Her success is all down to his connections, rather than any merit her art may or may not have had.
Hypothetical: Frida never existed and you’re in art school. You submit any of her paintings to your teacher for critique. The teacher will give you a poor grade and tear you to shreds for one simple reason: on a technical level, she wasn’t a very good painter.
But, in real life, she was married to a famous artist, so she was able to use his connections to make her work popular. It is possible she could have made it on her own if she wasn’t married to one of the most famous artists of the time, but the fact is, we’ll never know if she could have because she didn’t make it based on her talent, she made it based on the connections of who she married.
Here’s another interesting point from her Wikipedia page:
Kahlo's posthumous popularity and the commercialization of her image have drawn criticism from many scholars and cultural commenters, who think that, not only have many facets of her life been mythologized, but the dramatic aspects of her biography have also overshadowed her art, producing a simplistic reading of her works in which they are reduced to literal descriptions of events in her life.[275] According to journalist Stephanie Mencimer, Kahlo "has been embraced as a poster child for every possible politically correct cause" and
like a game of telephone, the more Kahlo's story has been told, the more it has been distorted, omitting uncomfortable details that show her to be a far more complex and flawed figure than the movies and cookbooks suggest. This elevation of the artist over the art diminishes the public understanding of Kahlo's place in history and overshadows the deeper and more disturbing truths in her work. Even more troubling, though, is that by airbrushing her biography, Kahlo's promoters have set her up for the inevitable fall so typical of women artists, that time when the contrarians will band together and take sport in shooting down her inflated image, and with it, her art."[268]
To be fair, I think it’s pretty cool that she made an effort to give a voice to people too often overlooked in the west by incorporating the traditional styles of native Mexicans into her art and fashion. And I really enjoyed the movie about her life, and feel for her on a human level because she lived with so much physical pain her whole life.
But I don’t think she made it as an artist based on the merit of her work.
