Frida Kahlo: From Cult Figure to Mainstream : Culture: With the tormented Mexican artist’s works in demand and four films pending, will we lose Frida?

No doubt about it, Kahlomania is upon us.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has become a mini-industry. Last week, Christie’s sold one of her instantly recognizable self-portraits to a private Mexican collector for $1.65 million.

In language tailored to titillate the art world’s fast-trackers, Christie’s pre-auction press release began: “Madonna collects her. Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky loved her. Muralist Diego Rivera married her. Hayden Herrera wrote the critically acclaimed book about her. . . .”

When she died at 47 in 1954, Frida Kahlo had had two one-woman shows, her art was owned by only a few collectors and by loyal friends. Gradually, she has become an international cult figure, “Frida,” known as much for her persona as her painting.

What we accept as Frida Kahlo is an image she painted obsessively: a challenging face with a single, batwing eyebrow and a look of stoicism, vividly theatrical, deeply solitary. That glance hid lifelong pain, bodily and emotional. She had childhood polio, then at 18, a catastrophic bus accident that crushed her pelvis and one foot, fractured her spine and left her a legacy of therapeutic abortions and miscarriages in place of the children she so wanted. She reserved that pain--and the torment that came from her marriage to Rivera whose casual love affairs included Kahlo’s favorite sister--for her canvases.

Actually no tougher than a Mexican paper flower, her public image was flamboyant and salty. But her small-scale paintings overflowed with Surrealist images of mutilation, wounds, tears, broken hearts and torment.

Since the late 1970s, Kahlo has become the subject of documentaries, poetic dramatizations and dance-dramas in varying degrees of effectiveness; this year four feature films on her life have been announced, including projects with Robert De Niro and with Madonna.

From neglect to Madonna in less than a decade? Uh oh. Something about that equation makes me wary: a concern that in today’s National Enquirer climate of morbid curiosity, The Woes of Frida will be seen as the way to “sell” Kahlo. In my worst-scenario case, her swirling, international world and the Marxism that gave her life its meaning will pale beside Kahlo as the Sylvia Plath of painting. If this sounds cynical, remember that until Robert Altman, what the public “knew” about Vincent Van Gogh was that he’d sliced off his ear.

By phone from Dallas, Dr. Solomon Grimberg, a friend of Kahlo’s from childhood and co-author, in 1988, of the complete catalogue of her work, wondered as well. “Whenever I hear artists speak of Frida, I never hear about her miscarriages, her abortion, her bloody leg or the abuse by Rivera. They speak only about the art.”

In Grimberg’s view, Kahlo’s art was the purest sleight-of-hand; she created Frida, this mythic, powerful woman, to compensate for her own, desperately fragile and always-dependent sense of self. “She said she painted herself because that’s what she knew best, but if you know something well, why do you have to ruminate endlessly about it?”

Yet there’s no denying the power of her vision. I had felt it full force when I was 13 and happened suddenly on a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. It was in the New York apartment of Nickolas Muray, the Hungarian-born photographer whose studio was a gathering place for artists from Martha Graham and Jean Cocteau, to T. S. Eliot and Isamu Noguchi.

Muray had paintings everywhere, but nothing with the intensity of this one. As I gaped, Kahlo stared back, her hair in a braided coronet with maroon ribbons and silver butterflies. Over her imperturbable eyes arched the famous single eyebrow, painted in the same exquisite detail as her mustache. On her right shoulder perched her sweet, small monkey, over her left was a black cat, its ears back ominously. Around the painter’s neck was a network of branches, some of whose thorns pierced her throat; from that necklace hung a dead hummingbird.

Breaking the very long silence, Muray said, “It’s a self-portrait. What do you think about it?” Teen-agers are rotten: I remember saying, “If it was me , I think I’d have gone a little lighter on the mustache.”

Muray roared. What he didn’t tell me then was that the painting was by one of the (numerous) great loves of his life. He and Frida--deep in her tortuous marriage to Rivera--had become lovers during one of Muray’s unmarried periods, in the late 1930s; they remained in close communication until her death. He told me, a curious young friend, vivid anecdotes about Kahlo’s style and her intensity, but it wasn’t until Herrera’s 1983 biography that I learned about their passionate involvement.

The vision of that painting and that afternoon was indelible, though, even during the years when I thought I must have hallucinated them both, since I couldn’t find anyone else who’d even heard of her, much less seen her work. It made me ravenous for the slowly growing flood of Kahlo biographies, interpretations and exhibits.

Three of the four announced films are based on biographies: Robert De Niro’s Tribecca company has optioned “The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera,” by Bertram Wolfe with a script most probably by Robin Swicord. Independent producer Nancy Hardin has the rights to Herrera’s “Frida.” “Frida, the Brush of Anguish” by Mexican biographer Martha Zamorra is the basis for an announced New Line film, to be directed and co-written by Luis Valdez (“Zoot Suit,” “La Bamba”). A fourth film has been announced by Madonna, whose trumpeted projects would fill Charles Foster Kane’s warehouse.

The hyperextended shallowness of Madonna’s “Truth or Dare” is enough to suggest that Madonna’s Frida would be an exercise in narcissism and posturing; as a friend suggested dryly, a movie about an eyebrow. It’s far from certain that De Niro would play the ponderously fat, unhandsome and charismatic Rivera who called himself a “toad-frog,” but it would certainly be casting at its most challenging. (Others? Raoul Julia perhaps. The closest Anglo? Alfred Molino, the husband from “Not Without My Daughter,” the lover from “Prick Up Your Ears.”)

Bring up even the notion of Madonna to Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and the reaction is volcanic: “I think it’s especially offensive because as Latinas we feel we’ve finally found one of our heroes in the void where we had none. To see someone as shallow as Madonna appropriating her, for her own purposes or for (her) own romantic vision, I just find so . . . disgusting.”

Who should be cast? Who should make this film about an intensely political Mexican artist and her world? Not to be heretical, but I suspect that Kahlo will be best served by whichever writer is able to capture the full flood of that rich period. One who doesn’t believe that because a woman is an artist she has to suffer; one sophisticated enough to take Kahlo’s romantic liaisons in stride, and one penetrating enough to dig behind the facade that Kahlo herself maintained so brilliantly, to see that she lived her life and painted her shadow. It’s an extraordinary challenge.