The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is too often reduced to a pop-culture cliché—her likeness appears on products from tote bags to cake toppers. Starting Feb. 8, the Brooklyn Museum reaffirms her complexity, in the exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” Her indelible self-portraits on canvas are joined—for the first time in the U.S.—by a selection of the Tehuana garments and jewelry with which the artist cannily constructed her public persona—a reminder that, in Kahlo’s case, style was substance.
Frida Kahlo’s Style and Substance
A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum reaffirms the complexity of an artist who is too often reduced to a pop-culture cliché.
“Frida Kahlo, 1939,” Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
