How has Frida Kahlo become a global icon?

When we went to Mexico a year ago our seven-year-old granddaughter asked us to bring back a picture of Frida Kahlo. She had managed to penetrate the awareness of a small girl in South London 70 years after her death. How had Kahlo managed to do that? An exhibition at Tate Modern, Frida Kahlo, the Making of an Icon, tries to answer that question. And there’s no doubt that images of Frida are ubiquitous. In Mexico you see her everywhere, and, as the exhibition shows, she has inspired many other artists but also hundreds of bags, clothes, jewellery, pottery, books, films and all kinds of artistic and commercial products. She has become a commodity. I can’t think of another artist who has spread so widely. Individual art objects—like the Mona Lisa, The Scream, David, and even Ophelia—have spread everywhere, as a recent BBC Radio4 series explores—but I can’t think of another artist whose face is as well-known as that of Kahlo beyond the world of art enthusiats. I thought of James Joyce,…