QI The Book of the Dead

appeared in public without make-up, but adamantly refused to remove her trademark moustache, oftenusing a pencil to make it darker. A lover of gossip and dirty jokes, she had little time for the abstract theorising of the European art houses:
    I would rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have anything to do with these ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris. They sit for hours in cafés warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘revolution’ and so on, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories that never come true .
     
    Even allowing for her own extra-marital dalliances, the strain of living with Diego became too much for Frida. She found his constant philandering deeply wounding. ‘I have suffered two grave accidents in my life,’ she wrote, ‘one in which a streetcar ran me over; the other accident is Diego.’ For a while, they tried living in separate houses linked by a footbridge. This didn’t work and when Diego suggested a divorce in 1939 Frida accepted. She started drinking heavily, cut her hair short and began wearing men’s clothes. They were remarried within a year, largely at the suggestion of her doctor who was worried about Frida’s mental health. Diego described the deal they came to in his autobiography:
    For her part, she asked for certain conditions: that she would provide for herself financially from the proceeds of her own work; that I would pay for one half of our household expenses – no more; and that we would have no sexual intercourse. In explaining this last stipulation, she said that, with the images of all the other women flashing through her mind, she couldn’t possibly make love to me, for a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances .
     
    They never had children: Frida’s physical condition made it impossible. But she was desperately maternal: she even kept one of her aborted foetuses in a jar by her bedside. Her child substitutes were her pet monkeys, on whom she lavished her affection, particularly the spider monkey, Don Fulang Chang. Her beautiful self-portrait, Fulang Chang and I (1937), was bought for $1 million by Frida Kahlo’s no. 1 fan, Madonna, in 1988. Monkeys appear in several of her other paintings. Instead of their usual symbolic baggage of lasciviousness or stupidity, Frida’s monkeys represent natural grace and childlike mischief. They kept her company during Diego’s long absences along with the rest of her menagerie – Granizo the deer, Bonito the parrot, a miniature hairless dog called Señor Xolotl and an eagle by the name of Gertrude Caca Blanca.
    Frida’s work was not widely recognised while she was alive. Her commercial breakthrough came in 1938, when she accompanied Diego on a tour of the USA (or ‘Gringolandia’ as she called it). She held her first solo exhibition in New York and her first significant sale was to the Hollywood tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson, who bought four paintings for $200 each. In 1939 Frida went to Paris, becoming the first twentieth-century Mexican artist to have a work purchased by the Louvre. Only one Mexican show was organised in her lifetime, and that didn’t take place until 1953. Forbidden to attend by her doctors, Frida had herself transported to the gallery, still in bed, on a lorry, and was wheeled triumphantly into the party.
    Shortly afterwards, her health began to deteriorate sharply, thedecline being exacerbated by her drinking and over-use of sleeping pills. In August of that year her damaged right leg was amputated because of gangrene. A year later she was dead, seemingly of pneumonia, though some friends believed she may have taken an overdose. A few days before she died, she wrote in her diary: ‘I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to come back.’
    Since then, she has never been away. Frida Kahlo is a one-woman international industry: feted by feminist critics, her mono-browed, moustachioed visage is used to sell exhibitions, prints, tote bags, mouse mats and watches all over the world. In 2001, she became the first Hispanic woman to feature on a US postage stamp – surely the only America-loathing, unrepentant Stalinist to have been so honoured. None of this would have surprised Diego. In comparison to Frida’s work, his own socialist realist murals now look rather old-fashioned and politically naive. For