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The three-part documentary made for BBC "Becoming Frida Kahlo" begins today, 9pm, BBC Two

The three-part documentary made for BBC "Becoming Frida Kahlo" begins today, 9pm, BBC Two

10 March 2023

With its abundance of old images and films showing the artist in both private and public settings, the series will enchant Frida lovers.

Yet, Becoming Frida Kahlo is a highly thorough portrayal of the artist and shows the BBC at its absolute finest. It does this by doing in-depth study. Luis Martn Lozano, professor, series consultant, and author of "Frida Kahlo The Complete Paintings", is largely responsible for the plot.

The series also incorporates a Mexican point of view thanks to researchers Ruth Araiza Moreno and Lorenza Espnola Gómez de Parada from Mexico. The remarkable list of archives that were utilized to present viewers with a treasury of images and motion pictures of Kahlo (and Rivera) from her early years in the 1920s to the time of her passing in 1954 is included in the concluding credits.

In the first episode, post-Revolutionary Mexico is introduced to us, complete with a thriving cultural scene, wild parties, and turbulent communist politics.

In episode two, we visit New York, which was affected by the Great Depression, and Detroit, where Ford put down a strike by autoworkers. As Rivera completes mural assignments from affluent capitalists like Ford and Rockefeller, we can see the paradoxes of the communist marriage in this instance.

Episode three travels back to Mexico, but not before stopping in Paris in 1940, just before the Nazi invasion and the start of the Second World War. As Kahlo's fame grows internationally, André Breton, a French surrealist author and poet, invites her to Paris to display some of her artwork. When Breton "discovered" Kahlo during his 1938 trip to Mexico, he labeled her as a surrealist. We also find out about her annoyance with Breton and other surrealists who preferred political discourse to actual political action.

And at the center of it all is Kahlo's artwork, which, as we learn the narratives behind her very autobiographical, symbolic works, we see with fresh eyes. The show details her political activities, miscarriages, affairs, and physical suffering.

Her physical and emotional body serves as the context for her embodied art. Her life, events, and work are brilliantly braided together in this to tell a very personal tale.