THE Face of Frida : Frida Kahlo is <i> everywhere. </i> The late Mexican artist has inspired a craze that has captivated Madonna, museums, mug makers and the popular imagination.

In Mexico there’s a word for it: Fridamania.

Almost 40 years after artist Frida Kahlo died in relative obscurity, she is hot, hot, hot. For reasons that are as mysterious as her work, the Mexicana with the single swooping eyebrow has become both a cultural icon and a commercial commodity.

Frida’s riveting face is not yet as familiar as that of Mona Lisa or even Madonna, the most famous collector of Kahlo’s work. But few artists, and certainly no woman artist since Georgia O’Keeffe, have so captured the popular imagination. And because Frida’s favorite subject was Frida, not flowers, it is her own image that is being cranked out by the Great Big Cultural Copy Machine.

An Angeleno who is so inclined can devote a whole day to Fridamania.

Frida’s face is everywhere. There are Frida posters and postcards, ranging from images of her with artist-husband Diego Rivera to macabre shots of her taken after her death in 1954 at age 47. But there are also Frida comics and coffee mugs, masks and refrigerator magnets.

Start with a visit to the Los Angeles County Art Museum, where seven of her paintings are on exhibit as part of the current “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” show. You will, of course, want to wear a jeans jacket hand-painted with a portrait of the artist ($175 to $290, depending upon where you bought it and whether you supplied the jacket). On the way you will probably drive past one of the giant billboards featuring Frida’s face that advertise the show throughout the city.

Next, check out the exhibit of photos of the artist at the Jan Baum Gallery in West Los Angeles. Examine her love letters and marriage certificate at the Louis Newman Galleries in Beverly Hills. Pick up Frida earrings or a Mexican-style altar box featuring her picture at Sonrisa on Beverly Boulevard or one of several other local shops that stock objets de Frida. Finally, examine your loot over a cup of Frida’s Blend ($9.99 a pound) at the new Little Frida Coffee Bar in West Hollywood, a veritable shrine to the charismatic Kahlo.

Frida has long had a following among Latinos, artists (especially women) and feminists. The current craze seems to have started building in the early 1980s. Publisher Harper Collins reports that its biography of Kahlo, written by art historian Hayden Herrera, has sold more than 100,000 copies since it was first published in 1983.

Los Angeles artist Vicki Berndt says interest in her Frida jackets has grown steadily since she painted the first one in 1986. Berndt, who was living in San Francisco at the time, frequented a Latino art gallery in the Mission District that featured images of a darkly beautiful woman with a haunting look. Berndt had to ask someone, “Who’s this lady with the big eyebrows?”

“Shopping-mall girls have heard of Frida Kahlo now,” Berndt observes, wistfully.

Berndt, who does mostly custom orders, says the cultural icons she is most frequently asked for are “Frida, Jesus, Elvis and Cher. Frida is much more popular than Jesus now as far as painted jackets go.”

One of Berndt’s jackets will appear in the “Fridamania” show that opens Nov. 5 at the Museum Studio of Diego Rivera in Mexico City. The government-sanctioned exhibit, which continues through the end of the year, will feature paintings and other fine art inspired by Frida, memorabilia and commercial objects bearing her image. Frida-related films, theater, dance and lectures are also planned.

The show will travel throughout Mexico and the United States next year, according to Xavier Castellanos, one of five curators and coordinators of the show here and in Mexico.

As cultural phenomena go, Frida is more complicated than any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. She was a liberated woman in a male-dominated culture, so liberated she sometimes wore men’s suits, although she is most identified with Mexican folk dress.

She was a half-Jewish nonbeliever who loved Mexican Catholic images of suffering and death. She was a bisexual who wrote adoring notes in pink ink to her chronically unfaithful husband. She was a Stalinist who had an affair with Trotsky.

Marietta Bernstorff, curator of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, views the current Fridamania with concern. Bernstorff has a personal collection of 100 Frida things, including a chair painted, front and back, with her image by artist Gonzolo Espinosa. She also buys Frida-themed items for the gallery’s newly opened gift shop.

But Bernstorff was alarmed by the proliferation of Frida schlock at the Los Angeles Boutique Show in July.

“That’s when it got gross. The Santa Fe coyote howling at the moon, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean--it’s the same concept,” says Bernstorff, who doesn’t want to see Frida degenerate into a cultural cliche, mindlessly duplicated without any thought to what she stood for.

Bernstorff notes that Frida is no longer a favorite motif of many of the Chicana artists who originally championed her.

“The artists are dropping her, and she’s being picked up by commercial interests. It’s pretty bizarre.”

In light of the current craze, Chicana artists are talking about the need to write articles and otherwise correct the superficial image of Frida that has recently emerged.

But for many admirers, Frida functions as a secular Virgin of Guadalupe, a woman of great mystical power. Renee Moreno, a commercial artist who was born in East Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco, recalls how she got into the business of making Frida things in 1984.

Like Kahlo, who was tormented throughout her life as a result of a bus accident when she was 18, Moreno had injured her back. Moreno was stretched out in the tub, trying to ease the ache, in a darkened room full of flickering candles. Because of her injury, Moreno knew she had to give up her regular job--driving big rigs cross-country for a women’s trucking company.

She looked up at the Frida poster on the wall, and it was as if, Moreno recalls, “the poster spoke to me and inspired me to make Frida cards.”

Since then, Moreno has created Frida stickers, calendars, coffee mugs, pins, even an apron. She also designed the Frida T-shirt Madonna wears in “Truth or Dare.” As to what Kahlo--a genius at manipulating her own image--would have made of Fridamania, Moreno speculates that “Frida would have loved it.”

Because of Frida’s history, she has a special meaning for minorities and mavericks of many kinds. But perhaps the real secret of her growing appeal is simply the power of her work, which French writer Andre Breton once described as “a ribbon around a bomb.”

Recently, two girls who are fourth-graders at Carden Malibu School, homed in on a display of Frida items at the county museum shop. They had just seen her paintings in the splendors of Mexico show and wanted more. Flipping through a postcard book featuring photographs of the artist as well as color reproductions of her work, the girls articulated their obvious enthusiasm.

They didn’t know about Frida’s pain or politics or troubled love for Rivera. They just knew they liked the way she looked and the way she painted.

“I like the one with the monkeys,” said Bree, 10, turning to Frida’s 1943 “Self-Portrait with Monkeys.”

“She looks really strong, like she’s strong inside.”

Hanna, who is 9, preferred “Self-Portrait as a Tehuana,” in which Frida painted herself wearing an elaborate traditional headdress and included a little portrait of Rivera on her forehead (the painting is subtitled “Diego on my Mind”).

Mysterious hair-like lines and white tendrils radiate out from the artist’s face and seem to fissure the surface.

“She can do all kinds of artwork,” Hanna said. “I like the way she painted all the cracks.”