Jeanette Winterson on Frida Kahlo

We are obsessed by celebrity, alive or dead, and our determination to raid the personal lives of those who achieve something affects both men and women alike, but for women there is a special problem. Creative women in all the arts find themselves explained by and reduced to the circumstances of their lives in a way that men are not. It is a fear of genius, of a women’s genius, that no matter what we create, it is ultimately down to autobiography, the world of the very small. A sideways glance at Jane Austen, the Brontes, or Virginia Woolf, will remind you that the connections between their life and work are treated very differently to the connections apparent in the life and work of Wordsworth, Dickens, or DH Lawrence, Men, it is assumed, shape the world, shape taste, shape sensibility. Women are shaped by their circumstances and from that, sometimes, make art.

Kahlo’s intense representation of her own body put her on the side of ‘women’s work’; personal, partial, confessional. Even her re-valuation by feminists in the 1970’s positioned her as an interpreter of private experience. She was speaking to us – to other women, about physical pain, sexual rejection, medical intervention, marginalisation, family life, gynaecology. Her paintings were small in size and carefully defined by their own concerns. Where was the big wide world of her lover Diego Rivera, with his vast political murals?

Full article here.