★★★★☆

Mexican painter and self-perpetuating icon Frida Kahlo is long overdue a definitive account of her short but extraordinary life. All the documentaries and biopics from the last 30 years have either mythologised or victimised her in a way it would be difficult to imagine happening to a male artist. 

Becoming Frida Kahlo is Louise Lockwood’s ravishing and revealing new BBC series which gives Kahlo’s story the treatment it deserves. Over three chunky episodes, it reveals her making, an emotional breaking (through love and loss), and a final artistic ascent. With access to some really incredible archive footage (some previously unseen) and an acutely well-chosen range of talking heads (relatives of friends and lovers, Mexican art historians and scholars), Becoming Frida Kahlo platforms the wonder, insight and madness so frequently at the heart of her work. 

Crippled in a road accident as a teenager and in constant pain, Kahlo became her own muse because, in her own words, it was the subject she knew best. The cultural critic James Park Sloan encapsulated things when he wrote of her: ‘with her glare, her moustache and her unlikely handlebar eyebrows, she was her own religious subject; exotic and dynamically unsettling in an over-ripe world of pain, jungle fantasy and Mexican folkloric arcana.’ But Kahlo’s life and art was also defined by her relationship with that other titan of Mexican art, Diego Rivera. This dynamic is picked apart and examined here to reveal some disturbing and possibly revelatory unknown truths.

The latest in publisher SelfMadeHero’s Art Masters series of graphic-novel biographies is also about this proto-feminist Latina goddess who counted Georgia O’Keeffe, Trotsky, Picasso and André Breton among her friends and lovers. Subtitled Her Life, Her Work, Her Home, Francisco De La Mora’s beautifully produced book begins on Kahlo’s 47th birthday at her blue house home (now the Frida Kahlo Museum) in Coyoacán.

Kahlo chooses this occasion to tell her life story. It stretches from a comfortable childhood to rebellious schooldays, her accident, failed loves, finding her voice through art, and the initial contact and connection she made with the womanising Rivera, who was nevertheless supportive of both Kahlo and her art. Miscarriages and affairs are touched on, but this is very much a celebration of a life and reflection of the beauty she brought to our world. It’s there in all its tragedy and loss.

Becoming Frida Kahlo starts on BBC Two, Friday 10 March; Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Work, Her Home is published by SelfMadeHero on Thursday 16 March.