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The discipline of art history developed the biographical narrative as the mode to illustrate how artists' innate genius inspired their creativity, giving a literary form to the construct of genius. When artistic creativity became the subject of cinematic discourse, the abstract and interiorized nature of inspiration became a greater problem because it was essentially unfilmable.1 One solution embraced by the artist biopic was to highlight intense personal suffering as the outward sign of the creative forces that lay within. This occurred in biopics of Vincent Van Gogh and Michelangelo when dramatized versions of their lives made them popular icons in the 1950s and '60s.2 It occurred again with Frida Kahlo, whose life was dramatized in seven works of fiction that appeared between 2000 and 2002.3 In these portrayals of Kahlo the emotional nature of the female artist is intensified even further by the conjoining of physical suffering with other forms of emotional excess, most notably an intense love of, and engagement with, life. Julie Taymor's film Frida (2002) went further than the other media by portraying the fictional Frida's life as a work of art itself, and then showing how her art is a direct transcription of that life.4 A life lived artistically and intensely becomes, in Taymor's film, the outward manifestation of the creative spirit that lies within, validating her authentic genius, artistic renown, celebrity status, and appropriateness as the subject of popular media. It also shifts the narrative focus from a concern with the narrow, specific biographical events to a broader, more generic interest in emotional truth.
Fact and fiction are inextricably interwoven in any biographical treatment of Kahlo because of the illusion of self-revelation in her paintings, written autobiographical sketches, diary entries,...