When Theresa May coughed into her hand during her painful conference speech back in 2017, adorning her wrist was a chunky Frida Kahlo bracelet. Some left-wingers were outraged that a Tory would ‘appropriate’ the image of ‘a Communist, bisexual artist who was also a disabled woman of colour’ . The Guardian described it as ‘a surprising statement’ given that Kahlo ‘spent her career concerned with the plight of the impoverished, our connectedness to self, nature and the universe, the relationship between pain and identity, and imagined, one day, we could live in a classless society’.

She was as much a materialist as a Marxist

She was as much a materialist as a Marxist

But I believe it was an apt choice for my fellow Conservative. Kahlo is a capitalist icon, a right-wing poster girl. Frida: The Making of an Icon, the current exhibition at the Tate Modern, contains entire rooms of Frida-branded tat, before you even get to the shop. Such is Kahlo’s commercial clout that the show broke pre-sale records despite containing almost none of her most famous works.

The Tate’s blurb admits how thin its pickings are, boasting of having ‘over 30 of her paintings alongside ‘200 works by her contemporaries and the artists she inspired’ and ‘200 commercial objects’. When spread across the gallery’s massive exhibition spaces, you often have to hunt through these........

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