Tracey As Frida / Dame Tracey Emin as Frida Kahlo / Being Frida

Mary McCartney’s multi-layered photograph Tracey As Frida / Dame Tracey Emin as Frida Kahlo / Being Frida from 2000 brings together no less than three outstanding female artists: photographer Mary McCartney (born 1969), model (and artist) Dame Tracey Emin (born 1963) and source of inspiration (and artist) Frida Kahlo (1907-1954).

Dame Tracey Emin is known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media,including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the ‘enfant terrible’ of the, so-called, Young British Artists (‘YBA’) in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In a 2014 Christie’s auction, Emin’s legendary 1998 installation My Bed was sold to White Cube founding director Jay Jopling for 2.5 million pounds, including buyer’s commission.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artefacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, gender, class, race and postcolonialism in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream (The Bed) holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever, auctioned at $54.7 million.

On closer inspection, the constellation in question thus seems more or less self-evident. The two contemporary artists are both British and were in their thirties when the collaboration took place, as well as being familiar with each other’s work. The surrealist artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo was also a source of inspiration for both of them, especially Dame Tracey Emin, whose artistic production often reflects Kahlo’s in terms of choice of subject matter (gender, identity, feminism and depictions of physical and mental pain etc.). In addition, Kahlo as well as Emin have created iconic works of art that revolve around a bed as a subject matter to express deeply personal experiences of pain. In an article for TATE in London (‘Frida on my mind’, 1 May 2005), Emin described Kahlo’s significance for her own work:

Some people say there are similarities between Frida Kahlo’s work and mine. I think it has less to do with subject matter and more about coincidences – in particular, because I am a woman. (I used to have a unibrow before I plucked it.) Women can relate to her. She did images of herself bleeding in the bath, of foetuses coming out of her, and pictures of her family and lovers. […] I came across Kahlo when I was at the Royal College. I read her letters before I saw any of her art. I remember that they very poetic and passionate. I then did some images that were directly influenced by her, including a drawing of my family tree. What confused me was why she could be in love with a fat, misogynistic, bad painter. But I realised that she was a masochist. You can see that in the work – and it’s what drives it. I like it. Some of it makes me feel sick, and makes me think: I didn’t need to know that. But on the other hand, the fact that she had no proper training yet obviously had the talent is extraordinary. When you look at the paintings you see that they are good. She painted what she saw – and the fact that she actually saw these things in her imagination is incredible. At the time there were many people around her, including the Surrealists, who were trying to be weird, when she genuinely was. She was also extremely politically motivated. She laid herself on the line about the things she believed in.

When Mary McCartney decided to bring the two legendary artists, Kahlo and Emin, together, it therefore seemed like a predestined project that was meant to be. McCartney, who felt emotionally connected with the late Mexican artist known for her vibrant self-portraits, later told Lianne Kolirin, in a 2023 interview for CNN (‘When Tracey Emin became Frida Kahlo: Mary McCartney’s take on two groundbreaking artists’) ‘She’s such an incredible artist and there’s so much of her own emotion and her own personality in her work, and a lot of honesty,’ adding, ‘I’ve always felt quite emotional looking at her work and I had felt emotion looking at Tracey’s work.’

McCartney said she had initially planned for a series of similarly themed shoots. Ultimately, the project consisted of this and an image of 1960s model Twiggy (Dame Lesley Lawson, born 1949, widely known by the nickname Twiggy, an English model, actress, and singer who was a British cultural icon and a prominent teenage model during the ‘swinging sixties’ in London) dressed as Greta Garbo (1905–1990, Swedish and American actress and a premier star during Hollywood’s silent and early golden eras; she’s regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time, known for her melancholic and sombre screen persona). McCartney told Lianne Kolirin:

The idea was going to be a portrait of somebody, and then a photograph of them as someone they really admire or have an affinity with. It all sort of came together in this daydream that I had of taking this portrait of Tracey Emin dressed as Frida Kahlo. […] We didn’t know each other and I had no idea how she’d feel about this, whether she even had an affinity with Frida Kahlo.

McCartney got in touch with Emin, who replied quickly, saying that she, indeed, had a real affinity with Kahlo and, thus, really liked the idea. McCartney and Emin subsequently met, in October 2000, at Emin’s home in London, where McCartney photographed Emin (in bed with her cat), using an R7 Leica camera given to her by her mother, Lady Linda McCartney (1941–1998, American photographer, musician, cookbook author, and activist who was also a member of the band Wings together with her husband, Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles), who had passed away just two years earlier.

McCartney and Emin then went to a nearby studio, hired for the day to transform into ‘Frida’s space’. There, a bed (Kahlo was seriously injured in a bus accident in 1925, and it was during her gradual recovery that she taught herself to paint. Some of her paintings feature bedroom scenes, and she was repeatedly photographed in bed) was adorned with black and white snapshots of Kahlo’s family to convey ‘a lot more narrative’ about her life, according to McCartney in the 2023 CNN interview:

I love the intimacy of bedrooms. It’s where you feel your safest, it’s where you’re at your most vulnerable. It’s a very private space where you switch your brain off. I’ve always loved Tracey Emin’s work for that because it also brings in this whole discussion about beds and your connection to your bed.

A makeup artist and a stylist prepped both the scene and Emin herself, dressing her in an embroidered blouse, flowery headpiece, chunky rings and bright red lipstick. In her 2023 CNN recollections, McCartney said:

She (Emin) got into bed and we were talking like Mary and Tracey together, then I picked the camera up and she stopped talking and just really started channeling Frida. Her expression changed, the way she sort of put her chin down and looked at me … Frida was much more in the forefront of her mind. I think that’s why it’s, to me, such a strong image, because she’s not just dressed up, she’s really got a whole process going on within her. The chemistry between us really worked and we became friends that day. Emin ‘loved’ the results.

Tracey Emin herself verified McCartney’s recollections (in a 2023 email to CNN reporter Lianne Kolirin): ‘At the time I really thought I looked like Frida Kahlo, and now I really think I look like me. It’s a great portrait by Mary.’

Signed and numbered 6/10.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation