Enter the permanent collection galleries on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and among the first pieces you’ll encounter is a pair of Frida Kahlo self-portraits, executed in her signature magic-realist style. In one she poses with a pet monkey (Fulang-Chang and I, 1937); in another she has shorn hair and wears a man’s suit (Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940). The paintings hang in a room filled with works by early modern masters such as Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, and assorted European Surrealists. To see Kahlo’s work in this room is to think that her place in art history is secure. But, as Guardian critic Adrian Searle wrote in a review of the artist’s work, her status as a cult figure “makes looking at her art a complicated business.”
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