FRIDA KAHLO--HER PAIN AND HER PAINTINGS

Ten years ago the name Frida Kahlo would get you a slightly puzzled stare from all but the most exquisite of art trivia mavens. Did she do tatting? Wasn’t she married to Diego Rivera?

Today, thanks to a confluence of political and aesthetic trends, a small show of her work at Plaza de la Raza has West L.A. artniks poring over their Thomas Brothers maps to locate the remote and exotic community of Lincoln Heights. (When I was a downtown kid way back the name of the neighborhood evoked tough street gangs and it was considered the worst fate in the world to wind up in Lincoln Heights jail for the kind of huge crime we were inclined to commit, like staying out after curfew.)

Anyway, Kahlo is to be seen at Plaza de la Raza in pretty Lincoln Park at 3540 N. Mission Road until March 29. The gallery folks seem pleased but slightly flummoxed at the attention the show visits upon them. It draws a nice mixture of yuppies who talk like New Yorker cartoons and local kids who sometimes march out in a huff when they discover the show is not free. “Two bucks for that stuff? Forget it, man.”

You get the feeling Kahlo would be amused.

But who was Frida Kahlo and why does she seem so important just now? Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, she was a woman, tiny, and ferociously beautiful with dark down on her upper lip and eyebrows that grew together in the middle.

And of course she was a Mexican, the daughter of a German (or possibly Hungarian)-Jewish photographer and a Catholic mother of mixed Indian and Spanish blood. It is unlikely that she would be getting her due today were it not for the efforts of the art branch of the grass-roots subcultural movement that insisted that Black, Latin, Oriental and other minority sensibilities have something distinctive and worthwhile to contribute to the visual lexicon, a self-evident truth that becomes evermore insistent as L.A.’s immigrant population burgeons to bursting.

And she was intensely political on the far left. According to one story, she fibbed about her birth date, changing it from 1907 to 1910 not because she wanted to appear younger but because she wanted her birthday to coincide with the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution. Today’s art world waxes political, too.

But Frida Kahlo was not a politicized Mexican woman in any passive sense. She was, indeed, the wife of the overblown mural master Diego Rivera and shared his entwined beliefs in Communist-Leftist ideology and Mexican popular and pre-Columbian art.

And she was Woman in spades, italics and caps, an archetype, alas, of much of the dreck women have traditionally suffered even when they are tough and resourceful. She was the Noble Victim. At age 16 she was involved in a pathetically commonplace Mexico City bus accident that left her with a crushed pelvis and a leg and foot shattered in 11 pieces. For the rest of her short life--she died in 1954 in her mid-40s after the leg was finally amputated--she was not to know a day without physical pain, which she bore with remarkable humor and aplomb.

She married the hulking Rivera when she was about 20 and he 43. She had taught herself to paint in the hospital, but marriage to Mexico’s premier muralist guaranteed her efforts would remain shadowed by his reputation and volcanic ego, despite the fact that she shared his flair for flamboyant self-dramatization. The marriage, acted out in a bohemian-cosmopolitan social setting that included surrealist guru Andre Breton, was tempestuous and obsessive. Infidelity marked both sides, but evidently Rivera stayed ahead on points.

Kahlo knew she could not have children, but repeatedly became pregnant only to miscarry or be forced to abortion. Some crazy kind of love caused the couple to divorce and remarry three times. Significantly, Kahlo agreed to the final reconciliation only on the terms that she be financially and sexually independent of Rivera.

Thus far, we have a riveting and heart-rending tale that happens to suit current intellectual fashion like Fred Astaire’s kid gloves. That means that Kahlo’s revival, like many another, could prove her an interesting historical oddity destined to go back in the curio cabinet the minute fickle chic blinks.

To make an intelligent estimate of Kahlo’s chances to remain permanently on our minds, we have to have recourse to the 20 drawings and small paintings from the private collection of Dolores Olmeda Patino on view at Plaza de la Raza.

First encountered is a 1945 “Self-Portrait With Monkey.” It has the intense dry realism of self-taught artists who believe they can master the medium by a simple act of faith--painting each hair and thread. Kahlo got down every twist of her braided coiffure and the shawl that tops her characteristically traditional Mexican costume. She loops the composition together with a boa of ribbon that unites her with a clever monkey, faithful dog and brooding ancient West Mexican sculpture in the background. The device bespeaks a tortuous complication that is as much a hallmark of the work as her ability to fuse parts into an emotionally eloquent whole.

Such an attack usually guarantees a sense of sincerity in self-taught work but Kahlo manages something almost unheard of in the genre. The drawing of her head, especially around the nose, has a released three-dimensionality one rarely sees outside primitive Flemish portraiture.

Kahlo was gifted. That helps, but what really holds us to the work is the certainty that it is absolutely for real even in its posturings. Even its shortcomings attest to its moral authenticity. Kahlo’s natural skill and imitativeness could lead her into a corny Dali-esque 1944 landscape like “Fantasy,” where floats an eye that is a clock and volcanoes that are breasts. Somehow she invests surrealist cliches with passion. We know those are her eyes and her crying breasts.

The same goes for occasional slumps into sentimentality like a 1929 “Little Girl.” She’s button-eyed bathos, but a streak of toughness runs through her sour green dress. Kahlo was attracted to women, but it wasn’t weakness, it was empathy. She gives us the peasant nobility of Dona Rosita Morillo but leaves out Rivera’s slosh by comparing the old lady to a cactus. She respected the chilly glamour of society women as a necessary defense against inner vulnerability.

And she never gave herself an inch. There is a lot to be said about “The Broken Column” where she pictures her spine as a shattered classic column. She sweats tears like a Mexican ex-voto folk painting or Grunewald’s “Crucifixion.” Bristling pins, she’s trussed in an orthopedic corset, but no art philologist could really call it Surrealism and no fetishist in his right mind could take it for a kinky turn-on.

Kahlo said she was a Realist painting the actuality of her pain, disappointment and struggle for life. We believe that and realize why, in fact, she does seem so important right now.

We live in an art world where venality and guile have come to taint even pretended innocence. It’s a queasy kind of fun to imagine Neo-Expressionist naifs in million-dollar lofts calculating the psychological effects of their heartfelt work. “Do you think that figure will really give them the idea I’m suffering in my Jungian universal conscience while referring ever so delicately to the decadence of Persian miniatures?”

Kahlo reminds us of the uses of art as a heartfelt vehicle of autobiography. When the painter has something to say, we are moved to share the experience. With a life like Kahlo’s, who can accuse her of exaggeration? Look at “Without Hope” and know what it is to be a young woman who sees her urge to give life as producing nothing but a bloody geyser of dead chickens, slaughtered pigs and dripping entrails. Look at “My Nurse and I” and know, rather oddly, the whole thrust of Kahlo’s complex feelings about her race, her gender and her elastic age.