The artist who proclaimed Jewish identity when it was even more dangerous than today

In an era in which Jews are afraid to be visibly identifiable, it’s a shock to find an artist who proudly proclaimed her own Jewish identity when it was even more dangerous to do so than it is today.

It may be a matter for debate whether Frida Kahlo was indulging in wishful thinking, but the world’s most-revered female artist did marry a man who looked as Mexican as she did but fervently embraced his own Jewish ancestry, took at least two Jewish lovers and put her work in the hands of Jewish art dealers in New York.

Now Kahlo, whose personal style has inspired more merchandise than any other female painter – more than 100,000 objects imprinted with her face are on sale around the world – is having her resonance with today’s shopaholics as well as dozens of other artists analysed in a new London show at the Tate Modern entitled Frida: The Making of an Icon.

Was she as Jewish as she purported? “Frida Kahlo emphasised the fact that her father, Wilhelm, was a German-born Jew of Hungarian descent who came to Mexico as a young man,” says Gannit Ankori, Kahlo scholar, in her essay The Immigrant’s Daughter.

Ankori cites a telling incident at a Detroit hotel from which Jews were barred. Kahlo and Rivera threatened to leave immediately on the grounds that they had Jewish blood themselves (Rivera, descended from conversos on his mother’s side, declared in 1935: “My Jewishness is the dominant element in my life.”). The management caved in and changed its policy. In 2006, a couple of historians suggested Wilhelm was actually Lutheran Protestant, by which time New York’s Jewish Museum had made one of her most iconic paintings the subject of an exhibition and Rabbi Edward Van Voolen, curator of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, had chosen the same painting for the cover of his book about Jewish art and culture.

Kahlo painted My Grandparents, My Parents and I in 1936, celebrating her own mixed heritage a year after the Nazis banned interracial marriage under the Nuremberg laws. She would soon take Hungarian Jew Miklos Mandl as her lover, and go on to dally with Leon Trotsky. The family tree painting is not in the Tate show but can be seen this summer in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s own exhibition, Frida and Diego: The Last Dream.

There are more clues to Frida’s secret Jewish life at the Blue House in Mexico City, where she grew up and died, including her book of Yiddish poems by Isaac Berliner, a source of inspiration in the joy of nature they evoke, which made its way onto Kahlo’s canvasses. She also owned several volumes published by El Libro Libre, established during the Second World War by German-Jewish immigrants in Mexico.

“That Kahlo was among the select circle which subscribed to this small and specialised publishing effort is significant,” says Ankori, who points out that Kahlo also treasured a volume of poetry by Yehuda Halevi.

Some of her darker pictures portraying her tormented self – a terrible accident at
the age of 18 left her disabled for life – were inspired by a book detailing how Jews in Mexico were tortured during the Inquisition.

And political torture was uppermost in her mind as Hitler came to power; as she gained fame, she was also influenced by a book detailing what was going
on in the concentration camps.

Rare self-portraits illustrating her torment will be on show at the Tate, including an iconic painting never before seen in the UK in which the artist depicts herself in a thorn necklace adorned with a hummingbird. There are several photographs of Kahlo by her art dealer friend Julien Levy, in which she looks dressed to the hilt even with bare breasts, and more by her lover Mandl, who renamed himself Nickolas Muray. Another self-portrait in a tin butterfly frame could have come straight out of one of the many Mexican gift shops awash with Kahlo merchandise.

Given how her love of colourful costumes depicting the folkloric side of her Mexican heritage, her jewellery and accessories contributed an explosion of retail items following her death, there is an appropriately-named Fridamania room in the Tate show, packed with the many kinds of merch she’s inspired, from tequila labels and T-shirts to bags, scent and even a Frida Barbie. For a woman with such a sense of her own style and the joy she took in clothes – which must have been so hard to climb into over the medical corsets and other underpinnings necessitated by her disabilities, including spina bifida and childhood polio – the fact her image became so universally embraced would surely feel like an even greater tribute than the art world’s appreciation of her talent as a painter.

Frida: The Making of an Icon runs at Tate Modern from 25 June 2026 to 3 January 2027