My mindframe as I walked into the Frida Kahlo exhibition was sceptical interest. I’d read reviews by blokes that were
negative and reviews by blokes that were positive. And I was well aware of Kahlo’s status as a feminist icon, who had a fascinating, traumatic life. But ultimately, you can only judge an artist by their art.

And it was Kahlo’s art that caused me to leave the exhibition shaken, almost overwhelmed, and convinced that she deserves to be up there as one of the greats. One day an exhibition will establish this beyond doubt; this is not, however, that exhibition – it merely points towards that possibility.

The Tate show focuses too much on her early art, and her political art, which is, it must be admitted, rather thin, and sometimes undergraduate. The mocking of America in My Dress Hangs There (1933), which features a golf trophy and a toilet on matching monumental columns is mildly amusing, but it isn’t great art. Her political paintings, while adding to the understanding of her life – her involvement with the nationalist Mexicanidad movement and marriage to a leading member of that movement – do little to advertise her art.

The first painting in this exhibition that stopped me was, however, very early in her career. A Few Small Pricks (1935)is based on a newspaper account of a brutal murder, in which a man who’d stabbed his lover with a knife many times said: “I gave her only a few little pricks.” Enclosed in a simple wooden frame covered too with the “blood” of the scene, Kahlo presents its simply, realistically. There is absolutely no dignity, no glamour in this death: an early sign of an absolutely uncompromising artistic vision.

Even earlier, another central aspect of her art – its personal nature – is evident in My Birth, painted after Kahlo had suffered a traumatic miscarriage and her mother had died. She emerges in gynaecological detail, but her mother’s face is shrouded like that of a corpse in a sheet, and the body/mother lies in a bleak, empty room, albeit it on perfectly made bed. This, with its Marian icon above the bed, must have been truly shocking in the Mexico of 1932.

But in this show you are then sent through several rather thin rooms of political art, drawings and still lifes (for which what I’d suggest over-grand claims are made – although the dreadfully kitsch circular flower painting, made for an American actress with whom her husband is thought to have been having an affair, is an enjoyable joke).

It is in the next two rooms that Kahlo’s greatness emerges. It is no accident that nearly all of the paintings are self-portraits in one form or another: it is when Kahlo is in her body, or out of her body looking in, that she’s at her most powerful. She makes the personal into art long before feminists came to call it political.

My single favourite, if I had to pick one, is Self-portait with Monkeys (1943). Kahlo, with a typically studiously neutral expression, wearing a simply white shift, stands amidst but apart from luxuriant tropical foliage, accompanied by these four primates. Two, diffidently and uncertainly, look as though they are trying to comfort her; the other two are curious onlookers. As a restrained portrait of sad, but proud, solitude and alienation it is breathtaking.

Yet Kahlo is not always so restrained. Self-Portrait with Loose Hair (1947) is more obviously, emotionally, bleak, as is The Mask (1945), in which Kahlo conceals her face behind a papier-mache image of La Malinche, the Indian mistress of the conquistador Cortes.

But it is when Kahlo maintains her distance that she is at her most powerful. That’s again the stance in The Little Hart (1946)in which Khalo is a stag in a forest pierced with a flurry of arrows, yet her face looks out at us serene, groomed, detached.

That neutral expression becomes strained, however, in The Broken Column (above). Painted in 1944, it reflects the continuing deterioration of her already shattered body. It is a depiction of shattering, chronic, inescapable pain and suffering that refuses to slide into self-pity.

Kahlo is, perhaps inescapably in view of the framework of her life, chiefly a painter of the miserable side of the human condition. But she rises above that, to show that even in misery there can be dignity and nobility. And she shows that from the perspective of the human body – the female body. Can you really claim – as some continue to do – that this in any way invalidates her greatness, rather than amplifies it?

The exhibition is at the Tate Modern until October 9.

This is a good collection of resources about Kahlo.

Art, a Technorati tag

I’m not a great one for e-mail campaigns and joining in protests, probably mostly because I’m just not a “joining” sort of person, but I found that this horrific story just demands action.

It is of a woman falsely imprisoned and raped for four months in Venezuala, by a politically well-connected man. He got off – although that verdict is being appealed – and she faces an investigation for prostitution.

Warning: there are disturbing pictures on this story, but read it anyway, and take the action it suggests.
(Via Bitch PhD.

* The new, improved Carnivalesque is up at The Cranky Professor. In its new format, this one focuses on ancient and medieval history, which will be alternating with early modern. Don’t miss it – particularly the lewd Maygames.

* Do we need editors? The Guardian explores the history of the editor, and their modern disappearance. (And presents the interesting thesis that the rise of the “creative writing” course is actually the rise of the editing course.)

My view: I’ve worked with only one writer I can think of who didn’t benefit from or need editing, and anything I write I hope someone will edit properly.

* Recovering the voices of the victims of the Inquisition, from The Telegraph:

A Sicilian palazzo once used as a headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition has been discovered to contain dozens of pieces of graffiti by “witches” condemned to burn at the stake.

* Theatre isn’t what it used to be, in some past golden age, critics of all ages complain. Looking at this “special effects” wig, as used by David Garrick playing Hamlet, that might be a good thing. (From a discussion on the 18th-century list.)

* The Bodleian has an exhibition on music hall. Not exactly what you’d expect, but it sounds fascinating.

* Not new, but an interesting description of 18th-century Smithfield.

* What a good idea: the NHS is paying for people suffering from chronic medical conditions to buy and care for a dog. No doubt the curmudgeon class will complain (and this article is distinctly ambivalent), but it is not hard to see how this could both save the NHS a lot of money and prevent a lot of suffering.

* And finally a good laugh: a “public service” pamphlet on how to deal with the “epidemic of blog depression”.

Any time I walk through a Tube station these days I see at least four police officers (and sometimes more). What are they doing? They’re chatting, studying their nails, shifting from foot to foot, or simply looking bored and pissed off.

I don’t blame them: as an approach to dealing with the terrorist threat I have to wonder who thought this was a good idea.

What precisely are they supposed to do?

Let’s imagine an actual suicide bomber is approaching them – presumably in peak hour, when the entrance hall to the Tube will be packed with people.

First they have to somehow – perhaps by mental telepathy? – identify the bomber from among all of the other people dragging suitcases, lugging large backpacks, or boxes of what appear to be electrical items from the sales.

Then what do they do? They challenge the person, approach, then are the first to get blown up, together with all of the people around. If it is a less confined space than a Tube carriage I guess the carnage would be slightly less, and help would reach the victims more easily, but does the degree of improvement justify the expenditure of resources? I doubt it.

The theory goes that they are supposed to “reassure” the public. But anyone with half a brain will have reached the same conclusion as I – and the apparent emergency state of London, with police very visible everywhere, can only be adding to the panic among those of nervous disposition. (Reports are suggesting Tube usage is down 15 per cent – or to put it the other way around, 85 per cent of people are going about their business perfectly normally.)

After what is increasingly looking like the most horrific misjudgement in the shooting of Charles de Menezes, the police doing nothing might be a good thing, but surely they could do it more cheaply and sensibly by getting back on to a normal footing.

What they are now doing, as Matthew Parris points out in The Times today, is glorifying the suicide bomber.

Inspired by the guided cycle tour of Kent medieval architecture that I enjoyed recently, last Sunday I set out on my own, with only a guide for company*, to try the same in Essex. The architecture and history was fine, and I learnt an awful lot about how not to read a cycling guide.

First the cycling: I learnt not to believe it when the label says this is an “easy” route – also read the bit where it says “undulating countryside”. I think the easy label came because there were no big hills, but for the best part of 40 miles it was up and down, up and down; and the problem is, for me anyway, that the ups take an awful lot longer than the downs. (I also enjoyed another first – my first ride through a flooded ford – algae is very slippery under bike tyres, I learnt.)

I did, however, glean a lot about how to tackle inclines. I have virtually no hills on my London commuting routes, so have had no cause to learn. The way NOT to do it is to start at the bottom in the highest gear you think you can possibly manage, then battle and strain your way to the top, arriving a panting, sweating mess. Instead, start in a very low gear and arrive at the top in a reasonable state, even if after many more revolutions of the legs. (Obvious? Well in retrospect.)

So, I made it before dark – and I had started at around 1.45 (not helped by the train firm One, which manages to send two trains an hour to Stansted Mountfitchett on a Sunday, within five minutes of each other – clever).

And while I didn’t get quite so much time for history as I would have liked, I did collect some nice snippets.

The most noticeable, seemingly localised (at least I didn’t see it in Kent), feature of the houses in the villages through which I went (Much Hadham, Westmill, Furneux Pelham and Manuden) was pargeting, simple (here at least) decorative plasterwork, frequently seen on timber-framed houses and other pretty early ones. Mostly it seems to be patterns made with materials at hand – the bases of bottles, in one case I saw a large scallop-type shell, combs swept across the surface in a regular pattern. The only rule seems to have been: don’t repeat anything already done in the village, or at least on the main street.

The church in Much Hadham is interesting in that it has been used jointly by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches for some decades, so it has much of the fittings and furnishings that would have been in pre-Reformation churches, making it most evocative.

There’s an excellent guide to the village here. It also told me that the Elizabethan memorial which I was admiring from a distance (it is right beside the altar and I didn’t think jumping over the altar rail was the done thing) is of a bishop’s wife, Judith Aylmer, who died in 1615. It looks very like the memorial for Blanche Parry in St Margaret’s, although sadly this one has lost its head.

What appealed about Westmill church was a memorial stone – no longer readable – but apparently that of Nicol de Lewknor, who died about 1300, said to be “one of the oldest personal memorials in the county”. A handwritten notice beside it says he “came to a tragic end in France, on the day of his third nuptials, leaving no issues”, and that he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

“A tragic end on the day of his nuptials?” … The mind boggles.

* This one is Philip’s Cycle Tours Around London North, by Nick Cotton, if you were wondering. And when you work it out it’s fine – at least I didn’t get lost, and seldom even felt lost.

No, I haven’t won the lottery (with a ticket I haven’t got), but Blogcritics, of which I’m now an editor-at-large, is celebrating its 10 millionth hit. More than 8 million of those have been in the past year, the third of its existence, a growth that this post outlines.

If you haven’t seen Blogcritics before, go out and check it out. It now has some 1,000 contributing bloggers. There’s huge music and video sections, and, where you’ll find me, books, culture and politics.

The politics section gets the most heated – sometimes it seems the right is in the ascendent, sometimes the left – but there’s also some excellent news you might not get elsewhere. I was taken today by a post on Canada’s new governor-general, a Haitian-born woman, who’s replacing a woman of Japanese extraction. (Sad to think that in progressive politics Australia and Canada were once neck and neck. What does Australia get now? white male clerics with dubious pasts.)

In books you’ll find a lot of popular light reading, but also plenty of meatier material, from a review of two books on the collapse of a major hedge fund to an explanation for genocide.

Culture is something of a catch-all. You’ll find my theatre reviews there, but also musing on whether you should stay friends with your ex, and similar. And I got quite a bit of interest with a post on a 12th-century Anglo-Norman play, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with what some might see as obscure topics!

If I’ve got one complaint, it’s that women are in a definite minority. So if you’re a blogger – particularly a female blogger – who posts on any of these topics – even if only occasionally – why not think about joining and getting more readers for your gems of wisdom, and more traffic to your blog? More here.