s credited with is generic and non-partisan. The fact that she was a loyal member of the Mexican Communist Party, except when she was allied with Leon Trotsky instead, is often left out. And so, sanitized and commodified for popular consumption, she can sit comfortably on Theresa May’s wrist. It’s a fate she would likely have despised and a tremendous disservice to her real legacy.
How did this happen? As usual, Hollywood is partly to blame. The definitive biography of Kahlo is Hayden Herrera’s Frida, from 1983, and it covers her politics in considerable detail—from her childhood fascination with the ongoing Mexican Revolution, to her reading of Marx and Hegel as a teenager, to her later engagements with both Trotskyism and Stalinism. But sadly, a lot more people get their history from big-budget movies than from 400-page hardcover books, especially in the United States. There are two major films about Kahlo’s life: one a dramatization from 2002 with Salma Hayek in the lead role and the other a documentary released on Amazon Prime in 2024. Like Herrera’s book, both are simply called Frida, and both have their strengths. But they also distort their subject in important ways and, above all, downplay Kahlo’s devotion to the communist cause.
The 2002 Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, really ought to be called Frida and Diego, the title it reportedly had at one point during its long and troubled development. Ostensibly, it’s an adaptation of Herrera’s book. At the time, Harper Perennial even released a new edition of the biography with the movie poster as the cover. But really, the film is less a straightforward biopic and more a romantic drama. It frames Kahlo’s life mainly through her romantic and sexual relationships—primarily with fellow artist Diego Rivera, but also with Leon Trotsky when he was exiled to Mexico in the late 1930s, and occasionally with a variety of female side characters. The tagline on one of the cinema posters reads “prepare to be seduced,” and that sums up the film’s approach.
When communism comes up, it’s usually because Rivera (played with aplomb by Alfred Molina) or Trotsky (a slightly underwhelming Geoffrey Rush) are expounding about it. Kahlo takes part in their arguments and their protests; she helps Rivera crank out communist pamphlets on a clunky printing press and supports him when he feuds with Nelson Rockefeller over his decision to paint Lenin into his latest mural. But she seems to have little political initiative of her own. The implication is that she’s a communist mainly because the men in her life are. Instead of a portrait of her as a serious political thinker, we get a lot of prurient stuff about her sex life, whether she’s seducing the same woman Rivera has just slept with (out of jealousy, it’s implied) or having a fling with the much-older Trotsky. The performances save this version of Frida from being truly bad—both Hayek and Molina inhabit their roles perfectly—and Taymor’s use of color, plus the occasional stop-motion skeleton, bring Kahlo’s art to vibrant life. The film looks like one of her paintings, but as a portrait of the painter, it’s incomplete.
Of course, Kahlo’s (bi)sexuality was an important part of her life, and biopics shouldn’t prudishly shy away from sex. But there’s an ugly reason for the romantic and erotic focus of the 2002 Frida: the predatory habits of its producer, Harvey Weinstein. As Hayek revealed in a 2017 op-ed during the #MeToo movement, Weinstein started sexually harassing her soon after signing the deal to produce Frida, and he turned to petty sadism when his advances were rejected, even threatening to kill Hayek in a fit of rage at one point. By her account, he also insisted on adding more of what he considered “sex appeal” to the film, “constantly asking for more skin” and threatening to shut down the production if he didn’t get his way. To the extent that the film is a halfway decent adaptation of Kahlo’s life at all, it’s because Taymor and Hayek pushed back. Weinstein had wanted Kahlo’s trademark unibrow removed, along with the limp from her childhood bout with polio, neither of which he considered “sexy”; both made it into the final film. But he did force Hayek to perform a completely extraneous lesbian sex scene, which she describes as a traumatic experience—“not because I would be naked with another woman [but] because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein.” By itself, this behavior is nauseating, and anyone who complains about the #MeToo movement today is either utterly misinformed, cruelly misogynistic, or both. But as a secondary effect of his lechery, Weinstein has also helped to distort the perception of one of history’s most important Marxist artists, making it possible for the moviegoing public to see Frida Kahlo as a mere sex symbol to be leered at and fantasized over. If anything, that’s almost as bad.
The 2024 Frida, meanwhile, is both better and worse. There’s no abuse associated with this production—at least, none that’s been made public—which is an obvious point in the “better” column. The documentary also tells Kahlo’s story in her own words, relying heavily on narration taken from her diaries and letters, and it’s mostly in her native Spanish. But although it’s a lot more faithful and less sensationalized than the 2002 Frida, it’s still highly selective in which parts of Kahlo’s life it explores. The art itself is presented well, with expensive-looking animated recreations of Kahlo’s paintings sprawling across the screen as narrator Fernanda Echevarría reads the artist’s commentaries on her pieces. Birds flutter, vines creep, and the scissors in the famous portrait of Kahlo wearing close-cropped hair and a men’s suit go snip. Kahlo’s sexuality, meanwhile, is treated tastefully. It’s there, as it should be, but it isn’t made an all-consuming focus like in the 2002 film. But if anything, the political content is even more lacking than in the Taymor/Hayek drama. As Maximilíano Durón wrote in his review for Art News, “we learn that Kahlo decided to join the Communist Party” in a single line of voiceover, but “not much more is said on that front.” There’s some B-roll footage of Emiliano Zapata, but the complexities of the Mexican Revolution and Kahlo’s nationalist commitment to “the cause of a new Mexico” go unexamined. The more difficult aspects of her art, like her appropriation of the traditional dress of the indigenous Tehuana people—which has provoked a wide variety of responses over the years—are nowhere to be found. Durón concludes that the 2024 film “doesn’t even scratch the surface” of Kahlo’s life and that her “Wikipedia page remains more insightful.” That might be a little harsh, but it basically hits the mark.
Again, the involvement of a malevolent rich man plays a role. This time it’s not Harvey Weinstein but Jeff Bezos, and instead of gendered abuse, more subtle economic and cultural forces are at work. The 2024 Frida was released through Bezos’s Amazon Prime streaming platform, and it shares the same formal issues that many such “streaming originals” have. To put it bluntly, streaming video services reward bland, dumbed-down content that’s easy to consume—what online critics have taken to derisively calling “slop.” With a few exceptions, they don’t make “films” in the sense a 20th-century cinema audience would recognize. They make “content” designed for “casual viewing”—literally, to be half-watched while doing laundry or scrolling social media. It’s gotten so bad that Netflix executives have reportedly ordered their screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along” without actually looking at the screen. For his part, Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of slop. Amazon Prime cranks out endless straight-to-streaming films like Without Remorse and The Tomorrow War that come and go without leaving much of an impression, positive or negative. The 2024 Frida isn’t as bad as those, which are some of the most generic action movies (er, “action content”) ever made. But if the documentary is superficial and doesn’t dive into the complexities of Kahlo’s politics, it’s partly because it was made for a platform that’s uninterested in complexity of any kind.
Beyond this, though, we know that Jeff Bezos—one of the richest people in the world—discourages people at his companies from taking left-wing political stances. Just this month, he issued a decree that all opinion writers at the Washington Post, which he also owns, must support “free markets” and “personal liberties” in their articles if they want to be published. (Never mind that markets, and the necessity of selling one’s time and labor in order to live, are the single biggest thing preventing people from having any meaningful liberty.) Bezos has also personally stepped in to prevent the Post making an endorsement in the last U.S. presidential election, and under his watch the paper has refused to run negative ads about his fellow billionaire Elon Musk. This kind of censorship is the obvious danger of having one person own a media service the general public relies on. With the Frida documentary, there’s no evidence that Bezos or any other executive stepped in to prevent director Carla Gutierrez from talking about Kahlo’s politics—but they didn’t need to. Censorship in a capitalist media industry is more subtle than that. As Noam Chomsky memorably put it in an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, media figures usually “believe everything [they’re] saying,” and believe they’re expressing their own point of view—but “if they believed something different, [they] wouldn’t be sitting there.” People who want to make bland, agreeable, non-partisan art (or “content”) get hired. People who want to make more radical statements don’t. And so we get a documentary about a famous and outspoken communist that barely mentions communism.
It’s the same in the publishing industry, especially when the books are geared toward a younger audience. There are several children’s books about Kahlo’s life, ranging from a board book called Counting With Frida (“two paint brushes,” “three flowers,” and so on), to Silvia López’s My Little Golden Book About Frida Kahlo (meant for children four to eight years old, with a few sentences per page), to a volume called Who Was Frida Kahlo? aimed at middle schoolers. They’re cute books, but they’re almost entirely apolitical. Now, it’s probably understandable that the Little Golden Book and the one that teaches babies to count don’t include Kahlo’s politics. Four years of age might, after all, be a little young to be introduced to the finer points of Marxism-Leninism. But for Who Was Frida Kahlo?, there’s really no excuse. Amusingly enough, the same Who Was… series includes a book about Fidel Castro, which enraged Governor Ron DeSantis when he discovered it in a Florida library, and another about Che Guevara, both of which are more or less fair to their subjects. So clearly the authors and editors are capable of covering communist figures. But in Who Was Frida Kahlo?, communism just doesn’t come up; even poor old Trotsky doesn’t get to make a cameo appearance. The closest we get is a line about how the Mexican Revolution was fought against “government officials and a few rich farm owners [who] kept the money for themselves.” It would have been easy enough to include a page about the Mexican Communist Party, explained in terms a curious child could understand; for an honest account, all author Sarah Fabiny had to do was say something like “Frida and her friends carried a banner with a hammer and sickle, a symbol that showed they supported the workers and farmers movement in Mexico.” But there’s nothing like that in the book.
Even in books ostensibly meant for adults, it’s not much better. In a 2020 self-help book called What Would Frida Do? A Guide to Living Boldly, written by former Oprah Magazine digital director Arianna Davis, we get a grand total of four pages about Kahlo’s politics, plus a two-page timeline, both of which come at the end of a chapter called “Identity.” What’s there is accurate enough. Davis writes that Kahlo was “outspoken about her communist and Marxist-Leninist views” and notes that her political engagement began “long before she was Diego Rivera’s wife,” which is an important point. But the relative lack of emphasis is striking. By contrast to the six-ish pages about Marxism, “Love,” “Sex,” and “Heartbreak” all get their own chapters, each more than 20 pages in length. Even when writing about her communism, Davis manages to come to the conclusion that Kahlo is an example of how women should “embrace our viewpoints, even if they go against the norm,” and she wraps up by telling her readers “don’t just be yourself—be loud and proud about it.” It’s kind of miraculous, in all the wrong ways. Davis takes communism and transmutes it into individualism, taking only the form of Kahlo’s politics—her “outspokenness”—and casting the content aside. The vital question of what people should be outspoken about is not asked. It doesn’t seem to occur to Davis that the answer to the question “What Would Frida Do?” is “find a communist party and join it.” Instead, we get Kahlo-as-Girlboss—a formulation that could just as easily “empower” someone to be a corporate executive, or even a conservative politician like Theresa May, as it could an artist or a socialist. The fact that the author used to work for Oprah does not seem coincidental.
Illustration by Emily Altman
Needless to say, Kahlo is not the only famous figure to be sanitized and stripped of her association with the political Left in this way. Last year, Prince Shakur wrote for Current Affairs about how James Baldwin has undergone a similar process. He’s a literary icon, the inspiration for multiple films, and his face appears on all kinds of merchandise—but the fact that he was a vocal supporter of Palestinian liberation is carefully left out of the conversation. Similarly, everyone knows Albert Einstein’s name, but fewer people have read his essay “Why Socialism?” from the inaugural issue of the Monthly Review. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as a significantly less radical figure than he really was. So is Helen Keller. In The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin summed up this phenomenon perfectly:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Lenin was talking about Marx (when wasn’t he?), but the same principle applies exactly to Frida Kahlo. Hollywood, the publishing industry, and the commercial art world are more than happy to buy and sell images of her work and to hold exhibitions and make documentaries in her honor. They’ll sell you a Frida Kahlo finger puppet and be glad to do it. But to acknowledge her as a communist, and not a commodity, would be too much. It would suggest that Marxism is not an ideology of pure evil or base stupidity, as almost 200 years of propaganda has told us. It would reveal that communism is something intelligent and creative people have devoted their lives to, with good reason. And that’s too dangerous an idea to be allowed.
So who was Frida Kahlo, the communist? What is it that’s been occluded from her history? When we peel back the veil and see her for who she truly was, the person we find is far more impressive than the version we’ve been told about. Kahlo was a radical from her youth, even before she’d had any kind of political education; it seems rebellion was just part of her temperament. More specifically, she told interviewers that she was spurred into radical politics partly as a reaction against her mother’s conservative Catholicism, which she found stifling:
My mother was a great friend to me, but the whole religion thing never united us. My mother went down in history for religion. We had to pray before every meal…. For twenty years my mother won the battle against me, but by thirteen I was already a raging leftist.
In her diary, Kahlo recalls another formative incident: having seen “with my own eyes the clash between Zapata’s peasants and the forces of Carranza” during the Mexican Revolution, and how her mother invited Zapatista rebels into their home, “tended their wounds and fed them corn gorditas.” This impressed her deeply and seems to have contributed to her lifelong affinity for revolution and revolutionaries. In a move that has made life difficult for her biographers ever since, she lied about her age when she entered preparatory school, claiming that she was born in 1910—the year the Revolution kicked off—rather than 1907. It meant that much to her.
At the age of 15 (not 13, as she claimed!), Kahlo went to the National Preparatory School in Mexico City—the equivalent of an American high school—and quickly joined the Cachuchas, a radical student group. In early accounts of Kahlo’s life, like the rather sexist 1938 Vogue profile that called her “Madame Rivera,” this group has been described in infantilizing terms as “a gang of boys and girls who made the school halls ring with their escapades.” That’s the way they’re portrayed in the 2002 Frida film, too, although they barely appear in it. But the Cachuchas were much more than that. As Herrera puts it, they “espoused a kind of romantic socialism mixed with [Mexican] nationalism,” and although they did play juvenile pranks, they had a distinct political bent. It was the conservative teachers at the Preparatoria, specifically, who were the targets. At one point, apparently, they detonated a “six-inch firecracker” in the classroom of one Professor Caso—all because he refused to teach them Marx, Engels, and Hegel! But beyond petty acts of mayhem, the Cachuchas were also a revolutionary reading circle, exactly the kind of small intellectual cell that the Bolshevik Party had started out with in Russia. Among other authors, they read Dumas, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, H.G. Wells, and the revolutionary poet Ramón López Velarde, and Kahlo herself soon learned to read in three languages—Spanish, English, and German. Later in life, she would write in her diary that “I have read the History of my country and of nearly all nations. I know their class struggles and their economic conflicts. I understand quite clearly the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse,” and “I love them as the pillars of the new Communist world.” In other words, she was intellectually brilliant on a level that few adults, let alone teenagers, can aspire to—a fact that makes the sexism of those early press accounts, with titles like “Wife of the Master Muralist Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art,” all the more infuriating.
What’s more, Kahlo’s communism was connected to her lifelong experience of chronic illness and pain in a way that resonates deeply today. This has been left out of virtually all accounts of her life, both print and film, but it’s vital. In the last interview she gave before her death, to the Mexican art critic Raquel Tibol, Kahlo reflects on the infamous bus accident that broke her spine at the age of 18 and left her with a variety of traumas and complications. The incident is portrayed in both of the Frida films, but what isn’t said there—and what Kahlo reveals to Tibol—is that it wasn’t just the accident itself that hurt her. It was the subpar medical care she received afterward:
I was not taken care of properly and I had no X-rays taken. I sat down as best I could and told the Red Cross to call my family… I spent three months in the Red Cross. The Red Cross was very poor. They had us in a kind of awful shed, the food was crap and could hardly be eaten. A single nurse took care of twenty-five patients.
There’s no way of telling for sure, but it’s very possible that if Kahlo had gotten better healthcare—including X-rays, which were widely considered an essential medical tool by the year 1900—she might not have suffered as much of the pain, difficulty walking, miscarriage, and other medical difficulties that haunted her life from that time on. In particular, the detail about one nurse’s labor being stretched too far to adequately cover all of the patients is familiar from hospital workers’ strikes today: dangerous understaffing has been one of the most important issues driving workers to seek better labor conditions.
In other words, Kahlo understood her illness and injury, at least in part, in terms of resources and the lack thereof. Toward the end of her life, she would paint a remarkably unsubtle picture called Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick that gave that understanding visual form. It shows the disembodied head of Karl Marx hovering in the sky like some strange bearded sun and reaching out with a giant fist to strangle a vulture with the face of Uncle Sam. In the center, Kahlo stands with a book—red, of course—in hand and casts her crutches aside. The painting’s original title was even more direct: “Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism.” Curiously, it’s not a piece that tends to show up on gift-shop calendars. But to my mind, it’s her greatest work. It’s all there: her unshakable faith that socialism would change everything and ensure no one ever had to suffer the way she did again. A promise to the future.
Kahlo didn’t live to see that promise fulfilled. She died in 1954, just days after she and Rivera had marched in a demonstration against the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala; at her funeral, one of her students threw a flag with the hammer and sickle over her coffin. But since the mid-20th century, Mexico has been on a long road to universal healthcare. In 1943 the Mexican Social Security Institute was established, with public hospitals and emergency services as one of its main purviews along with public pensions and, as the name suggests, social security payments. Still, healthcare was tied to one’s employment, much as it is in the U.S. today. That changed in 1983, when an amendment to the Mexican constitution made healthcare a universal right for the first time.
Over the ensuing decades, a series of large-scale government plans have been enacted to make that provision a reality. First there was the Sistema Nacional de Salud (National Health System) in 1984, which consolidated existing public health services into a single framework. That was followed by the Programa de Reforma del Sector Salud (Health Sector Reform Program) in 1995, which decentralized the system and gave more local control to individual Mexican states, and by the Seguro Popular (Popular Insurance) program in 2003—a colossal effort which gave health insurance to more than 53 million people who didn’t previously have it and helped cut the infant mortality rate in Mexico by half. Finally, the Morena government recently implemented the INSABI (Instituto de Salud para el Bienestar, or “Institute of Health for Well-being”) program, which replaced Seguro Popular to remove premiums and enrollment costs and make healthcare truly free. (Though certain major conditions, like cancer and heart attacks, are still not fully covered—a notable flaw.) Through this extended process, there have been plenty of struggles, scandals, and setbacks, all of which could fill a book. There actually is such a book, Health Systems in Transition: Mexico by Miguel A. González Block et al. But the bottom line is that Mexico has committed itself to healthcare as a human right for all of its citizens, regardless of their ability to pay. If not precisely Marxism, at least social democracy and robust public services really have brought health to the sick, just as Kahlo said. And as a much richer and more powerful nation, the United States truly has no excuse for not making the same commitment to the north.
You can tell Frida Kahlo was a remarkable communist, because more than 70 years after her death, the international right wing is still scared of her. In Hungary, a conservative newspaper affiliated with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party threw a fit about Kahlo’s paintings being displayed in the National Gallery in Budapest in 2018, fuming that “This is the way communism is promoted using state money.” A year later, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Mexico—a man named Christopher Landau who, like many Trump ambassadors, was not actually a trained diplomat—took it upon himself to denigrate Kahlo, saying that he admired her “free and bohemian spirit” but condemned her “obvious passion for Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism.” Ironically, these conservative figures recognize what the commercial peddlers of Kahlo merchandise don’t. They understand that her communism is an essential part of her life and legacy, along with her outspoken feminism, her illness, her sexuality, and all the rest. The fact that they’re so visibly worried about her art and its potential to inspire people today shows that it’s still what Surrealist André Breton called it: “a ribbon around a bomb.” And that’s exactly how she should be remembered.
