FRIDA

KAHLO
FRIDA

 Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (born July 6,

1907, Coyoacán, Mexico—died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán). Kahlo
was born to a German father of Hungarian descent and a Mexican
mother of Spanish and Native American descent.
 Mexican painter best known for her uncompromising and
brilliantly coloured self-portraits that deal with such themes as
identity, the human body, and death.
 Although she denied the connection, she is often identified as a
Surrealist.
 In addition to her work, Kahlo was known for her tumultuous
relationship with muralist Diego Rivera (married 1929, divorced
1939, remarried 1940).
Early years and bus accident

 Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in
Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum.
 As a child, she suffered a bout of polio that left her with a slight limp, a chronic ailment
she would endure throughout her life. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for
the rest of her life.
 Kahlo was especially close to her father, who was a professional photographer, and she
frequently assisted him in his studio, where she acquired a sharp eye for detail.
 Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of
1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon
became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the
famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time. Rivera at that time was working
on a mural called The Creation on the school campus. Frida often watched it and she told
a friend she will marry him someday.
 In 1925 Kahlo was involved in a bus accident, which so seriously injured her that she had
to undergo more than 30 medical operations in her lifetime. During her slow recovery,
Kahlo taught herself to paint, and she read frequently, studying the art of the Old Masters.
The bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. A steel handrail
impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis are fractured and this accident left her
in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically.
Early years and bus accident

 After that, she returned home for further recovery. She had to wear full-body
cast for three months.
 To kill the time and alleviate the pain, she started painting and finished her first
self-portrait the following year. Frida Kahlo once said, "I paint myself because I
am often alone and I am the subject I know best".
 Her parents encouraged her to paint and made a special easel made for her so
she could paint in bed. They also gave her brushes and boxes of paints.
 In one of her early paintings, Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress (1926), Kahlo
painted a regal waist-length portrait of herself against a dark background with
roiling stylized waves. Although the painting is fairly abstract, Kahlo’s soft
modeling of her face shows her interest in realism. The stoic gaze so prevalent
in her later art is already evident, and the exaggeratedly long neck and fingers
reveal her interest in the Mannerist painter Il Bronzino.
 After her convalescence, Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM),
where she met Rivera once again. She showed him some of her work, and he
encouraged her to continue to paint.
Marriage to Diego Rivera

 Soon after marrying Rivera in 1929, Kahlo changed her personal

and painting style.
 She began to wear the traditional Tehuana dress that became
her trademark. It consisted of a flowered headdress, a loose
blouse, gold jewelry, and a long ruffled skirt.
 Her painting Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) shows not only her
new attire but also her new interest in Mexican folk art. The
subjects are flatter and more abstract than those in her previous
work. The towering Rivera stands to the left, holding a palette
and brushes, the objects of his profession. He appears as an
important artist, while Kahlo, who is petite and demure beside
him, with her hand in his and with darker skin than in her earlier
work, conveys the role she presumed he wanted: a traditional
Mexican wife.
THE UNITED STATES

 Kahlo painted that work while traveling in the United States (1930–33) with
Rivera, who had received commissions for murals from several cities.
 During this time, she endured a couple of difficult pregnancies that ended
prematurely. After suffering a miscarriage in Detroit and later the death of
her mother, Kahlo painted some of her most-harrowing works.
 Diego Rivera encouraged her to start the project to paint her major life
events to a series of paintings. My birth (1932) is the first one in her series.
She remarked this painting is about "...how I imagined I was born." And in
her journal, Frida said this painting depicts she was giving birth to her self.
 In this painting, the head of Frida, which is frightening large, is getting out
of the mother's womb. There is a puddle of blood under the mother's body
which might be a hint of Frida's own experience with the recent
miscarriage. A sheet covers the mother's face, which might be from the
recent event of the death of Frida's mother. Above the birth bed, a picture
of weeping "Virgin of Sorrows" hangs above. The Virgin looks on in tears
with sorrow and sympathy but seems she can do nothing about the
situation.
FIRST SOLO EXHIBITIONS

 In 1933 Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico, where they lived in a

newly constructed house comprising separate individual spaces
joined by a bridge.
 The residence became a gathering spot for artists and political
activists, and the couple hosted the likes of Leon Trotsky and André
Breton, a leading Surrealist who championed Kahlo’s work.
 Breton wrote the introduction to the brochure for her first solo
exhibition, describing her as a self-taught Surrealist. The exhibition
was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, and it was a
great success.
 The following year Kahlo traveled to Paris to show her work. There
she met more Surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp, the only
member she reportedly respected. The Louvre also acquired one of
her works, The Frame (c. 1938), making Kahlo the first 20th-century
Mexican artist to be included in the museum’s collection.
THE TWO FRIDAS AND OTHER LATER
WORKS

 By the mid-1930s numerous extramarital affairs—notably that of

Rivera with Kahlo’s younger sister and those of Kahlo with several
men and women—had undermined their marriage, and the two
divorced in 1939.
 That same year Kahlo painted some of her most famous works,
including The Two Fridas. The unusually large canvas shows twin
figures holding hands, each figure representing an opposing side of
Kahlo. The figure to the left, dressed in a European-style wedding
dress, is the side that Rivera purportedly rejected, and the figure to
the right, dressed in Tehuana attire, is the side Rivera loved best.
The full heart of the indigenous Kahlo is on display, and from it an
artery leads to a miniature portrait of Rivera that she holds in her
left hand. Another artery connects to the heart of the other Kahlo,
which is fully exposed and reveals the anatomy within. The end of
the artery is cut, and the European Kahlo holds a surgical instrument
seemingly to stem the flow of blood that drips onto her white dress.
THE TWO FRIDAS AND OTHER LATER
WORKS

 Kahlo reconciled with Rivera in 1940, and the couple moved into her
childhood home, La Casa Azul (“the Blue House”), in Coyoacán.
 In 1943 she was appointed a professor of painting at La Esmeralda, the
Education Ministry’s School of Fine Arts.
 Never fully well, Kahlo began to further decline in health, and she
frequently turned to alcohol and drugs for relief.
 Nonetheless, she continued to be productive during the 1940s. She painted
numerous self-portraits with varying hairstyles, clothing, and iconography,
always showing herself with an impassive, steadfast gaze, for which she
became famous.
 Kahlo underwent several surgeries in the late 1940s and early ’50s, often
with prolonged hospital stays. Toward the end of her life, she required
assistance with walking. She appears in Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr.
Farill (1951) seated in a wheelchair. Her ill health caused her to attend her
first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953 lying on a bed. She died in La Casa
Azul a year later, the official cause documented as a pulmonary embolism.