Frida on the CatwalkMaimon Schwarzschild

On a visit to Mexico City a few months ago, I visited the famous Frida Kahlo house in Coyoacan, where it turned out a fashion shoot was under way.  (Here are some of the fashion pictures from the shoot, now online.)   The Kahlo house is disconcertingly beautiful: colourful, built round a lovely patio, with lots of Aztec and Mayan pieces which you probably couldn’t acquire legally nowadays.  Disconcerting because the house is a temple not only to Kahlo but also to her heroes Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.  The centrepiece of Kahlo’s studio is her unfinished portrait of Stalin, still on its easel.  (Not a good likeness, I thought, quite apart from anything else.)  Above Kahlo’s bed there is a votive picture of Mao.  Clearly, Kahlo’s idea of social justice – palpably, in fact, her personal religion – were the greatest mass murderers of the twentieth century.  (Or of any century, so far.)

Say what you will about Kahlo’s art – it has always seemed self-dramatising kitsch to me – she had a lovely house.  It’s disconcerting to realise that you have tastes (in surroundings, if not in art) in common with a devotee of political barbarism.

The fashion shoot pleased me, on the other hand.  There’s something oddly reassuring about Kahlo’s radical chic transformed into pure unadulterated commercial chic.

Will Trotsky be next?  His house is around the corner from Kahlo’s.  He appears to have had a brief affair with Kahlo.  That would have been before Kahlo’s hero in the Kremlin had Trotsky murdered with the icepick.