Frida Kahlo: Pin-up girl

How did long-suffering Mexican painter Frida Kahlo become such an icon, asks Madeleine North. And can a new film and a play shed any fresh light on her life?

What is it about Frida Kahlo that makes people go to such extremes? Actress Salma Hayek was so convinced she should play the Mexican painter in the Hollywood biopic that she chased the role for 10 years, fending off competition from Madonna and Jennifer Lopez to star in Julie Taymor's Frida (which recently previewed at the Venice Film Festival). And a new play at London's Lyric Hammersmith, La Casa Azul, is the pet project of Quebecois actress Sophie Faucher, who first began work on a dramatisation of the artist's life in 1994.

Frida Kahlo was a woman who spent her life in battle – with her body, with her husband, with her country. So it seems appropriate that those who choose to immerse themselves in her story should suffer, just a little, for their art.

Suffering was Kahlo's thing, her destiny – heck, she practically owned the rights. Crippled from polio at seven, fate dealt her another blow as a teenager, when, returning home from school, a tram ploughed into the bus she was on, sending a handrail through her body and condemning her to a life of steel corsets, botched operations and near constant pain. Talk about bad luck, as Kahlo might have quipped.

Her marriage (twice) to the famous Communist artist, Diego Rivera, was also beset with trauma. Their love was huge, but so was Rivera's appetite for other women. (The final straw, for Kahlo, was when he slept with her younger sister, a betrayal achingly symbolised in La Casa Azul with the passing of Kahlo's dress between the two siblings.) "I have suffered two grave accidents in my life," the painter dryly commented to a friend, "the one was a streetcar that ran me over, the other was Diego."

But how did Kahlo, an artist who, as she said herself, stood in the shadow of her husband's career during her lifetime (1907 – 1954), become the iconic, celebrated figure she is today? And beyond all the hype about her extraordinary life – which, web folklore would have it, has inspired a new religion called Kahloism – is her work actually any good?

The last 20 years – chiefly since Hayden Herrera's influential 1983 biography Frida – have seen Kahlo turned into a mono-browed, peasant-chic pin-up for the feminist movement. She became, as one writer put it, "the art world's Sylvia Plath". Loving Kahlo is a statement – like wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt or marching for world peace. She is a symbol, not just of female strength and endurance, but of the indomitable human spirit. Madonna knew that when she bought Kahlo's gruesome, disturbing work My Birth and put it on her study wall. (Lending her other Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Monkey, to Tate Modern last year, she said, was "like letting go of one of my precious children".) And the fashion editors knew it when they commissioned their Kahlo-inspired Mexican shoots this summer. Join up your eyebrows and you too can be a great artist/ a martyr/ a hero for your country...

But both the film and the play hope to take Kahlo off her recently-constructed pedestal and remind people of the human being behind the legend: the needy wife, the bi-sexual adulteress (Kahlo took a leaf out of Rivera's book and explored her sexuality with a number of lovers, including Trotsky), the demanding invalid and the impassioned artist.

In La Casa Azul, which Sophie Faucher has crafted from the singular poetry of Kahlo's colourful, intimate diary, we see her lying in a creamy-white bath, suspended in a void of total darkness (one of many stunning visual tricks from renowned Quebecois director Robert Lepage). She is talking to Death (her closest companion) about her determination to go to the opening of her first one-woman show in Mexico, despite the onset of gangrene in her leg. (It was later amputated.) The water turns suddenly red as she recalls her recent miscarriage. "Senora Kahlo's 'body of work' is rotting away...", she jokes. Later on, we see her dangling like a puppet for a back operation (Kahlo underwent 32 operations in total, none of which was successful), the x-ray of her mangled bones illuminated on top of one of Kahlo's self-portraits. Faucher wails with every incision and probe from the surgeon. A more graphic illustration of the pain Kahlo endured is hard to imagine.

And near the start of the show, there's a wonderful scene depicting Kahlo and Rivera's first meeting, the latter up a ladder painting one of his huge political murals. The young girl hands over her paintings to the artist and asks for his professional opinion. "They're good," he assures her. "I like the sensuality that's coming through."

She's mistrustful. "[People] told me if it's a girl wants your opinion, and she's not totally disgusting-looking, you give her lots of compliments."

"That's not all I give her..." comes the reply, and the flirting begins. But so, too, does Kahlo's career as an artist.

Of the 200 or so paintings which Kahlo completed – mostly on her back in bed – 55 of those were self-portraits. "I am the subject I know best", she said. But are they important works of art in their own right?

Dr Fiona Bradley, exhibitions curator at the Hayward Gallery, thinks so. "[Kahlo's art] is incredibly inventive. She developed an entire personal vocabulary of form. She's also very important for the development of the genre, self-portraiture." The Surrealists were particularly taken by her (André Breton described her work as like a ribbon around a bomb), and though there are similarities of style, Kahlo's work has a personal dimension which merits a genre of its own. The artist herself still has the best description for that: "I took my tears and turned them into paintings."

Recovering from another failed operation in 1946, Kahlo painted The Wounded Deer, a poignantly self-pitying portrait of both the physical pain she was enduring and the equally debilitating mental anguish. It's an arresting sight: Kahlo's distinctive features atop a deer's body, pierced, St Sebastian-style, with numerous arrows. "Never before had a woman put such agonised poetry on canvas...", Rivera commented about his wife's work. He was right. "Before Kahlo," biographer Sarah M Lowe points out, "Western art was unused to images of birthing or miscarriage, double self-portraits with visible internal organs or cross-dressing, as subjects for 'high art'." Her work is, then, at the very least, unique – no mean feat in the been-there-done-that world of 20th-century painting.

But it wasn't just Kahlo's ability to "translate pain into art" which makes her special. Though Rivera was always considered to be the "political artist" of the pair, Kahlo was a woman whose life and work was inextricably bound up in the country of her birth (she always claimed to have been born in 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution broke out; in fact she was born three years earlier). In the introduction to Kahlo's diary, Carlos Fuentes remarks on the "mysterious sisterhood between the body of Frida Kahlo and the deep divisions of Mexico during her early years. Mexico is a country that has been made by its wounds." And Neil Bartlett, director of the Lyric Hammersmith and translator of La Casa Azul (which receives its British premiere this week), comments: "It wasn't that there was a revolution during her lifetime and her work documents it, but that her work itself was a revolution. You do get this extraordinary sense from the woman and the pictures, of the great struggles: the struggle with what love is, how to live with your lover, how to be an artist, how to be a woman..."

No wonder everyone wants a piece of her. "Everybody thinks they know Frida Kahlo," says Faucher. "It's our Frida [in La Casa Azul], but if the show gives the curiosity to people to buy some books, to read about her, or to be interested in the Mexico of those years... c'est parfait, c'est magnifique!"

'La Casa Azul': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8741 2311), previews from Friday, opens 15 Oct to 26 Oct. 'Frida' opens in the UK next year