This paper proposes to explore two films based on the lives of two woman visual artists, the North American painter, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Mexican painter Frieda Kahlo. Its aim is to focus on these internationally acclaimed and in many ways iconic artists through the medium of a biopic (biographical movie) – a film genre supposed to be rooted in reality and in biographical truth – in Julie Taymor’s Frida (2002) and Bob Balaban’s Georgia O’Keeffe (2009).

Through this double lens, we shall tackle the following questions raised by the “female biopics”, thus named by Dennis Bingham, the author of Whose Lives Are They Anyway? : The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (Rutgers University Press, 2010) which zooms in on the distinctions between cinematic portrayals of men and women. – How do Taymor and Balaban set up O’Keeffe (Joan Allen) and Kahlo (Salma Hayek) as woman painters within a more general aesthetic, intellectual and political context of their respective countries? – To what extent do the two cinematographic biographies manage to break away from the generic conventions – which tend to reinforce more traditional views on the woman artist as a “protégée” in need of a male mentor – despite the strong presence, in both films, of artist husbands and lovers: photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Jeremy Irons) and muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina)? – And finally, is it possible to argue that the strategies of representation used by the biopics depicting the lives of O’Keeffe and Kahlo bring to the fore something crucial and / or revisionist about these woman painters, also known for their profound interest in the painterly rendering of Mexico (Kahlo) and New Mexico (O’Keeffe)?