Too often, documentaries about art and artists can lean towards the pretentious and stodgy. Not so with Becoming Frida Kahlo, the first of a three-part series on the legendary Mexican painter, which canters along at a celebratory pace. This opening episode, The Making and Breaking, squashes a great deal of information and insight about Kahlo’s early life into an hour, and sets up a gripping and convincing portrait of the great artist that she would become.
Her work is so familiar (and so astonishingly valuable – her 1949 painting Diego y yo sold for almost $35m in 2021) that it seems a mammoth task to shine a new light on it, and yet this documentary manages to do so. There are interviews with biographers, art historians, and, fascinatingly, family members. Kahlo’s great-niece Cristina Kahlo, now a photographer, talks about the artist’s husband and great love, the artist Diego Rivera, as does Rivera’s grandson. The information they provide is out there already – Rivera was a huge celebrity in Mexico, as famous as Picasso in his time (“possibly Picasso was more famous”, says one contributor) – yet it gives it a personal and comprehensive feel.
