A Max Beerbohm cartoon famously reduced Arthur Wing Pinero (author of that interesting play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray) to a single eyebrow and a fur coat. Frida Kahlo’s fame rests upon little more: not so much anything she painted but her eyebrows – or should that be eyebrow? – and her moustache. If you get the impression that her output contains an awful lot of images of her face, you would be right. She painted 55 self-portraits – more than a third of her output.

Hers is a strange cult, but a cult it is, and Making of an Icon is what the Tate exhibition subtitle says, not ‘Making of an Artist’. The show is drawing the pilgrims in record numbers. Kahlo functions as a modern secular saint before whose icon come to pray those eager not so much for an aesthetic experience as for, among other modish things, ‘gender fluidity’. And, sure enough, there is a large room in this sprawling exhibition devoted to ‘Gendered Dialogues’.

As a painter, she functions at the level of those gifted people who composed wonderful shop-window displays

As a painter, she functions at the level of those gifted people who composed wonderful shop-window displays

It so happens that, alongside the Kahlo, Tate Modern has another sell-out........

© The Spectator