The face of twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has become iconic. In somber self-portrait after self-portrait, she presented an unflinchingly honest depiction of imperfect beauty: bushy eyebrows that meet to form a unibrow, an unmistakable moustache on her upper lip, and a body increasingly wracked by injury and infection.
In her paintings, she exposed every inch of her body to public scrutiny. With one notable exception.
Through her surreal, primitivist art, Kahlo offered an intimate look at her entire body, which had been ravaged first by polio as a child, then by a horrific accident as a teenager. She displayed her damaged spine in “ The Broken Column,” her bleeding thigh in “Remembrance of an Open Wound,” her heart and blood vessels in “ The Two Fridas,” her diseased foot in “ What the Water Gave Me,” and her naked body in the midst of a miscarriage in “ Henry Ford Hospital.”
But there’s one part of her body that Kahlo never painted: her teeth. She never painted herself smiling.