Hollywood Film May Spark a New Craze for All Things Frida

Frida-mania--the cult and the industry--may soon get a second wind.

Hollywood is finally making a movie on the tortured, colorful life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo after a decade of abortive attempts. If the film is a hit, Mexico City could see a wave of Frida-inspired merchandising like the one that engulfed the capital a few years ago.

On an autumn day in 1997, you could go to a Frida bar, see a Frida play, have a Frida dinner and load up on Frida T-shirts, calendars, cookbooks and key rings featuring her baleful, beetle-browed visage.

Overshadowed during her life by her husband, legendary muralist Diego Rivera, and ignored by the public for decades, Kahlo--who died at age 47 in 1954--became an icon of popular culture. She was transformed into Mexico’s Elvis, a “brand” that has sold several forests’ worth of postcards, picture books and posters. Feminists, gays, the disabled--all have claimed her as theirs.

Frida-mania began building in the late 1970s, spurred by the interest of European feminists and Chicano muralists who saw her as a forerunner, said Raquel Tibol, author of “Frida Kahlo: An Open Life.” A 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera helped popularize her legend.

Rivera willed all rights to his and Kahlo’s images and intellectual property to the Mexican people after his death in 1957. And Mexico has made out handsomely, although not as well as it might have because of weak copyright protection laws. To merchandise Kahlo legally, movie producers and souvenir manufacturers must pay royalties to the Mexican Central Bank.

Kahlo’s house--la Casa Azul, or Blue House, where she was born, lived, worked and died--is Mexico City’s Graceland, a museum now visited by an average of 300 pilgrims a day. They view the dozen Kahlo paintings on display, immerse themselves in the legend and pay homage to the artist’s ashes, stored in a pre-Columbian urn on the premises.

But like all fads, Frida-mania has subsided. Visits to the museum have declined 25% from the 1997 peak. Merchandisers report that demand for coasters, mirrors, calendars, key rings and desk calendars has slipped significantly. The onslaught of books and theatrical productions--the latter now numbering at least 60--has slowed.

Frida is still there, just not everywhere.

One place she is these days: the city of Puebla, where shooting began earlier this month on Miramax Films’ production, starring Mexican actress Salma Hayek. Release is expected early next year.

“People might be tired of her. I think the movie is three years too late,” said Alejandro Saucedo, owner of Alternativa, a Mexico City manufacturer of gift merchandise that supplies the Kahlo museum. Sales volume on most items he stocks is down an average 30% from the peak, he said.

But Kahlo museum administrator Ignacio Custodio Villa predicted that the movie will give Frida-mania new life by bringing awareness of the artist to new corners of the world, creating a “new impulse. . . . She is like a bomb wrapped in paper colors. The content is very strong.”

Her brand potency may have slipped, but Kahlo still rules the art galleries. Her paintings are the most coveted of any Latin American painter--and of any female painter, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt. The last time a Kahlo painting sold at auction, last May at Sotheby’s in New York, it fetched nearly $5.1 million.

The same painting sold privately in 1979 for about $50,000.

How much cash does Frida Inc. generate? The Central Bank won’t specify royalty dollars, although Saucedo and other merchandisers say the royalty flow has declined. Then there is the enormous bootleg trade--which may exceed legitimate goods--that weak copyright laws here encourage.

“When Frida-mania was on a global scale, it was an incalculable number of dollars that were lost” to Frida bootleggers in Mexico and abroad, said Carmen Ramirez, past president of the Mexican Assn. of Visual Artists, whose group is trying to forge closer ties with the Frida trust run by the Central Bank, saying an alliance would improve royalty collections.

Under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement signed by the United States, Mexico and Canada, intellectual property rights are given short shrift, said Angelina Cue, a Mexico City attorney and copyright authority.

Although NAFTA helped “industrial” trademark owners such as software publishers fight piracy, it diminished the rights of Mexican copyright owners, including artists, Cue said. That is because NAFTA weakened the “moral” right that Mexican authors and artists claim to the reproduction of their works even after selling them, a right not afforded artists under the trade agreement.

In any case, industrial trademarks in Mexico are enforced by the Commerce Ministry, which has an aggressive enforcement apparatus. Artists’ and authors’ copyrights here are enforced by the Education Ministry, a much less powerful agency.

The vagaries of pop culture and merchandising fads aside, Kahlo, who overcame polio, a near-fatal bus accident in her teens and other setbacks to become an accomplished artist, remains a powerful cultural force here. Ask a dozen museum-goers, art experts and Frida merchants why that is, and you get a dozen different answers.

“It was her attitude before life that appeals to people, that of an indefatigable fighter who struggled against physical problems, the shadow of her famous husband, the social restrictions of womanhood,” said Luis-Martin Lozano, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

Mary-Anne Martin, a New York art dealer and Latin American art specialist, said the incredible rise in value of Kahlo’s art stems partly from the fact that there are only 200 known works and also from a “grass-roots canonization” of Kahlo.

“I think people are buying her biography,” Martin said, a reference to Kahlo’s struggle with--and artistic triumph over--physical ailments and personal setbacks, some of which she turned into subject material for her paintings.

Restaurateur George Ghosn offered another possible reason for her appeal: “She was a great cook. Look at how fat her husband was,” referring to the corpulent Rivera. The Mexico City restaurant he founded offers eight dishes made from Kahlo’s recipes.

“She is the precursor of the independent Mexican woman,” said Rosalinda Sales Chavez, a Mexico City schoolteacher interviewed outside the Casa Azul. “She wouldn’t conform herself to the idea of giving herself up entirely to her man.”