The eyes have it: what Frida Kahlo's gaze says about us

CULTURE SHOCK: THE EYES have it. In the Irish Museum of Modern Art's wonderful exhibition of paintings by Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera, is an amazing photographic portrait of Kahlo. Made in 1939 by her lover, the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, it is self-consciously elaborate.

Kahlo’s Mexican dress, the flowers in her hair, the white bench she’s sitting on and the wallpaper behind her form clashing floral patterns. The image ought to be a mess. But it is held together by the dark stars of Kahlo’s eyes. Unfathomable, unflinching, uncannily self-possessed, they create a fixed centre around which the apparently disparate patterns revolve.

Those are the same eyes that look out from Kahlo’s self-portraits. It is almost disappointing to see from the photograph that they are real, that she didn’t entirely invent them as an artistic strategy. If she had done that, they would be one of the great revolutionary inventions of modern culture.

But even if she didn’t imagine them into existence she imagined the way to use them. She framed them with her famous monobrow and her dark shadow of a moustache, making a face in which they catch all the available light. And she made them look outwards from paintings in a way that neither women nor non-white people were supposed to look at their beholders.

No cultural stock has risen quite as fast as Kahlo’s in the past 30 years.

As recently as 1983 New York Magazineintroduced her as "a kind of Mexican Georgia O'Keeffe" but admitted that "chances are you've never heard of her". In 2011, if you haven't heard of her, chances are you've been living in a cultural desert. When alive, Kahlo was Rivera's wife. Now, as the Imma show confirms, Rivera is her husband.

Kahlo was the inspiration for Holly Hunter's character in Jane Campion's film The Piano.The Julie Taymor-Selma Hayek biopic followed. Kahlo's image has graced US postage stamps and Mexican banknotes. Huge retrospectives have been mounted around the world, including a great show at Tate Modern in London in 2005.

But it's important to remember that Kahlo didn't becomeiconic. She created herself, quite literally, as an icon. The process is one she controlled. Though it's not a comparison I've encountered in art history, Kahlo seems to me to be, among other things, a precursor of Warhol. Her images seem to be made for mass reproduction.

Kahlo’s constant return to her own image may be a result of physical disability (she suffered polio as a child and then received terrible injuries in a bus crash) and relative isolation. “I paint self-portraits,” she said, “because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” The focus on herself may also be rooted in her inability to share Rivera’s confident sense of political belonging. Although she was a committed communist (a fact that tends to be played down in her international celebrity) and deeply engaged with Mexican culture, she was not a romantic.

One of Kahlo's rare public paintings (not in the Imma show) is the small 1932 work Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States. It is much more complex and ambivalent than any of Rivera's great political murals. Rivera tends to show Mexico (as in the gorgeous Calla Lily Vendorsat Imma) as vital and natural, in contrast to the machine culture of the US. The US side of Kahlo's borderline fits this stereotype. It is all belching chimneys and weirdly futuristic machines. But the Mexican side is no flowering paradise. It is ruins, relics and stones. She pictures herself, in other words, hovering between equally arid realities.

These personal and political factors help to explain her obsession with her own image. But no self-obsession has ever been less solipsistic. Kahlo’s genius is that the pictures she made of herself are at once utterly, nakedly personal and completely impersonal. As Rivera put it, “Frida’s art is individual-collective . . . She paints at the same time the exterior and interior of herself and the world.” She did this by simultaneously emphasising her own extreme individuality – the moustache, the monobrow, the braided hair, that unsettling gaze – and placing it within existing traditions (from both classical and folk art) of representing madonnas, Hindu avatars, goddesses and saints.

No one else has managed such a perfect tension between self and image. The autobiographical aspects of the works (most painfully present at Imma in the lithograph Frida and the Miscarriage) humanise the icon. But the iconography distances and transforms those personal realities. It pushes away pity and proclaims power.

And that power is in the eyes. In his classic 1972 book and TV series, Ways of Seeing, John Berger argued that in western art, from the Renaissance through to advertising and pornography, "men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at . . . The 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him." This is true, however, not just of women but also of indigenous peoples. In both the erotic and the exotic, the person in the image is there to be possessed through the eyes.

There’s a simple term for the look in Frida Kahlo’s eyes: self-possession.

The gaze is not that of the (putatively male, white) viewer looking inwards. It is her own. She’s the one who does the looking. Her preternaturally long neck holds her head completely still and completely erect so that the eyes are front and centre. (It is striking that this pose is jealously guarded: her fine portrait of Rivera in this show has him looking askance. Equally, Rivera’s eroticised lithograph of a naked Frida has her eyes shyly averted.) Her gaze could not even be called challenging or, as the exhibition guide puts it at one stage, “authoritarian”. It just belongs entirely to the woman in the picture.

In a culture saturated as never before by the old possessive gaze of advertising and porn, it retains an extraordinary power.

“New look” has been debased as a term of fashion. But Kahlo’s gaze is still the newest look in modern culture. If more people looked like that, the world would be a different place.