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Frida Kahlo

Painter Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was married to Diego Rivera and is still admired as a feminist icon.

(1907-1954)

Who Was Frida Kahlo?

Artist Frida Kahlo was considered one of Mexico's greatest artists who began painting mostly self-portraits after she was severely injured in a bus accident. Kahlo later became politically active and married fellow communist artist Diego Rivera in 1929. She exhibited her paintings in Paris and Mexico before her death in 1954.

Family, Education and Early Life

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico.

Kahlo's father, Wilhelm (also called Guillermo), was a German photographer who had immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. She had two older sisters, Matilde and Adriana, and her younger sister, Cristina, was born the year after Kahlo.

Around the age of six, Kahlo contracted polio, which caused her to be bedridden for nine months. While she recovered from the illness, she limped when she walked because the disease had damaged her right leg and foot. Her father encouraged her to play soccer, go swimming, and even wrestle — highly unusual moves for a girl at the time — to help aid in her recovery.

In 1922, Kahlo enrolled at the renowned National Preparatory School. She was one of the few female students to attend the school, and she became known for her jovial spirit and her love of colorful, traditional clothes and jewelry.

While at school, Kahlo hung out with a group of politically and intellectually like-minded students. Becoming more politically active, Kahlo joined the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party.

Frida Kahlo's Accident

After staying at the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks, Kahlo returned home to recuperate further. She began painting during her recovery and finished her first self-portrait the following year, which she gave to Gómez Arias.

Frida Kahlo's Marriage to Diego Rivera

In 1929, Kahlo and famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera married. Kahlo and Rivera first met in 1922 when he went to work on a project at her high school. Kahlo often watched as Rivera created a mural called The Creation in the school’s lecture hall. According to some reports, she told a friend that she would someday have Rivera’s baby.

Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. He encouraged her artwork, and the two began a relationship. During their early years together, Kahlo often followed Rivera based on where the commissions that Rivera received were. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. They then went to New York City for Rivera’s show at the Museum of Modern Art and later moved to Detroit for Rivera’s commission with the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Kahlo and Rivera’s time in New York City in 1933 was surrounded by controversy. Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller , Rivera created a mural entitled Man at the Crossroads in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller halted the work on the project after Rivera included a portrait of communist leader Vladimir Lenin in the mural, which was later painted over. Months after this incident, the couple returned to Mexico and went to live in San Angel, Mexico.

Never a traditional union, Kahlo and Rivera kept separate, but adjoining homes and studios in San Angel. She was saddened by his many infidelities, including an affair with her sister Cristina. In response to this familial betrayal, Kahlo cut off most of her trademark long dark hair. Desperately wanting to have a child, she again experienced heartbreak when she miscarried in 1934.

Kahlo and Rivera went through periods of separation, but they joined together to help exiled Soviet communist Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia in 1937. The Trotskys came to stay with them at the Blue House (Kahlo's childhood home) for a time in 1937 as Trotsky had received asylum in Mexico. Once a rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin , Trotsky feared that he would be assassinated by his old nemesis. Kahlo and Trotsky reportedly had a brief affair during this time.

Kahlo divorced Rivera in 1939. They did not stay divorced for long, remarrying in 1940. The couple continued to lead largely separate lives, both becoming involved with other people over the years .

Artistic Career

While she never considered herself a surrealist, Kahlo befriended one of the primary figures in that artistic and literary movement, Andre Breton, in 1938. That same year, she had a major exhibition at a New York City gallery, selling about half of the 25 paintings shown there. Kahlo also received two commissions, including one from famed magazine editor Clare Boothe Luce, as a result of the show.

In 1939, Kahlo went to live in Paris for a time. There she exhibited some of her paintings and developed friendships with such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso .

Kahlo received a commission from the Mexican government for five portraits of important Mexican women in 1941, but she was unable to finish the project. She lost her beloved father that year and continued to suffer from chronic health problems. Despite her personal challenges, her work continued to grow in popularity and was included in numerous group shows around this time.

In 1953, Kahlo received her first solo exhibition in Mexico. While bedridden at the time, Kahlo did not miss out on the exhibition’s opening. Arriving by ambulance, Kahlo spent the evening talking and celebrating with the event’s attendees from the comfort of a four-poster bed set up in the gallery just for her.

After Kahlo’s death, the feminist movement of the 1970s led to renewed interest in her life and work, as Kahlo was viewed by many as an icon of female creativity.

Frida Kahlo's Most Famous Paintings

Many of Kahlo’s works were self-portraits. A few of her most notable paintings include:

'Frieda and Diego Rivera' (1931)

Kahlo showed this painting at the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, the city where she was living with Rivera at the time. In the work, painted two years after the couple married, Kahlo lightly holds Rivera’s hand as he grasps a palette and paintbrushes with the other — a stiffly formal pose hinting at the couple’s future tumultuous relationship. The work now lives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932)

In 1932, Kahlo incorporated graphic and surrealistic elements in her work. In this painting, a naked Kahlo appears on a hospital bed with several items — a fetus, a snail, a flower, a pelvis and others — floating around her and connected to her by red, veinlike strings. As with her earlier self-portraits, the work was deeply personal, telling the story of her second miscarriage.

'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale' (1939)

Kahlo was asked to paint a portrait of Luce and Kahlo's mutual friend, actress Dorothy Hale, who had committed suicide earlier that year by jumping from a high-rise building. The painting was intended as a gift for Hale's grieving mother. Rather than a traditional portrait, however, Kahlo painted the story of Hale's tragic leap. While the work has been heralded by critics, its patron was horrified at the finished painting.

'The Two Fridas' (1939)

One of Kahlo’s most famous works, the painting shows two versions of the artist sitting side by side, with both of their hearts exposed. One Frida is dressed nearly all in white and has a damaged heart and spots of blood on her clothing. The other wears bold colored clothing and has an intact heart. These figures are believed to represent “unloved” and “loved” versions of Kahlo.

'The Broken Column' (1944)

Kahlo shared her physical challenges through her art again with this painting, which depicted a nearly nude Kahlo split down the middle, revealing her spine as a shattered decorative column. She also wears a surgical brace and her skin is studded with tacks or nails. Around this time, Kahlo had several surgeries and wore special corsets to try to fix her back. She would continue to seek a variety of treatments for her chronic physical pain with little success.

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Frida Kahlo’s Death

About a week after her 47th birthday, Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, at her beloved Blue House. There has been some speculation regarding the nature of her death. It was reported to be caused by a pulmonary embolism, but there have also been stories about a possible suicide.

Kahlo’s health issues became nearly all-consuming in 1950. After being diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot, Kahlo spent nine months in the hospital and had several operations during this time. She continued to paint and support political causes despite having limited mobility. In 1953, part of Kahlo’s right leg was amputated to stop the spread of gangrene.

Deeply depressed, Kahlo was hospitalized again in April 1954 because of poor health, or, as some reports indicated, a suicide attempt. She returned to the hospital two months later with bronchial pneumonia. No matter her physical condition, Kahlo did not let that stand in the way of her political activism. Her final public appearance was a demonstration against the U.S.-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2nd.

Movie on Frida Kahlo

Kahlo’s life was the subject of a 2002 film entitled Frida , starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as Rivera. Directed by Julie Taymor, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

Frida Kahlo Museum

The family home where Kahlo was born and grew up, later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul, was opened as a museum in 1958. Located in Coyoacán, Mexico City, the Museo Frida Kahlo houses artifacts from the artist along with important works including Viva la Vida (1954), Frida and Caesarean (1931) and Portrait of my father Wilhelm Kahlo (1952).

Book on Frida Kahlo

Hayden Herrera’s 1983 book on Kahlo, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo , helped to stir up interest in the artist. The biographical work covers Kahlo’s childhood, accident, artistic career, marriage to Diego Rivera, association with the communist party and love affairs.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Frida Kahlo
• Birth Year: 1907
• Birth date: July 6, 1907
• Birth City: Mexico City
• Birth Country: Mexico
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Painter Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who was married to Diego Rivera and is still admired as a feminist icon.
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• National Preparatory School
• Nacionalities
• Interesting Facts
• Frida Kahlo met Diego Rivera when he was commissioned to paint a mural at her high school.
• Kahlo dealt with chronic pain most of her life due to a bus accident.
• Death Year: 1954
• Death date: July 13, 1954
• Death City: Mexico City
• Death Country: Mexico

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Frida Kahlo Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/frida-kahlo
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: November 19, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
• My painting carries with it the message of pain.
• I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
• I think that, little by little, I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.
• The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
• I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.
• I love you more than my own skin.
• I am not sick, I am broken, but I am happy as long as I can paint.
• Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
• I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed with this decent and good feeling.
• There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.
• I hope the end is joyful, and I hope never to return.

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

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Frida Kahlo biography

Considered one of Mexico's greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family's home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister.

Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.

Frida 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 the same year, Kahlo joined a gang of students who shared similar political and intellectual views. She fell in love with the leader Alejandro Gomez Arias. On a September afternoon when she traveled with Gomez Arias on a bus the tragic accident happened. 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.

She was injured so badly and had to stay in the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks. 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.

Frida Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. She asked him to evaluate her work and he encouraged her. The two soon started the romantic relationship. Despite her mother's objection, Frida and Diego Rivera got married in the next year. During their earlier years as a married couple, Frida had to move a lot based on Diego's work. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. Then they moved to New York City for Rivera's artwork show at Museum of Modern Art . They later moved to Detroit while Diego Rivera worked for Detroit Institute of Arts .

In 1932, Kahlo added more realistic and surrealistic components in her painting style. In the painting titled Henry Ford Hospital(1932) , Frida Kahlo lied on a hospital bed naked and was surrounded with a few things floating around, which includes a fetus, a flower, a pelvis, a snail, all connected by veins. This painting was an expression of her feelings about her second miscarriage. It is as personal as her other self-portraits.

In 1933, Kahlo was living in New York City with her husband Diego Rivera. Rivera was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to create a mural named as Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center. Rivera tried to include Vladimir Lenin in the painting, who is a communist leader. Rockefeller stopped his work and that part was painted over. The couple had to move back to Mexico after this incident. They returned and live in San Angel, Mexico.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's marriage is not a usual one. They had been keeping separate homes and studios for all those years. Diego had so many affairs and one of that was with Kahlo's sister Cristina. Frida Kahlo was so sad and she cut off her long hair to show her desperation to the betrayal. She has longed for children but she cannot bear one due to the bus accident. She was heartbroken when she experienced a second miscarriage in 1934. Kahlo and Rivera have been separated a few times but they always went back together. In 1937 they helped Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia. Leon Trotsky is an exiled communist and rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Kahlo and Rivera welcomed the couple together and let them stay at her Blue House. Kahlo also had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky when the couple stayed at her house.

In 1938, Frida Kahlo became a friend of André Breton, who is one of the primary figures of the Surrealism movement. Frida said she never considered herself as a Surrealist "until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one." She also wrote, "Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself". "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself."

In the same year, she had an exhibition at New York City gallery. She sold some of her paintings and got two commissions. One of that is from Clare Boothe Luce to paint her friend Dorothy Hale who committed suicide. She painted The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), which tells the story of Dorothy's tragic leap. The patron Luce was horrified and almost destroyed this painting.

The next year, 1939, Kahlo was invited by André Breton and went to Paris. Her works are exhibited there and she is befriended with artists such as Marc Chagall , Piet Mondrian , and Pablo Picasso . She and Rivera got divorced that year and she painted one of her most famous paintings, The Two Fridas (1939).

But soon Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera remarried in 1940. The second marriage is about the same as the first one. They still keep separate lives and houses. Both of them had infidelities with other people during the marriage. Kahlo received a commission from the Mexican government for five portraits of important Mexican women in 1941, but she was unable to finish the project. She lost her beloved father that year and continued to suffer from chronic health problems. Despite her personal challenges, her work continued to grow in popularity and was included in numerous group shows around this time.

In the year of 1944, Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous portraits, The Broken Column . In this painting, she depicted herself naked and split down the middle. Her spine is shattered like a column. She wears a surgical brace and there are nails all through her body, which is the indication of the consistent pain she went through. In this painting, Frida expressed her physical challenges through her art. During that time, she had a few surgeries and had to wear special corsets to protect her back spine. She seeks lots of medical treatment for her chronic pain but nothing really worked.

Her health condition has been worsening in 1950. That year she was diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot. She became bedridden for the next nine month and had to stay in hospital and had several surgeries. But with great persistence, Frida Kahlo continued to work and paint. In the year of 1953, she had a solo exhibition in Mexican. Although she had limited mobility at that time, she showed up on the exhibition's opening ceremony. She arrived by ambulance, and welcomed the attendees, celebrated the ceremony in a bed the gallery set up for her. A few months later, she had to accept another surgery. Part of her right leg got amputated to stop the gangrene.

With the poor physical condition, she is also deeply depressed. She even had an inclination for suicide. Frida Kahlo has been out and in hospital during that year. But despite her health issues, she has been active with the political movement. She showed up at the demonstration against US-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2. This is her last public appearance. About one week after her 47th birthday, Frida Kahlo passed away at her beloved Bule House. She was publicly reported to die of a pulmonary embolism, but there is speculation which was saying she died of a possible suicide.

Frida Kahlo's fame has been growing after her death. Her Blue House was opened as a museum in the year of 1958. In the 1970s the interest in her work and life is renewed due to the feminist movement since she was viewed as an icon of female creativity. In 1983, Hayden Herrera published his book on her, A Biography of Frida Kahlo , which drew more attention from the public to this great artist. In the year of 2002, a movie named Frida was released, staring alma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. This movie was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

The Two Fridas

Self-portrait with thorn necklace & hummingbird, viva la vida, watermelons, the wounded deer, self portrait with monkeys, without hope, me and my parrots, what the water gave me, frida and diego rivera, the wounded table, diego and i, my dress hangs there, henry ford hospital, self portrait as a tehuana, fulang chang and i.

Frida Kahlo

Mexican Painter

Summary of Frida Kahlo

Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological overflow. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists (including Albrecht Dürer , Francisco Goya , and Edvard Munch ), but had not yet been significantly dissected by a woman. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. By literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help explain human behaviors on the outside. She gathered together motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn created a new and articulate means to discuss the most complex aspects of female identity. As not only a 'great artist' but also a figure worthy of our devotion, Kahlo's iconic face provides everlasting trauma support and she has influence that cannot be underestimated.

Accomplishments

• Kahlo made it legitimate for women to outwardly display their pains and frustrations and to thus make steps towards understanding them. It became crucial for women artists to have a female role model and this is the gift of Frida Kahlo.
• As an important question for many Surrealists , Kahlo too considers: What is Woman? Following repeated miscarriages, she asks: to what extent does motherhood or its absence impact on female identity? She irreversibly alters the meaning of maternal subjectivity. It becomes clear through umbilical symbolism (often shown by ribbons) that Kahlo is connected to all that surrounds her, and that she is a 'mother' without children.
• Finding herself often alone, she worked obsessively with self-portraiture. Her reflection fueled an unflinching interest in identity. She was particularly interested in her mixed German-Mexican ancestry, as well as in her divided roles as artist, lover, and wife.
• Kahlo uses religious symbolism throughout her oeuvre . She appears as the Madonna holding her 'animal babies', and becomes the Virgin Mary as she cradles her husband and famous national painter Diego Rivera . She identifies with Saint Sebastian, and even fittingly appears as the martyred Christ. She positions herself as a prophet when she takes to the head of the table in her Last Supper -style painting, and her depiction of the accident which left her impaled on a metal bar (and covered in gold dust when lying injured) recalls the crucifixion and suggests her own holiness.
• Women prior to Kahlo who had attempted to communicate the wildest and deepest of emotions were often labeled hysterical or condemned insane - while men were aligned with the 'melancholy' character type. By remaining artistically active under the weight of sadness, Kahlo revealed that women too can be melancholy rather than depressed, and that these terms should not be thought of as gendered.

The Life of Frida Kahlo

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone... because I am the subject I know best." From battles with her mind and her body, Kahlo lived through her art.

Important Art by Frida Kahlo

Frieda and Diego Rivera

It is as if in this painting Kahlo tries on the role of wife to see how it fits. She does not focus on her identity as a painter, but instead adopts a passive and supportive role, holding the hand of her talented and acclaimed husband. It was indeed the case that during the majority of her painting career, Kahlo was viewed only in Rivera's shadow and it was not until later in life that she gained international recognition. This early double-portrait was painted primarily to mark the celebration of Kahlo's marriage to Rivera. Whilst Rivera holds a palette and paint brushes, symbolic of his artistic mastery, Kahlo limits her role to his wife by presenting herself slight in frame and without her artistic accoutrements. Kahlo furthermore dresses in costume typical of the Mexican woman, or "La Mexicana," wearing a traditional red shawl known as the rebozo and jade Aztec beads. The positioning of the figures echoes that of traditional marital portraiture where the wife is placed on her husband's left to indicate her lesser moral status as a woman. In a drawing made the following year called Frida and the Miscarriage , the artist does hold her own palette, as though the experience of losing a fetus and not being able to create a baby shifts her determination wholly to the creation of art.

Oil on canvas - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Henry Ford Hospital

Many of Kahlo's paintings from the early 1930s, especially in size, format, architectural setting and spatial arrangement, relate to religious ex-voto paintings of which she and Rivera possessed a large collection ranging in date over several centuries. Ex-votos are made as a gesture of gratitude for salvation, a granted prayer or disaster averted and left in churches or at shrines. Ex-votos are generally painted on small-scale metal panels and depict the incident along with the Virgin or saint to whom they are offered. Henry Ford Hospital , is a good example where the artist uses the ex-voto format but subverts it by placing herself centre stage, rather than recording the miraculous deeds of saints. Kahlo instead paints her own story, as though she becomes saintly and the work is made not as thanks to the lord but in defiance, questioning why he brings her pain. In this painting, Kahlo lies on a bed, bleeding after a miscarriage. From the exposed naked body six vein-like ribbons flow outwards, attached to symbols. One of these six objects is a fetus, suggesting that the ribbons could be a metaphor for umbilical cords. The other five objects that surround Frida are things that she remembers, or things that she had seen in the hospital. For example, the snail makes reference to the time it took for the miscarriage to be over, whilst the flower was an actual physical object given to her by Diego. The artist demonstrates her need to be attached to all that surrounds her: to the mundane and metaphorical as much as the physical and actual. Perhaps it is through this reaching out of connectivity that the artist tries to be 'maternal', even though she is not able to have her own child.

Oil on canvas - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

This is a haunting painting in which both the birth giver and the birthed child seem dead. The head of the woman giving birth is shrouded in white cloth while the baby emerging from the womb appears lifeless. At the time that Kahlo painted this work, her mother had just died so it seems reasonable to assume that the shrouded funerary figure is her mother while the baby is Kahlo herself (the title supports this reading). However, Kahlo had also just lost her own child and has said that she is the covered mother figure. The Virgin of Sorrows , who hangs above the bed suggests that this is an image that overflows with maternal pain and suffering. Also though, and revealingly, Kahlo wrote in her diary, next to several small drawings of herself, 'the one who gave birth to herself ... who wrote the most wonderful poem of her life.' Similar to the drawing, Frida and the Miscarriage , My Birth represents Kahlo mourning for the loss of a child, but also finding the strength to make powerful art because of such trauma. The painting is made in a retablo (or votive) style (a small traditional Mexican painting derived from Catholic Church art) in which thanks would typically be given to the Madonna beneath the image. Kahlo instead leaves this section blank, as though she finds herself unable to give thanks either for her own birth, or for the fact that she is now unable to give birth. The painting seems to bring the message that it is important to acknowledge that birth and death live very closely together. Many believe that My Birth was heavily inspired by an Aztec sculpture that Kahlo had at home representing Tiazolteotl, the Goddess of fertility and midwives.

Oil and tempera on zinc - Private Collection

My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)

This dream-like family tree was painted on zinc rather than canvas, a choice that further highlights the artist's fascination with and collection of 18 th -century and 19 th -century Mexican retablos. Kahlo completed this work to accentuate both her European Jewish heritage and her Mexican background. Her paternal side, German Jewish, occupies the right side of the composition symbolized by the sea (acknowledging her father's voyage to get to Mexico), while her maternal side of Mexican descent is represented on the left by a map faintly outlining the topography of Mexico. While Kahlo's paintings are assertively autobiographical, she often used them to communicate transgressive or political messages: this painting was completed shortly after Adolf Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws banning interracial marriage. Here, Kahlo simultaneously affirms her mixed heritage to confront Nazi ideology, using a format - the genealogical chart - employed by the Nazi party to determine racial purity. Beyond politics, the red ribbon used to link the family members echoes the umbilical cord that connects baby Kahlo to her mother - a motif that recurs throughout Kahlo's oeuvre .

Oil and tempera on zinc - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fulang-Chang and I

This painting debuted at Kahlo's exhibition in Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1938, and was one of the works that most fascinated André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. The canvas in the New York show is a self-portrait of the artist and her spider monkey, Fulang-Chang, a symbol employed as a surrogate for the children that she and Rivera could not have. The arrangement of figures in the portrait signals the artist's interest in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child. After the New York exhibition, a second frame containing a mirror was added. The later inclusion of the mirror is a gesture inviting the viewer into the work: it was through looking at herself intensely in a mirror in her months spent at home after her bus accident that Kahlo first began painting portraits and delving deeper into her psyche. The inclusion of the mirror, considered from this perspective, is a remarkably intimate vision into both the artist's aesthetic process and into her personal introspection. In many of Kahlo's self-portraits, she is accompanied by monkeys, dogs, and parrots, all of which she kept as pets. Since the Middle Ages, small spider monkeys, like those kept by Kahlo, have been said to symbolize the devil, heresy, and paganism, finally coming to represent the fall of man, vice, and the embodiment of lust. These monkeys were depicted in the past as a cautionary symbol against the dangers of excessive love and the base instincts of man. Kahlo again depicts herself with her monkey in both 1939 and 1940. In a later version in 1945, Kahlo paints her monkey and also her dog, Xolotl. This little dog that often accompanies the artist, is named after a mythological Aztec god, known to represent lightning and death, and also to be the twin of Quetzalcoatl, both of who had visited the underworld. All of these pictures, including Fulang-Chang and I include 'umbilical' ribbons that wrap between Kahlo's and the animal's necks. Kahlo is the Madonna and her pets become the holy (yet darkly symbolic) infant for which she longs.

In two parts, oil on composition board (1937) with painted mirror frame (added after 1939) - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

What the Water Gave Me

In this painting most of Kahlo's body is obscured from view. We are unusually confronted with the foot and plug end of the bath, and with focus placed on the artist's feet. Furthermore, Kahlo adopts a birds-eye view and looks down on the water from above. Within the water, Kahlo paints an alternative self-portrait, one in which the more traditional facial portrait has been replaced by an array of symbols and recurring motifs. The artist includes portraits of her parents, a traditional Tehuana dress, a perforated shell, a dead humming bird, two female lovers, a skeleton, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship set sail, and a woman drowning. This painting was featured in Breton's 1938 book on Surrealism and Painting and Hayden Herrera, in her biography of Kahlo, mentions that the artist herself considered this work to have a special importance. Recalling the tapestry style painting of Northern Renaissance masters, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the figures and objects floating in the water of Kahlo's painting create an at once fantastic and real landscape of memory. Kahlo discussed What the Water Gave Me with the Manhattan gallery owner Julien Levy, and suggested that it was a sad piece that mourned the loss of her childhood. Perhaps the strangled figure at the centre is representative of the inner emotional torments experienced by Kahlo herself. It is clear from the conversation that the artist had with Levy, that Kahlo was aware of the philosophical implications of her work. In an interview with Herrera, Levy recalls, in 'a long philosophical discourse, Kahlo talked about the perspective of herself that is shown in this painting'. He further relays that 'her idea was about the image of yourself that you have because you do not see your head. The head is something that is looking, but is not seen. It is what one carries around to look at life with.' The artist's head in What the Water Gave Me is thus appropriately replaced by the interior thoughts that occupy her mind. As well as an inclusion of death by strangulation in the centre of the water, there is also a labia-like flower and a cluster of pubic hair painted between Kahlo's legs. The work is quite sexual while also showing preoccupation with destruction and death. The motif of the bathtub in art is one that has been popular since Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793), and was later taken up many different personalities such as Francesca Woodman and Tracey Emin.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

The Two Fridas

This double self-portrait is one of Kahlo's most recognized compositions, and is symbolic of the artist's emotional pain experienced during her divorce from Rivera. On the left, the artist is shown in modern European attire, wearing the costume from her marriage to Rivera. Throughout their marriage, given Rivera's strong nationalism, Kahlo became increasingly interested in indigenism and began to explore traditional Mexican costume, which she wears in the portrait on the right. It is the Mexican Kahlo that holds a locket with an image of Rivera. The stormy sky in the background, and the artist's bleeding heart - a fundamental symbol of Catholicism and also symbolic of Aztec ritual sacrifice - accentuate Kahlo's personal tribulation and physical pain. Symbolic elements frequently possess multiple layers of meaning in Kahlo's pictures; the recurrent theme of blood represents both metaphysical and physical suffering, gesturing also to the artist's ambivalent attitude toward accepted notions of womanhood and fertility. Although both women have their hearts exposed, the woman in the white European outfit also seems to have had her heart dissected and the artery that runs from this heart is cut and bleeding. The artery that runs from the heart of her Tehuana-costumed self remains intact because it is connected to the miniature photograph of Diego as a child. Whereas Kahlo's heart in the Mexican dress remains sustained, the European Kahlo, disconnected from her beloved Diego, bleeds profusely onto her dress. As well as being one of the artist's most famous works, this is also her largest canvas.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

This self-portrait shows Kahlo as an androgynous figure. Scholars have seen this gesture as a confrontational response to Rivera's demand for a divorce, revealing the artist's injured sense of female pride and her self-punishment for the failures of her marriage. Her masculine attire also reminds the viewer of early family photographs in which Kahlo chose to wear a suit. The cropped hair also presents a nuanced expression of the artist's identity. She holds one cut braid in her left hand while many strands of hair lie scattered on the floor. The act of cutting a braid symbolizes a rejection of girlhood and innocence, but equally can be seen as the severance of a connective cord (maybe umbilical) that binds two people or two ways of life. Either way, braids were a central element in Kahlo's identity as the traditional La Mexicana , and in the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects some aspect of her former identity. The hair strewn about the floor echoes an earlier self-portrait painted as the Mexican folkloric figure La Llorona , here ridding herself of these female attributes. Kahlo clutches a pair of scissors, as the discarded strands of hair become animated around her feet; the tresses appear to have a life of their own as they curl across the floor and around the legs of her chair. Above her sorrowful scene, Kahlo inscribed the lyrics and music of a song that declares cruelly, "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are hairless, I don't love you anymore," confirming Kahlo's own denunciation and rejection of her female roles. In likely homage to Kahlo's painting, Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus photographed Wedding Portraits in 1997. On the occasion of her marriage, Brotherus cuts her hair, the remains of which her new husband holds in his hands. The act of cutting one's hair symbolic of a moment of change happens in the work of other female artists too, including that of Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

The frontal position and outward stare of Kahlo in this self-portrait directly confronts and engages the viewer. The artist wears Christ's unraveled crown of thorns as a necklace that digs into her neck, signifying her self-representation as a Christian martyr and the enduring pain experienced following her failed marriage. A dead hummingbird, a symbol in Mexican folkloric tradition of luck charms for falling in love, hangs in the center of her necklace. A black cat - symbolic of bad luck and death - crouches behind her left shoulder, and a spider monkey gifted from Rivera, symbolic of evil, is included to her right. Kahlo frequently employed flora and fauna in the background of her bust-length portraits to create a tight, claustrophobic space, using the symbolic element of nature to simultaneously compare and contrast the link between female fertility with the barren and deathly imagery of the foreground. Typically a symbol of good fortune, the meaning of a 'dead' hummingbird is to be reversed. Kahlo, who craves flight, is perturbed and disturbed by the fact that the butterflies in her hair are too delicate to travel far and that the dead bird around her neck, has become an anchor, preyed upon by the nearby cat. In failing to directly translate complex inner feelings it as though the painting illustrates the artist's frustrations.

Oil on canvas on masonite - Nikolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

The Broken Column

The Broken Column is a particularly pertinent example of the combination of Kahlo's emotional and physical pain. The artist's biographer, Hayden Herrera, writes of this painting, 'A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her in two. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida's feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart'. A broken ionic column replaces the artist's crumbling spine and sharp metal nails pierce her body. The hard coldness of this inserted column recalls the steel rod that pierced the artist's abdomen and uterus during her streetcar accident. More generally, the architectural feature now in ruins, has associations of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female body. Beyond its physical dimensions, the cloth wrapped around Kahlo's pelvis, recalls Christ's loincloth. Indeed, Kahlo again displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; through identification with Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of spiritual suffering. Tears dot the artist's face as they do many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico; her eyes stare out beyond the painting as though renouncing the flesh and summoning the spirit. It is as a result of depictions like this one that Kahlo is now considered a Magic Realist. Her eyes are never-changing, realistic, while the rest of the painting is highly fantastical. The painting is not overly concerned with the workings of the subconscious or with irrational juxtapositions that feature more typically in Surrealist works. The Magic Realism movement was extremely popular in Latin America (especially with writers such as Gabriel García Márquez), and Kahlo has been retrospectively included in it by art historians. The notion of being wounded in the way that we see illustrated in The Broken Column , is referred to in Spanish as chingada . This word embodies numerous interrelated meanings and concepts, which include to be wounded, broken, torn open or deceived. The word derives from the verb for penetration and implies domination of the female by the male. It refers to the status of victimhood. The painting also likely inspired a performance and sculptural piece made by Rebecca Horn in 1970 called Unicorn . In the piece Horn walks naked through an arable field with her body strapped in a fabric corset that appears almost identical to that worn by Kahlo in The Broken Column . In the piece by the German performance artist, however, the erect, sky-reaching pillar is fixed to her head rather than inserted into her chest. The performance has an air of mythology and religiosity similar to that of Kahlo's painting, but the column is whole and strong again, perhaps paying homage to Kahlo's fortitude and artistic triumph.

Oil on masonite - Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City, Mexico

The Wounded Deer

The 1946 painting, The Wounded Deer , further extends both the notion of chingada and the Saint Sebastian motif already explored in The Broken Column . As a hybrid between a deer and a woman, the innocent Kahlo is wounded and bleeding, preyed upon and hunted down in a clearing in the forest. Staring directly at the viewer, the artist confirms that she is alive, and yet the arrows will slowly kill her. The artist wears a pearl earring, as though highlighting the tension that she feels between her social existence and the desire to exist more freely alongside nature. Kahlo does not portray herself as a delicate and gentle fawn; she is instead a full-bodied stag with large antlers and drooping testicles. Not only does this suggest, like her suited appearance in early family photographs, that Kahlo is interested in combining the sexes to create an androgyne, but also shows that she attempted to align herself with the other great artists of the past, most of whom had been men. The branch beneath the stag's feet is reminiscent of the palm branches that onlookers laid under the feet of Jesus as he arrived in Jerusalem. Kahlo continued to identify with the religious figure of Saint Sebastian from this point until her death. In 1953, she completed a drawing of herself in which eleven arrows pierce her skin. Similarly, the artist Louise Bourgeois, also interested in the visualization of pain, used Saint Sebastian as a recurring symbol in her art. She first depicted the motif in 1947 as an abstracted series of forms, barely distinguishable as a human figure; drawn using watercolor and pencil on pink paper, but then later made obvious pink fabric sculptures of the saint, stuck with arrows, she like Kahlo feeling under attack and afraid.

Oil on masonite - Private Collection

Weeping Coconuts (Cocos gimientes)

This still life is exemplary of Kahlo's late work. More frequently associated with her psychological portraiture, Kahlo in fact painted still lifes throughout her career. She depicted fresh fruit and vegetable produce and objects native to Mexico, painting many small-scale still lifes, especially as she grew progressively ill. The anthropomorphism of the fruit in this composition is symbolic of Kahlo's projection of pain into all things as her health deteriorated at the end of her life. In contrast with the tradition of the cornucopia signifying plentiful and fruitful life, here the coconuts are literally weeping, alluding to the dualism of life and death. A small Mexican flag bearing the affectionate and personal inscription "Painted with all the love. Frida Kahlo" is stuck into a prickly pear, signaling Kahlo's use of the fruit as an emblem of personal expression, and communicating her deep respect for all of nature's gifts. During this period, the artist was heavily reliant on drugs and alcohol to alleviate her pain, so albeit beautiful, her still lifes became progressively less detailed between 1951 and 1953.

Oil on board - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Biography of Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacan, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was German, and had moved to Mexico at a young age where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking over the photography business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry, and raised Frida and her three sisters in a strict and religious household (Frida also had two half sisters from her father's first marriage who were raised in a convent). La Casa Azul was not only Kahlo's childhood home, but also the place that she returned to live and work from 1939 until her death. It later opened as the Frida Kahlo Museum.

Aside from her mother's rigidity, religious fanaticism, and tendency toward outbursts, several other events in Kahlo's childhood affected her deeply. At age six, Kahlo contracted polio; a long recovery isolated her from other children and permanently damaged one of her legs, causing her to walk with a limp after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very close, and particularly so after the experience of being an invalid, enrolled his daughter at the German College in Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer. All of Kahlo's sisters instead attended a convent school so it seems that there was a thirst for expansive learning noted in Frida that resulted in her father making different decisions especially for her. Kahlo was grateful for this and despite a strained relationship with her mother, always credited her father with great tenderness and insight. Still, she was interested in both strands of her roots, and her mixed European and Mexican heritage provided life-long fascination in her approach towards both life and art.

Kahlo had a horrible experience at the German School where she was sexually abused and thus forced to leave. Luckily at the time, the Mexican Revolution and the Minister of Education had changed the education policy, and from 1922 girls were admitted to the National Preparatory School. Kahlo was one of the first 35 girls admitted and she began to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. She excelled academically, became very interested in Mexican culture, and also became active politically.

Early Training

When Kahlo was 15, Diego Rivera (already a renowned artist) was painting the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater of her Preparatory School. Upon seeing him work, Kahlo experienced a moment of infatuation and fascination that she would go on to fully explore later in life. Meanwhile she enjoyed helping her father in his photography studio and received drawing instruction from her father's friend, Fernando Fernandez - for whom she was an apprentice engraver. At this time Kahlo also befriended a dissident group of students known as the "Cachuchas", who confirmed the young artist's rebellious spirit and further encouraged her interest in literature and politics. In 1923 Kahlo fell in love with a fellow member of the group, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and the two remained romantically involved until 1928. Sadly, in 1925 together with Alejandro (who survived unharmed) on their way home from school, Kahlo was involved in a near-fatal bus accident.

Kahlo suffered multiple fractures throughout her body, including a crushed pelvis, and a metal rod impaled her womb. She spent one month in the hospital immobile, and bound in a plaster corset, and following this period, many more months bedridden at home. During her long recovery she began to experiment in small-scale autobiographical portraiture, henceforth abandoning her medical pursuits due to practical circumstances and turning her focus to art.

During the months of convalescence at home Kahlo's parents made her a special easel, gave her a set of paints, and placed a mirror above her head so that she could see her own reflection and make self-portraits. Kahlo spent hours confronting existential questions raised by her trauma including a feeling of dissociation from her identity, a growing interiority, and a general closeness to death. She drew upon the acute pictorial realism known from her father's photographic portraits (which she greatly admired) and approached her own early portraits (mostly of herself, her sisters, and her school friends) with the same psychological intensity. At the time, Kahlo seriously considered becoming a medical illustrator during this period as she saw this as a way to marry her interests in science and art.

By 1927, Kahlo was well enough to leave her bedroom and thus re-kindled her relationship with the Cachuchas group, which was by this point all the more political. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and began to familiarize herself with the artistic and political circles in Mexico City. She became close friends with the photojournalist Tina Modotti and Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It was in June 1928, at one of Modotti's many parties, that Kahlo was personally introduced to Diego Rivera who was already one of Mexico's most famous artists and a highly influential member of the PCM. Soon after, Kahlo boldly asked him to decide, upon looking at one of her portraits, if her work was worthy of pursuing a career as an artist. He was utterly impressed by the honesty and originality of her painting and assured her of her talents. Despite the fact that Rivera had already been married twice, and was known to have an insatiable fondness for women, the two quickly began a romantic relationship and were married in 1929. According to Kahlo's mother, who outwardly expressed her dissatisfaction with the match, the couple were 'the elephant and the dove'. Her father however, unconditionally supported his daughter and was happy to know that Rivera had the financial means to help with Kahlo's medical bills. The new couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos where Kahlo devoted herself entirely to painting.

Mature Period

By the early 1930s, Kahlo's painting had evolved to include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity, a facet of her artwork that had stemmed from her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and from her interest in preserving the revival of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe. Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her German roots is evidenced in her name change from Frieda to Frida, and furthermore in her decision to wear traditional Tehuana costume (the dress from earlier matriarchal times). At the time, two failed pregnancies augmented Kahlo's simultaneously harsh and beautiful representation of the specifically female experience through symbolism and autobiography.

During the first few years of the 1930s Kahlo and Rivera lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York whilst Rivera was creating various murals. Kahlo also completed some seminal works including Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States (1932) with the latter expressing her observations of rivalry taking place between nature and industry in the two lands. It was during this time that Kahlo met and became friends with Imogen Cunningham , Ansel Adams , and Edward Weston . She also met Dr. Leo Eloesser while in San Francisco, the surgeon who would become her closest medical advisor until her death.

Soon after the unveiling of a large and controversial mural that Rivera had made for the Rockefeller Centre in New York (1933), the couple returned to Mexico as Kahlo was feeling particularly homesick. They moved into a new house in the wealthy neighborhood of San Angel. The house was made up of two separate parts joined by a bridge. This set up was appropriate as their relationship was undergoing immense strain. Kahlo had numerous health issues while Rivera, although he had been previously unfaithful, at this time had an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina which understandably hurt Kahlo more than her husband's other infidelities. Kahlo too started to have her own extramarital affairs at this point. Not long after returning to Mexico from the States, she met the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was on holiday in Mexico. The two began an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted 10 years, and it is Muray who is credited as the man who captured Kahlo most colorfully on camera.

While briefly separated from Diego following the affair with her sister and living in her own flat away from San Angel, Kahlo also had a short affair with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi . The two highly politically and socially conscious artists remained friends until Kahlo's death.

In 1936, Kahlo joined the Fourth International (a Communist organization) and often used La Casa Azul as a meeting point for international intellectuals, artists, and activists. She also offered the house where the exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, could take up residence once they were granted asylum in Mexico. In 1937, as well as helping Trotsky, Kahlo and the political icon embarked on a short love affair. Trotsky and his wife remained in La Casa Azul until mid-1939.

During a visit to Mexico City in 1938, the founder of Surrealism , André Breton , was enchanted with Kahlo's painting, and wrote to his friend and art dealer, Julien Levy , who quickly invited Kahlo to hold her first solo show at his gallery in New York. This time round, Kahlo traveled to the States without Rivera and upon arrival caused a huge media sensation. People were attracted to her colorful and exotic (but actually traditional) Mexican costumes and her exhibition was a success. Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the notable guests to attend Kahlo's opening. Kahlo enjoyed some months socializing in New York and then sailed to Paris in early 1939 to exhibit with the Surrealists there. That exhibition was not as successful and she became quickly tired of the over-intellectualism of the Surrealist group. Kahlo returned to New York hoping to continue her love affair with Muray, but he broke off the relationship as he had recently met somebody else. Thus Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City and upon her return Rivera requested a divorce.

Later Years and Death

Following her divorce, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul. She moved away from her smaller paintings and began to work on much larger canvases. In 1940 Kahlo and Rivera remarried and their relationship became less turbulent as Kahlo's health deteriorated. Between the years of 1940-1956, the suffering artist often had to wear supportive back corsets to help her spinal problems, she also had an infectious skin condition, along with syphilis. When her father died in 1941, this exacerbated both her depression and her health. She again was often housebound and found simple pleasure in surrounding herself by animals and in tending to the garden at La Casa Azul.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1940s, Kahlo's work grew in notoriety and acclaim from international collectors, and was included in several group shows both in the United States and in Mexico. In 1943, her work was included in Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York. In this same year, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at a painting school in Mexico City (the school known as La Esmeralda ), and acquired some highly devoted students with whom she undertook some mural commissions. She struggled to continue making a living from her art, never accommodating to clients' wishes if she did not like them, but luckily received a national prize for her painting Moses (1945) and then The Two Fridas painting was bought by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. Meanwhile, the artist grew progressively ill. She had a complicated operation to try and straighten her spine, but it failed and from 1950 onwards, she was often confined to a wheelchair.

She continued to paint relatively prolifically in her final years while also maintaining her political activism, and protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, her first and only solo show in Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed following on the back of a truck. The bed was then placed in the center of the gallery so that she could lie there for the duration of the opening. Kahlo died in 1954 at La Casa Azul. While the official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism, questions have been raised about suicide - either deliberate of accidental. She was 47 years old.

The Legacy of Frida Kahlo

As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with Primitivism , Indigenism , Magic Realism , and Surrealism . Posthumously, Kahlo's artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon. The artist's celebrity status for mass audiences has at times resulted in the compartmentalization of the artist's work as representative of interwar Latin American artwork at large, distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's deeply personal subject matter. Recent exhibitions, such as Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago have attempted to reframe Kahlo's cultural significance by underscoring her lasting impact on the politics of the body and Kahlo's challenge to mainstream aesthetics of representation. Dreamers Awake (2017) held at The White Cube Gallery in London further illustrated the huge influence that Frida Kahlo and a handful of other early female Surrealists have had on the development and progression of female art.

The legacy of Kahlo cannot be underestimated or exaggerated. Not only is it likely that every female artist making art since the 1950s will quote her as an influence, but it is not only artists and those who are interested in art that she inspires. Her art also supports people who suffer as result of accident, as result of miscarriage, and as result of failed marriage. Through imagery, Kahlo articulated experiences so complex, making them more manageable and giving viewers hope that they can endure, recover, and start again.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Frida Kahlo

• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo: Her Photos By Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
• Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up Our Pick By Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa
• Frida Kahlo at Home Our Pick By Suzanne Barbezat
• Frida Kahlo: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series) By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo I Paint My Reality By Christina Burrus
• Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life By Cateherine Reef
• The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait Our Pick By Carlos Fuentes
• Frida by Frida By Frida Kahlo and Raquel Tibol
• Frida Kahlo: The Paintings Our Pick By Hayden Herrera
• Frida Kahlo By Emma Dexter, Tanya Barson
• Frida Kahlo Retrospective By Peter von Becker, Ingried Brugger, Salamon Grimberg, Cristina Kahlo, Arnaldo Kraus, Helga Prignitz-Poda, Francisco Reyes Palma, Florian Steininger, Jeanette Zqingenberger
• Frida Kahlo Masterpieces of Art By Julian Beecroft
• Kahlo (Basic Art Series 2.0) Our Pick By Andrea Kettenmann
• Frida Kahlo's Gadren Our Pick By Adriana Zavala
• The Museum of Modern Art: Discussion of Portrait with Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo: The woman behind the legend - TED_Ed
• Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas” - Great Art Explained Our Pick
• Frida Kahlo: Life of an Artist - Art History School Our Pick
• A Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House – La Casa Azul
• La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick The artist's house museum
• Works from La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City Our Pick By The Google Cultural Institute
• Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern Website of the 2005 Exhibition
• Why Contemporary Art Is Unimaginable Without Frida Kahlo By Priscilla Frank / The Huffington Post / April 29, 2014
• Diary of a Mad Artist By Amy Fine Collins / Vanity Fair / July 2011
• The People's Artist, Herself a Work of Art Our Pick By Holland Cotter / The New York Times / February 29, 2008
• Let Fridamania Commence By Adrian Searle / The Guardian / June 6, 2005
• The Trouble with Frida Kahlo By Stephanie Mencimer / Washington Monthly / June 2002
• Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading Our Pick By Liza Bakewell / Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies / 1993
• Frida Kahlo: Portrait of Chronic Pain By Carol A. Courtney, Michael A. O'Hearn, and Carla C. Franck / Physical Therapy / January 2017
• Medical Imagery in the Art of Frida Kahlo Our Pick By David Lomas, Rosemary Howell / British Medical Journal / December 1989
• Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in “Gringolandia" Our Pick By Rebecca Block and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep / Women’s Art Journal / 1999
• Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A Comparison of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices By Elizabeth Garber / Art Education / March 1992
• NPR: Mexican Artist Used Politics to Rock the Boat Artist Judy Chicago discusses the book she co-authored: "Frida Kahlo: Face to Face"
• Frida Our Pick A 2002 Biographical Film on Frida Kahlo, Starring Salma Hayek
• The Frida Kahlo Corporation A Company with Products Inspired by Frida Kahlo
• How Frida Kahlo Became a Global Brand By Tess Thackara / Artsy.com / Dec 19, 2017 /

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Content compiled and written by Katlyn Beaver

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Rebecca Baillie

ARTS & CULTURE

Frida kahlo.

The Mexican artist’s myriad faces, stranger-than-fiction biography and powerful paintings come to vivid life in a new film

Phyllis Tuchman

Frida Kahlo, who painted mostly small, intensely personal works for herself, family and friends, would likely have been amazed and amused to see what a vast audience her paintings now reach. Today, nearly 50 years after her death, the Mexican artist’s iconic images adorn calendars, greeting cards, posters, pins, even paper dolls. Several years ago the French couturier Jean Paul Gaultier created a collection inspired by Kahlo, and last year a self-portrait she painted in 1933 appeared on a 34-cent U.S. postage stamp. This month, the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as her husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera, opens nationwide. Directed by Julie Taymor, the creative wizard behind Broadway’s long-running hit The Lion King , the film is based on Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography, Frida. Artfully composed, Taymor’s graphic portrayal remains, for the most part, faithful to the facts of the painter’s life. Although some changes were made because of budget constraints, the movie “is true in spirit,” says Herrera, who was first drawn to Kahlo because of “that thing in her work that commands you—that urgency, that need to communicate.”

Focusing on Kahlo’s creativity and tumultuous love affair with Rivera, the film looks beyond the icon to the human being. “I was completely compelled by her story,” says Taymor. “I knew it superficially; and I admired her paintings but didn’t know them well. When she painted, it was for herself. She transcended her pain. Her paintings are her diary. When you’re doing a movie, you want a story like that.” In the film, the Mexican born and raised Hayek, 36, who was one of the film’s producers, strikes poses from the paintings, which then metamorphose into action-filled scenes. “Once I had the concept of having the paintings come alive,” says Taymor, “I wanted to do it.”

Kahlo, who died July 13, 1954, at the age of 47, reportedly of a pulmonary embolism (though some suspected suicide), has long been recognized as an important artist. In 2001-2002, a major traveling exhibition showcased her work alongside that of Georgia O’Keeffe and Canada’s Emily Carr. Earlier this year several of her paintings were included in a landmark Surrealism show in London and New York. Currently, works by both Kahlo and Rivera are on view through January 5, 2003, at the SeattleArt Museum. As Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and one of the organizers of a 1993 exhibition of Kahlo’s work, points out, “Kahlo made personal women’s experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers—men and women—be moved by them.”

Kahlo produced only about 200 paintings—primarily still lifes and portraits of herself, family and friends. She also kept an illustrated journal and did dozens of drawings. With techniques learned from both her husband and her father, a professional architectural photographer, she created haunting, sensual and stunningly original paintings that fused elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore into powerful narratives. In contrast to the 20th-century trend toward abstract art, her work was uncompromisingly figurative. Although she received occasional commissions for portraits, she sold relatively few paintings during her lifetime. Today her works fetch astronomical prices at auction. In 2000, a 1929 self-portrait sold for more than $5 million.

Biographies of the artist, which have been translated into many languages, read like the fantastical novels of Gabriel García Márquez as they trace the story of two painters who could not live with or without each other. (Taymor says she views her film version of Kahlo’s life as a “great, great love story.”) Married twice, divorced once and separated countless times, Kahlo and Rivera had numerous affairs, hobnobbed with Communists, capitalists and literati and managed to create some of the most compelling visual images of the 20th century. Filled with such luminaries as writer André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, playwright Clare Boothe Luce and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Kahlo’s life played out on a phantasmagorical canvas.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón July 6, 1907, and lived in a house (the Casa Azul, or Blue House, now the Museo Frida Kahlo) built by her father in Coyoacán, then a quiet suburb of Mexico City. The third of her parents’ four daughters, Frida was her father’s favorite—the most intelligent, he thought, and the most like himself. She was a dutiful child but had a fiery temperament. (Shortly before Kahlo and Rivera were wed in 1929, Kahlo’s father warned his future son-in-law, who at age 42 had already had two wives and many mistresses, that Frida, then 21, was “a devil.” Rivera replied: “I know it.”)

A German Jew with deep-set eyes and a bushy mustache, Guillermo Kahlo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19. After his first wife died in childbirth, he married Matilde Calderón, a Catholic whose ancestry included Indians as well as a Spanish general. Frida portrayed her hybrid ethnicity in a 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (opposite).

Kahlo adored her father. On a portrait she painted of him in 1951, she inscribed the words, “character generous, intelligent and fine.” Her feelings about her mother were more conflicted. On the one hand, the artist considered her “very nice, active, intelligent.” But she also saw her as fanatically religious, calculating and sometimes even cruel. “She did not know how to read or write,” recalled the artist. “She only knew how to count money.”

A chubby child with a winning smile and sparkling eyes, Kahlo was stricken with polio at the age of 6. After her recovery, her right leg remained thinner than her left and her right foot was stunted. Despite her disabilities or, perhaps, to compensate for them, Kahlo became a tomboy. She played soccer, boxed, wrestled and swam competitively. “My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles,” the artist later recalled. (As an adult, she collected dolls.)

Her father taught her photography, including how to retouch and color prints, and one of his friends gave her drawing lessons. In 1922, the 15-year-old Kahlo entered the elite, predominantly male NationalPreparatory School, which was located near the Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City.

As it happened, Rivera was working in the school’s auditorium on his first mural. In his autobiography— My Art, My Life —the artist recalled that he was painting one night high on a scaffold when “all of a sudden the door flew open, and a girl who seemed to be no more than ten or twelve was propelled inside. . . . She had,” he continued, “unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes.” Kahlo, who was actually 16, apparently played pranks on the artist. She stole his lunch and soaped the steps by the stage where he was working.

Kahlo planned to become a doctor and took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Her knowledge of these disciplines would later add realistic touches to her portraits. She also had a passion for philosophy, which she liked to flaunt. According to biographer Herrera, she would cry out to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, “lend me your Spengler. I don’t have anything to read on the bus.” Her bawdy sense of humor and passion for fun were well known among her circle of friends, many of whom would become leaders of the Mexican left.

Then, on September 17, 1925, the bus on which she and her boyfriend were riding home from school was rammed by a trolley car. A metal handrail broke off and pierced her pelvis. Several people died at the site, and doctors at the hospital where the 18-year-old Kahlo was taken did not think she would survive. Her spine was fractured in three places, her pelvis was crushed and her right leg and foot were severely broken. The first of many operations she would endure over the years brought only temporary relief from pain. “In this hospital,” Kahlo told Gómez Arias, “death dances around my bed at night.” She spent a month in the hospital and was later fitted with a plaster corset, variations of which she would be compelled to wear throughout her life.

Confined to bed for three months, she was unable to return to school. “Without giving it any particular thought,” she recalled, “I started painting.” Kahlo’s mother ordered a portable easel and attached a mirror to the underside of her bed’s canopy so that the nascent artist could be her own model.

Though she knew the works of the old masters only from reproductions, Kahlo had an uncanny ability to incorporate elements of their styles in her work. In a painting she gave to Gómez Arias, for instance, she portrayed herself with a swan neck and tapered fingers, referring to it as “Your Botticeli.”

During her months in bed, she pondered her changed circumstances. To Gómez Arias, she wrote, “Life will reveal [its secrets] to you soon. I already know it all. . . . I was a child who went about in a world of colors. . . . My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants.”

As she grew stronger, Kahlo began to participate in the politics of the day, which focused on achieving autonomy for the government-run university and a more democratic national government. She joined the Communist party in part because of her friendship with the young Italian photographer Tina Modotti, who had come to Mexico in 1923 with her then companion, photographer Edward Weston. It was most likely at a soiree given by Modotti in late 1928 that Kahlo re-met Rivera.

They were an unlikely pair. The most celebrated artist in Mexico and a dedicated Communist, the charismatic Rivera was more than six feet tall and tipped the scales at 300 pounds. Kahlo, 21 years his junior, weighed 98 pounds and was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He was ungainly and a bit misshapen; she was heart-stoppingly alluring. According to Herrera, Kahlo “started with dramatic material: nearly beautiful, she had slight flaws that increased her magnetism.” Rivera described her “fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face,” and compared her thick eyebrows, which met above her nose, to “the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.”

Rivera courted Kahlo under the watchful eyes of her parents. Sundays he visited the Casa Azul, ostensibly to critique her paintings. “It was obvious to me,” he later wrote, “that this girl was an authentic artist.” Their friends had reservations about the relationship. One Kahlo pal called Rivera “a pot-bellied, filthy old man.” But Lupe Marín, Rivera’s second wife, marveled at how Kahlo, “this so-called youngster,” drank tequila “like a real mariachi.”

The couple married on August 21, 1929. Kahlo later said her parents described the union as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.” Kahlo’s 1931 Colonial-style portrait, based on a wedding photograph, captures the contrast. The newlyweds spent almost a year in Cuernavaca while Rivera executed murals commissioned by the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Kahlo was a devoted wife, bringing Rivera lunch every day, bathing him, cooking for him. Years later Kahlo would paint a naked Rivera resting on her lap as if he were a baby.

With the help of Albert Bender, an American art collector, Rivera obtained a visa to the United States, which previously had been denied him. Since Kahlo had resigned from the Communist party when Rivera, under siege from the Stalinists, was expelled, she was able to accompany him. Like other left-wing Mexican intellectuals, she was now dressing in flamboyant native Mexican costume—embroidered tops and colorful, floor-length skirts, a style associated with the matriarchal society of the region of Tehuantepec. Rivera’s new wife was “a little doll alongside Diego,” Edward Weston wrote in his journal in 1930. “People stop in their tracks to look in wonder.”

The Riveras arrived in the United States in November 1930, settling in San Francisco while Rivera worked on murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and Kahlo painted portraits of friends. After a brief stay in New York City for a show of Rivera’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, the couple moved on to Detroit, where Rivera filled the Institute of Arts’ garden court with compelling industrial scenes, and then back to New York City, where he worked on a mural for Rockefeller Center. They stayed in the United States for three years. Diego felt he was living in the future; Frida grew homesick. “I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste,” she observed. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.”

In Manhattan, however, Kahlo was exhilarated by the opportunity to see the works of the old masters firsthand. She also enjoyed going to the movies, especially those starring the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy. And at openings and dinners, she and Rivera met the rich and the renowned.

But for Kahlo, despair and pain were never far away. Before leaving Mexico, she had suffered the first in a series of miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. Due to her trolley-car injuries, she seemed unable to bring a child to term, and every time she lost a baby, she was thrown into a deep depression. Moreover, her polio-afflicted and badly injured right leg and foot often troubled her. While in Michigan, a miscarriage cut another pregnancy short. Then her mother died. Up to that time she had persevered. “I am more or less happy,” she had written to her doctor, “because I have Diego and my mother and my father whom I love so much. I think that is enough. . . . ” Now her world was starting to fall apart.

Kahlo had arrived in America an amateur artist. She had never attended art school, had no studio and had not yet focused on any particular subject matter. “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,” she would say years later. Her biographers report that despite her injuries she regularly visited the scaffolding on which Rivera worked in order to bring him lunch and, they speculate, to ward off alluring models. As she watched him paint, she learned the fundamentals of her craft. His imagery recurs in her pictures along with his palette—the sunbaked colors of pre- Columbian art. And from him—though his large-scale wall murals depict historical themes, and her small-scale works relate her autobiography—she learned how to tell a story in paint.

Works from her American period reveal her growing narrative skill. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline betweenMexico and the United States, Kahlo’s homesickness finds expression in an image of herself standing between a pre-Columbian ruin and native flowers on one side and Ford Motor Company smokestacks and looming skyscrapers on the other. In HenryFordHospital, done soon after her miscarriage in Detroit, Kahlo’s signature style starts to emerge. Her desolation and pain are graphically conveyed in this powerful depiction of herself, nude and weeping, on a bloodstained bed. As she would do time and again, she exorcises a devastating experience through the act of painting.

When they returned to Mexico toward the end of 1933, both Kahlo and Rivera were depressed. His RockefellerCenter mural had created a controversy when the owners of the project objected to the heroic portrait of Lenin he had included in it. When Rivera refused to paint out the portrait, the owners had the mural destroyed. (Rivera later re-created a copy for the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.) To a friend Kahlo wrote, Diego “thinks that everything that is happening to him is my fault, because I made him come [back] to Mexico. . . . ” Kahlo herself became physically ill, as she was prone to do in times of stress. Whenever Rivera, a notorious philanderer, became involved with other women, Kahlo succumbed to chronic pain, illness or depression. When he returned home from his wanderings, she would usually recover.

Seeking a fresh start, the Riveras moved into a new home in the upscale San Angel district of Mexico City. The house, now the Diego Rivera Studio museum, featured his-and-her, brightly colored (his was pink, hers, blue) Le Corbusier-like buildings connected by a narrow bridge. Though the plans included a studio for Kahlo, she did little painting, as she was hospitalized three times in 1934. When Rivera began an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, Kahlo moved into an apartment. A few months later, however, after a brief dalliance with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Kahlo reconciled with Rivera and returned to San Angel.

In late 1936, Rivera, whose leftist sympathies were more pronounced than ever, interceded with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to have the exiled Leon Trotsky admitted to Mexico. In January 1937, the Russian revolutionary took up a two-year residency with his wife and bodyguards at the Casa Azul, Kahlo’s childhood home, available because Kahlo’s father had moved in with one of her sisters. In a matter of months, Trotsky and Kahlo became lovers. “El viejo” (“the old man”), as she called him, would slip her notes in books. She painted a mesmerizing fulllength portrait of herself (far right), in bourgeois finery, as a gift for the Russian exile. But this liaison, like most of her others, was short lived.

The French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, also spent time with the Riveras in San Angel. (Breton would later offer to hold an exhibition of Kahlo’s work in Paris.) Arriving in Mexico in the spring of 1938, they stayed for several months and joined the Riveras and the Trotskys on sight-seeing jaunts. The three couples even considered publishing a book of their conversations. This time, it was Frida and Jacqueline who bonded.

Although Kahlo would claim her art expressed her solitude, she was unusually productive during the time spent with the Trotskys and the Bretons. Her imagery became more varied and her technical skills improved. In the summer of 1938, the actor and art collector Edward G. Robinson visited the Riveras in San Angel and paid $200 each for four of Kahlo’s pictures, among the first she sold. Of Robinson’s purchase she later wrote, “For me it was such a surprise that I marveled and said: ‘This way I am going to be able to be free, I’ll be able to travel and do what I want without asking Diego for money.’”

Shortly after, Kahlo went to New York City for her first one-person show, held at the Julien Levy Gallery, one of the first venues in America to promote Surrealist art. In a brochure for the exhibition, Breton praised Kahlo’s “mixture of candour and insolence.” On the guest list for the opening were artist Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom Kahlo later wrote a fan letter, art historian Meyer Schapiro and Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce, who commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of a friend who had committed suicide. Upset by the graphic nature of Kahlo’s completed painting, however, Luce wanted to destroy it but in the end was persuaded not to. The show was a critical success. Time magazine noted that “the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s . . . wife, Frida Kahlo. . . . Frida’s pictures, mostly painted in oil on copper, had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition, the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.” A little later, Kahlo’s hand, bedecked with rings, appeared on the cover of Vogue .

Heady with success, Kahlo sailed to France, only to discover that Breton had done nothing about the promised show. A disappointed Kahlo wrote to her latest lover, portrait photographer Nickolas Muray: “It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people—good for nothing—are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.” Marcel Duchamp— “The only one,” as Kahlo put it, “who has his feet on the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the Surrealists”—saved the day. He got Kahlo her show. The Louvre purchased a self-portrait, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist. At the exhibition, according to Rivera, artist Wassily Kandinsky kissed Kahlo’s cheeks “while tears of sheer emotion ran down his face.” Also an admirer, Pablo Picasso gave Kahlo a pair of earrings shaped like hands, which she donned for a later self-portrait. “Neither Derain, nor I, nor you,” Picasso wrote to Rivera, “are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.”

Returning to Mexico after six months abroad, Kahlo found Rivera entangled with yet another woman and moved out of their San Angel house and into the Casa Azul. By the end of 1939 the couple had agreed to divorce.

Intent on achieving financial independence, Kahlo painted more intensely than ever before. “To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult,” she would tell the group of students—known as Los Fridos—to whom she gave instruction in the mid-1940s. “It is necessary . . . to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting.” It was during this period that Kahlo created some of her most enduring and distinctive work. In self-portraits, she pictured herself in native Mexican dress with her hair atop her head in traditional braids. Surrounded by pet monkeys, cats and parrots amid exotic vegetation reminiscent of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, she often wore the large pre-Columbian necklaces given to her by Rivera.

In one of only two large canvases ever painted by Kahlo, The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait done at the time of her divorce, one Frida wears a European outfit torn open to reveal a “broken” heart; the other is clad in native Mexican costume. Set against a stormy sky, the “twin sisters,” joined together by a single artery running from one heart to the other, hold hands. Kahlo later wrote that the painting was inspired by her memory of an imaginary childhood friend, but the fact that Rivera himself had been born a twin may also have been a factor in its composition. In another work from this period, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo, in a man’s suit, holds a pair of scissors she has used to sever the locks that surround the chair on which she sits. More than once when she discovered Rivera with other women, she had cut off the long hair that he adored.

Despite the divorce, Kahlo and Rivera remained connected. When Kahlo’s health deteriorated, Rivera sought medical advice from a mutual friend, San Francisco doctor Leo Eloesser, who felt her problem was “a crisis of nerves.” Eloesser suggested she resolve her relationship with Rivera. “Diego loves you very much,” he wrote, “and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves—1) Painting 2) Women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous.” Kahlo apparently recognized the truth of this observation and resigned herself to the situation. In December 1940, the couple remarried in San Francisco.

The reconciliation, however, saw no diminution in tumult. Kahlo continued to fight with her philandering husband and sought out affairs of her own with various men and women, including several of his lovers. Still, Kahlo never tired of setting a beautiful table, cooking elaborate meals (her stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera filled a cookbook with Kahlo’s recipes) and arranging flowers in her home from her beloved garden. And there were always festive occasions to celebrate. At these meals, recalled Guadalupe, “Frida’s laughter was loud enough to rise above the din of yelling and revolutionary songs.”

During the last decade of her life, Kahlo endured painful operations on her back, her foot and her leg. (In 1953, her right leg had to be amputated below the knee.) She drank heavily—sometimes downing two bottles of cognac a day—and she became addicted to painkillers. As drugs took control of her hands, the surface of her paintings became rough, her brushwork agitated.

In the spring of 1953, Kahlo finally had a one-person show in Mexico City. Her work had previously been seen there only in group shows. Organized by her friend, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, the exhibition was held at Alvarez Bravo’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. Though still bedridden following the surgery on her leg, Kahlo did not want to miss the opening night. Arriving by ambulance, she was carried to a canopied bed, which had been transported from her home. The headboard was decorated with pictures of family and friends; papier-mâché skeletons hung from the canopy. Surrounded by admirers, the elaborately costumed Kahlo held court and joined in singing her favorite Mexican ballads.

Kahlo remained a dedicated leftist. Even as her strength ebbed, she painted portraits of Marx and of Stalin and attended demonstrations. Eight days before she died, Kahlo, in a wheelchair and accompanied by Rivera, joined a crowd of 10,000 in Mexico City protesting the overthrow, by the CIA, of the Guatemalan president.

Although much of Kahlo’s life was dominated by her debilitated physical state and emotional turmoil, Taymor’s film focuses on the artist’s inventiveness, delight in beautiful things and playful but caustic sense of humor. Kahlo, too, preferred to emphasize her love of life and a good time. Just days before her death, she incorporated the words Viva La Vida (Long Live Life) into a still life of watermelons. Though some have wondered whether the artist may have intentionally taken her own life, others dismiss the notion. Certainly, she enjoyed life fully and passionately. “It is not worthwhile,” she once said, “to leave this world without having had a little fun in life.”

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Frida Kahlo biography

Do you know about Frida Kahlo, the famous Mexican artist? Practise your reading in English with this biography.

Do the preparation exercise first. Then read the text and do the other exercises.

Preparation

Frida kahlo.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist. Her full name was Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón. She was born in Coyoacán, near Mexico City, in 1907. Frida grew up in a bright blue house called La Casa Azul with her parents and sisters. When she was six years old she became ill with polio and her leg was permanently damaged.

Starting to paint

Frida spent a lot of her life in and out of hospitals. She had many health problems and she suffered a lot of pain. When she was eighteen, she was in a bus accident. She broke lots of bones and she spent many months recovering. It was at this time that Frida started to paint. Many of her paintings from this time are self-portraits that show her pain and suffering.

Married life and career

In 1929 Frida married Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist who was famous for painting huge murals on walls. Both artists continued their work and became successful at home and abroad. After they got married, Frida started to wear traditional Mexican clothes and became interested in Mexican folk art. This influenced her paintings, which are very bright and colourful, with an original style that is very personal to Frida. However, they continued to show the pain and sadness which she experienced during her life.

Death and legacy

Frida Kahlo died on 13 July 1954, after suffering more and more health problems. Her husband died three years later. Today Frida and Diego's home, La Casa Azul, is a very popular museum, dedicated to Frida's life and work. It displays paintings by Frida and Diego, as well as many objects from their life, to help tell the story of one of the most important artists in the twentieth century.

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Art in 2 minutes

Life and works of the greatest artists summarized in two minutes

Frida Kahlo: life and paintings | summary in 10 points

In two minutes I will tell you the story of the immense Mexican painter, her illness, her tormented love for Diego and her beautiful self-portraits.

A fragile body and an indomitable spirit. A difficult life , that of Frida Kahlo, marked by a long illness and great passions, lived without hesitation, unconditionally with all of herself, abandoning rationality to the heart.

The passion for art, the bond with her Mexico and the tormented love for D iego Rivera , the companion of a lifetime. Frida’s life was short but very rich because living with the heart does not mean simply counting the days, months or years, but it means counting emotions, because life is not mere survival. And it is not true that those who live longer live more.

Frida Kahlo was a courageous artist, capable of transforming suffering into inspiration , defeats into masterpieces, shaping works that are a proud and powerful scream at the challenge of living.

BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS OF FRIDA KAHLO : SUMMARY IN TWO MINUTES (OF ART)

Who is Frida Kahlo?

1. Frida Kahlo (Coyoacán 1907 – 1954) is considered one of the most important Mexican painters . Many count her among the artists linked to the surrealist movement, but she will never confirm her adherence to this current.

Since she was a child she has shown that she has a strong, passionate character, combined with talent and skills that are out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, her strength of character compensates for a weak physique : she was in fact affected by spina bifida, which her parents and the people around her mistake for polio, thus failing to treat her properly.

The accident

2. The hardest test for Frida, however, arrived in 1925. One day, while returning from school by bus she was involved in a terrible accident that caused her multiple fractures of the spine, several vertebrae and pelvis. She risked dying and wass saved only by undergoing 32 surgeries that forced her to bed for months.

She was only 18 years old and the injuries to her body made her suffer for a lifetime, irremediably compromising her mobility.

Frida’s first self-portait

3. During the months in bed immobilized by metal busts and plaster, her parents gave her paints and brushes to help her pass the long days. This gift started a dazzling artistic career.

Frida’s first work was a self-portrait (which was followed by many others) that she gave to a boy she was in love with.

4. The parents immediately encouraged her passion for art, so much so that they installed a mirror on the ceiling of Frida’s room, so that she could withdraw in the long lonely afternoons. This is the main reason for the artist’s numerous self-portraits.

She herself declared: “I paint self-portraits because I am often alone, because I am the person I know best”.

The love story with Diego Rivera

5. Frida Kahlo in 1928, at the age of 21, joined the Mexican Communist Party , becoming a staunch activist. It was in that year that he met Diego Rivera , the most famous painter of revolutionary Mexico. She had met him for the first time when he was only fifteen (and he was thirty-six), under the scaffolding of the national preparatory school, while Diego was painting a mural for the school auditorium.

6. In 1929 she married Diego , despite the fact that he was 21 years older than her and was already in his third marriage. Diego also had a reputation as a “playboy” and an unfaithful husband.

The relationship between the two artists was very intense: art , betrayal , passion … and fighting with guns. She herself said: “I have suffered two serious accidents in my life … the first was when a tram ran over me and the second was Diego Rivera.”

An open marriage…

7. Frida Kahlo has had many lovers (men and women), including the Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky and the poet André Breton , but she was never able to have children, due to her physique compromised by the accident.

When she became pregnant with her first child, Frida went to great lengths to carry the pregnancy forward. She only had to give up when doctors forced her to have an abortion to prevent both her and the baby from losing their lives.

8. The relationship beetween Frida Kahlo and Diego could be considered an “ open marriage “, more because of Diego’s infidelities than by choice of Frida, who suffered greatly from her husband’s betrayals, who even had an affair with Frida’s younger sister, Cristina.

Given the impossibility of relying on Diego’s loyalty, the two decided to live in separate houses , joined together by a small bridge, so that each of them could have their own “artistic” space.

Frida and Surrealism

9. The works of Frida kahlo have often been compared to the Surrealist movement , but Frida has always rejected this closeness, arguing: “I have always painted my reality, not my dreams”.

Viva la vida

10. Coldplay’s album Viva la vida or Death and All His Friends (2008) is inspired by a famous phrase that Kahlo wrote on her latest painting, eight days before her death at the age of 47.

Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly? Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

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Frida's Bibliography

The most complete bibliography in the web - books.

• Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America: The Modern Era , 1920-1980. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Alcantara, Isabel - Egnolf, Sandra. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera , International Book Import Service, Inc., September 1999.
• Alkayat, Zena.  Library of Luminaries: Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Biography . Chronicle Books, 2016.
• Altamirano, Marcela. Frida Kahlo.  Grupo Editorial Tomo, 2005.
• Amador Tello, Judith. El porqué de "Las dos Fridas" An article from the magazine Proceso, May 29, 2005 [HTML] (Digital, available from amazon.com)
• Anderson Jones, Jane. Frida Kahlo (Rourke Biographies the Arts). Rourke Pub Group, September 1993.
• Ankori, Gannit. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation Greenwood Publishing Group, January 30, 2002.
• Ankori, Gannit.  Frida Kahlo . Reaktion Books, 2013.
• Ankori, Gannit. Henestrosa Circe and Olcott, Hillary C.  Frida Kahlo and San Francisco: Constructing her identity . Hirmer Verlag, 2/07/2020.
• Arnaldi, Valeria. Gli amori di Frida Kahlo . Red Star Press, 2016.
• Arquin, Florence.  Frida Kahlo: Portraits of An Icon . Turner, 2003
• Arteaga, Agustin.  Mexico 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde . Yale University Press, 2017.
• Artes de Mexico [Mexico City] 198 (1960). Issue titled " Monjas Coronadas ". Various authors. English translations: 95-109.
• Ashton, Dore. Surrealism and Latina America , in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. Museum of Modern Art and Harry N. Abrahams Inc., New York 1993, pp.106-15.
• Baddeley, Oriana, and Valerie Fraser. Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity In Contemporary Latin America . London and New York: Verso, New Left Books, published in association with the Latin American Bureau, 1989.
• Ballinger, James K. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Twentieth Century Mexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection . Museum of Contemporary Art, August 2000.
• Badillo Rev. Ruben Garcia . Frida Se Confiesa . Trafford, February 22, 2012.
• Badillo Rev. Ruben Garcia . Código Frieda: La primera y la última firma . Trafford, October 28, 2011.
• Barbezat, Suzanne.  Frida Kahlo at Home . Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd, 2016.
• Barraza, Eduardo. The Blue House of Frida Kahlo. Hispanic Institute of Social Issues, 2007. Kindle edition.
• Bartra, Eli. Mujer, ideología y arta. Ideología y política en Frida Kahlo y Diego Rivera . Barcelona: La Sal, Ediciones de les Dones, 1987.
• Bauer, Claudia. Frida Kahlo . Prestel, 2014.
• Berest, Claire.  Nada es negro.  Irradiador, 10/11/2023
• Bernard, Caroline.  Frida Kahlo et les couleurs de la vie : une Biographie romancée de Frida Kahlo.  Fleuve éditions (10 novembre 2022) 
• Bernier-Grand, Carmen T. Frida: Viva La Vida! Long Live Life! . Marshall Cavendish Corp/Ccb (November 1, 2007).
• Betcher, Sharon V.. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement . Augsburg Fortress Publishers (November 1, 2007).
• Billeter, Erica (Editor). The World of Frida Kahlo : The Blue House . Published by Museum of Fine Arts Houston, January 1, 1994.
• Biotti, Valeria. Frida Kahlo. Strappi, voli e bizzarrie. Una vita oltre. Diarkos, 14 Jul 2021.
• Bonito Oliva Achille, Martha Zamora, Frida Kahlo , Giunti Editore (13 Sep. 2004).
• Bonura Stefania, Frida Kahlo. Arte, amore, rivoluzione,  Nda Press (16 mar. 2014).
• Brabon, Katherine.  Body Friend.  Ultimo Press, 1 September 2023.
• Braverman, Kate. The Incantation of Frida K.  Seven Stories Press, April 2002.
• Brenner, Anita. Idols Behind Altars . New York, Payson & Clarke, 1929.
• Breton, André. Surrealism and Painting . Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972. Italian translation: Breton, André. Il surrealismo e la pittura, 1928-1965. Firenze, Marchi & Bertolli, 1966.
• Brewster, Koy.  Marian Anderson Frida Kahlo . Benchmark Education Company, 2011.
• Brownridge, Lucy.  Portrait of an Artist: Frida Kahlo: Discover the Artist Behind the Masterpieces . Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd, 2019.
• Burrus, Christina. Discoveries: Frida Kahlo: Painting Her Own Reality,Abrams (April 1, 2008).
• Cacucci, Pino. ¡VIVA LA VIDA!, Feltrinelli, 2010.
• Camanzi, Cristian.  Autoritratto con collana di spine di Frida Kahlo . Audioquadro. Area 51 Publishing, 2017 ebook.
• Cano-Murillo, Kathy.  Forever Frida: A Celebration of the Life, Art, Loves, Words, and Style of Frida Kahlo . Adams Media Corporation, 2019.
• Carra, Enrichetta.  Frida Khalo, l'altra . Edizioni Clandestine, 2010
• Casares Olivia e A. Riccio, Memoria in chiaroscuro. Diario apocrifo di Frida Kahlo,  Iacobelli (25 Mar. 2014).
• Castello-Cortes, Ian.  Cercasi Frida disperatamente . Ediz. illustrata, L'Ippocampo, 2019
• Cercenà Vanna e Sagona Marina, Frida Kahlo , Einaudi Ragazzi (11 Sep. 2007).
• Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,1985.
• Charlot, Jean. The Mexican Mural Renaissance: 1920-1925 . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967.
• Chicago Judy, Frances Borzello. Frida Kahlo: Face to Face . Prestel USA, September 1, 2010.
• Ciprandi, Sara.  Frida. Vita di Frida Kahlo . Hop!, 2017
• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art . See especially: "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," (189-214) and "On Ethnographic Surrealism ," (117-151). Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1988.
• Coates Beth, Foley Elizabeth.  Cosa farebbe Frida Kahlo? Lezioni di vita da 50 donne coraggiose . Sonzogno, 2018 ebook.
• Colbert, David. Frida Kahlo . Aladdin Paperbacks, 2009.
• Collins, Charlie.  Frida Kahlo – Style Icon . Illustrated by Camilla Perkins. Hardie Grant Books, 12 July 2022
• Concas, Andrea.  Frida Kahlo. 100 domande. 150 risposte . ChatBOT book, Mondadori, 23/03/2021
• Cortanze de Gérard, Kahlo Frida , Gaffi Editore in Roma (5 Sep. 2012)
• Cruz, Barbara. Frida Kahlo: Portrait of a Mexican Painter (Hispanic Biographies). Enslow Pub., August 1, 1996.
• Cullen, Greg. Mary Morgan / Tarzanne / Frida and Diego Dufour Editions., January 1998.
• Dalle Luche Riccardo, Palermo Angela.  Psicoanalisi immaginaria di Frida Kahlo . Mimesis, 2016.
• Davies, Arianna.  What Would Frida Do?: A Guide to Living Boldly . Seal Press. 20 Oct. 2020.
• Davies, Julie. An o pinionated Guide to   Women Painters . Hoxton Mini Press. 7 Mar 2024.
• de Cortanze, Gérard.  Gli amanti di Coyoacan.  Neri Pozza, 11 ottobre, 2022.
• de Cortanze, Gérard. Frida Kahlo. La belleza terrible.  Ediciones Paidós, April 19, 2012.
• de Cortanze Gérard, Freund Gisèle.  Frida Kahlo: The Gisèle Freund Photographs . Abrams, New York, 2014.
• de Cortanze, Gérard, Viva Frida . Lattès. 14/09/2022
• de la Mora, Francisco.  Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Work, Her Home . March 2023, SelfMadeHero.
• Deffebach, Nancy.  Maria Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo: Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art . University of Texas Press, 2016. 
• Delahunt, Meaghan. In the Casa Azul St. Martin's Press, April 2002.
• del Conde, Teresa. Vida de Frida Kahlo . Mexico City: Secretaría de la Presidencia, Departamento Editorial, 1976.
• del Conde, Teresa. Frida Kahlo: La Pintora Y El Mito . Plaza & Janes Mexico (August 2002).
• Di Martino, Mirko. Frida Kahlo . StreetLib, 2020 ebook
• Doeden, Matt.  Frida Kahlo: Artist and Activist . Lerner Publications TM, 2020
• Drakulic, Slavencka; Pribichevich-Zoric, Christina. Frida's Bed . Penguin, August 26 2008.
• Dromundo, Baltasar. Mi Calle de San Idelfonso . Mexico City: Editorial Guarania, 1956.
• Drucker, Malka. Frida Kahlo . University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
• Drucker, Malka. Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph in Her Life and Art (The Barnard Biography Series). Out of print.
• Durán, Fray Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar . Translated and edited by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
• Ethceves, Florencia,  Cocinera de Frida . Planeta Publishing (22 Noviembre 2022)
• Faucher, Sofie. La Casa Azul: inspired by the writings of Frida Kahlo. Oberon Books ,September 1, 2003.
• Fisanotti, Susanna.  «Viva la vida» Frida Kahlo. La famosa pittrice messicana del '900 icona e interprete del mondo femminile . Arshile booklets, 2015.
• Flores Guerrero, Raùl. Cinco Pintores Mexicanos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1957.
• Foster, Hal. Recodings, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. See especially: "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks," (181-208) Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press,1985.
• Franco, Jean. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
• Franger, Gaby and Kahlo, Cristina. Frida Folk. Tara Publishing. 2019
• Frazier, Nancy. Frida Kahlo : Mysterious Painter (The Library of Famous Women). Blackbirch Marketing, June 1994.
• Frith, Margareth. Frida Kahlo: The Artist who Painted Herself Grosset & Dunlap, August 11, 2003
• Fuentes, Carlo and Lowe Sarah M. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-portrait. Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1995. Italian translation: Frida Kahlo: autoritratto intimo, Leonardo, 1995.
• Fuentes, Carlos and Sarah Lowe. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. Harry N. Abrams Inc., April 1998.
• Fuentes, Carlos. The Years with Laura Diaz. Farrar Straus & Giroux, October 2000.
• Galasso, Alessandra.  Frida vestida. Abiti e accessori di Frida Kahlo . Illustratore: Alessandra Scandella, 24 Ore Cultura, 2018
• Garcia, Rupert. Frida Kahlo: A Bibliography and Biographic Introduction. Berkeley: University of California, Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit,1983.
• Garza, Hedda. Frida Kahlo (Hispanics of Achievement). Chelsea House Pub, 1993.
• Garza, Hedda and Robert Green. Frida Kahlo (Hispanics of Achievement). Chelsea House Pub, 1993.
• Grimberg, Salomon. I Will Never Forget You: Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray. Chronicle Books, Oct. 26 2006.
• Gruening, Ernest. Mexico and Its Heritage. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1928.
• Gottschalk, Maren. Die Farben meiner Seele: Die Lebensgeschichte der Frida Kahlo. Beltz Gmbh, Julius, May 1, 2012.
• Grimberg, Salomon;Oles, James ; Fuentes, Carlos and Tibol, Raquel. Frida Kahlo: National Homage 1907-2007. Editorial RM (March 1, 2008).
• Grimberg, Salomon and Herrera, Hayden Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes Merrel, April 2008.
• Grimberg, Salomon and Herrera, Hayden Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself Merrel, April 2008.
• Guzman Lila, Guzman Rick.  Frida Kahlo: Pinto Su Vida/ Painting Her Life.  Enslow Elementary, 2007
• Haghenbeck  F.G., The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo: A Novel , Atria Books (10 Jan. 2013).
• Hardie Grant Books.  Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom: Inspirational Quotes and Wise Words from a Legendary Icon.  14 June 2018
• Hardin, Terri. Frida Kahlo: A modern Master (Art Series). Out of print.
• Heijenoort, Jean van. With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1978.
• Helm, MacKinley. Modern Mexican Painters. New York: Dover, 1968.
• Henestrosa, Andrés. Una Alacena de Alacenas. Mexico City: Ediciones de Bellas Artes, 1970.
• Herrera, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Italian translation: Frida: Vita di Frida Kahlo, La Tartaruga edizioni, Milano 1993.
• Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. Harper Collins, New York 1991.
• Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo (Rizzoli Art Series). Rizzoli Intl Pubns, November 1992.
• Herrera, Juan Felipe. The Roots of a Thousand Embraces: Dialogues. Manic d Pr, August 1994.
• Hershon Elia, Guerra Roberto. Frida Kahlo . Pahidon, 2002.
• Hesse, Marìa.  Frida Kahlo. Una biografia.  Solferino, 2018
• Higgies, Jennifer. The Mirror And The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits . W&N, 18/03/2021
• Hill, Laban. Casa Azul: An Encounter with Frida Kahlo Watson-Guptill, July 1, 2005
• Iturbide Graciela, Mario Bellatin. Graciela Iturbide, El Bano de Frida Kahlo Editorial Rm, January 27, 2011
• Jamis, Rauda.  Frida Kahlo. autoportrait d'une femme . Presses de la Renaissance, Paris, 1985
• Jamis, Rauda. Frida Kahlo . Circe Ediciones, S.L.U., 1989.
• Johnston, Lissa.  Frida Kahlo: Painter of Strength.  Capstone Press , 2006.
• Judah, Hettie. Frida Kahlo . Laurence King Publishing, 2020
• Kahlo, Frida and Salomon Grimberg. Lola Alvarex Bravo: The Frida Kahlo Photographs. Distributed Art Pub (Dap), March 1992.
• Kahlo, Frida. Frida Kahlo : Masterpieces (Schirmer's Visual Library). W W Norton & Co, December 1994.
• Kahlo, Frida and Martha Zamora (Editor). The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas. Chronicle Books, 1995.
• Kahlo, Frida.  You are Always With Me: Letters to Mama . Translator: Hector Jaimes, Little, Brown Book Group, 2018.
• Kahlo Pinedo, Isolda. Frida intima: Frida Kahlo, 1907-1954 . Ediciones Dipon, 2004
• Karbo, Karen.  In Praise of Difficult Women . National Geographic, Feb. 27 2018
• Kettenmann, Andrea. Frida Kahlo 1907-1954: Pain and Passion. Benedikt Taschen, 1993.
• Kettenmann, Andrea.  Frida Kahlo.  Taschen America Llc, 2000.
• Klein, Diana Ingeborg . Frida Kahlo. GRIN Verlag, May 31, 2010.
• Knutson, Julie.  Born in 1907: Rachel Carson and Frida Kahlo . Cherry Lake Pub , 2020
• Kreiter-Foronda, Carolyn.  The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: Poems by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda . San Francisco Bay Press, 2013.
• Kuenster, Ken. Frida Kahlo , Creative Arts Book Company, September 1999.
• Lafaye, Jacques. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican Natlonal Consciousness 1531-1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
• Laidlaw, Jill A.  Frida Kahlo (Artists in Their Time) . Franklin Watts , 2003.
• Le Clezio, J - M.G.. Diego et Frida , kindle,  Il Saggiatore (Feb. 1 2012).
• Lee, Matt.  The Backwards Hand.  Curbstone Pr (May 15, 2024)
• Levine, Barbara.  Finding Frida Kahlo . Princeton Archit.Press, 2009.
• Lindauer, Margaret A. and Frida Kahlo. Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. Wesleyan Univ. Pr., April 1999.
• Lowe, Sarah M. Frida Kahlo. Universe, New York 1991.
• Lozano, Luis-Martín edited by, with contributions from Andrea Kettenmann and Marina Vázquez Ramos.  Frida Kahlo. The Complete Paintings. Taschen, July 2021
• Mayayo,Patricia. Frida Kahlo: Contra El Mito. Catedra (March 25, 2008).
• Marin Rivera, Guadalupe and Marie-Pierre Colle. Frida's Fiestas : Recipes and Reminiscences of Life With Frida Kahlo. Clarkson Potter, October 1, 1994.
• Martinez Vidal, Susana.  Frida Kahlo: Fashion as the Art of Being . Assouline, 2015.
• Martinez-Belli Laura.  La mesa herida . Planeta Publishing, 28 November 2023 (Spanish Edition).
• Maso Carole. Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. Counterpoint Press, November 5, 2002.
• Meisenhalter, Fernando.  Frida Kahlo, Her Politics . Published indipendently., 2020
• Mejia Moreno Raul. El Simbolismo en la Obra de Frida Kahlo: "Frida el Ser Doble o Rebis la Piedra Filosofal". Editorial Academica Espanola, June 8, 2012.
• Meléndez, Marco.  Frida Kahlo, la poeta. Kindle Edition, 2016.
• Migliavacca, Marina. Frida . Malìa, 2019
• Miller, David.  All You Need To Know About Frida Kahlo: The Remarkable Life Of The Iconic Artist Frida Kahlo . Kindle Edition, 2019
• Milner, Frank. Frida Kahlo. Smithmark Publishing, August 1995.
• Misemer, Sarah M. Secular Saints: Performing Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Peron, and Selena. Tamesis Books (April 17, 2008).
• Moffeit, Tony. Billy the Kid & Frida Kahlo. Paperback June 23, 2000.
• Monasterio, Pablo Ortiz. Frida Kahlo sus fotos . RM Verlag, 2014.
• Monsivais, Carlos, and Rafael Vazquez Bayod. Frida Kahlo: Una Vida, Una Obra. Mexico City, Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/ Ediciones Era, 1992.
• Montesarchio Serena, Varriale Pina.  Frida Kahlo. L'amore che brucia . Ciesse Edizioni, 2020 ebook.
• Montana Turner, Robyn. Frida Kahlo (Portraits of Women Artists for Children). Little Brown & Co (Juv Trd), April 1, 1993.
• Montero, Gloria.  Frida K.: A dialogue for a single actress . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
• Moreno Raul, Mejia.  El Simbolismo En La Obra de Frida Kahlo . Eae Editorial Academia Espanola, 2011.
• Morrison John, Jamie Pietras . Frida Kahlo (The Great Hispanic Heritage) Chelsea House Pub (L), 2 edition (September 2010).
• Mulvey, Laura, and Peter Wollen. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery,1982.
• Mujica, Barbara. Frida. Overlook Press, January 2001.
• Novesky Amy, Diaz David. Me, Frida . Harry N. Abrams, 2015.
• Nugnes, Salvo. Frida, la mia storia . Art Factory, 1 Gennaio 2022
• Oles, James. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican modernism: from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection. Out of print.
• Olmedo, Carlos Phillips; Rosenzweig, Denise; Rosenzweig Magdalena; del Conde, Teresa.; Turok, Marta Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress: The Fashion of Frida Kahlo Chronicle Books, June 18, 2008.
• Palacios, Maria R.  Dressing Skeletons: A Poetic Tribute To Frida Kahlo . Atahualpa Press, 2015.
• Parris, Matthew.  Fracture: Stories of How Great Lives Take Root in Trauma . Profile Books Ltd, 05/11/2020
• Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Translated by Lysander Kemp. New York: Grove, 1961.
• Petit, Pascale.  What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo . Poetry Wales Press, 2010.
• Petitjean, Marc. The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris. Translated by Adriana Hunter, Other Press LLC, 2020
• Poniatowska, Elena and Carla Stellweg . Frida Kahlo: The Camera Seduced. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1992.
• Prignitz-Poda, Helga, Salomón Grimberg and Andrea Kettenmann. Frida Kahlo. Das Gesamtwerk, Verlag Neue Kritik FG, Frankfurt am Main 1988.
• Prignitz-Poda, Helga. Frida Kahlo: The Painter and Her Work . Schirmer/Mosel,May 2007.
• Prignitz-Poda Helga, Brugger Ingried.  Frida Kahlo: Retrospective. Prestel, 2010.
• Prignitz-Poda, Helga.  Hidden Frida Kahlo: Lost, Destroyed, or Little-Known Works . Prestel, 2017.
• Rapp Black, Emily.  Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg.  Notting Hill Editions, 2021.  
• Rauda, Jamis. Frida Kahlo. Editorial Diana Sa, 1998.
• Reef, Catherine.  Frida & Diego: Art, Love, Life.  Clarion Books, 2014.
• Richmond, Robin. Frida Kahlo in Mexico (Painters and Places Series). Pomegranate, May 1, 1994.
• Rico, Araceli.  Frida Kahlo: Fantasia de un cuerpo herido (La Ciudad) . Plaza y Valdés, 1987.
• Righetti, Teresa. Frida Kahlo pittrice coraggiosa . La Meridiana, Nov. 2, 2023
• Rivera, Diego, with March, Gladys. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography. New York: Citadel, 1960.
• Roberts, Jodi.  Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair . The Museum of Modern Art, reprint edition 2019
• Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida. El Surrealismo y el Arte Fantóstico de México. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciónes Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1969.
• Romano Pace, Alba. Frida Kahlo. Il colore della vita . Giunti Editore, 6/10/2021
• Rosenthal, Marilyn.  Painting Pain: The Life of Frida Kahlo . (e-future Biography Series Book 7). Kindle edition.
• Rosenthal, Mark.  Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit . Yale University Press, 2015.
• Rothenstein, Julian, ed. Posada. Message of Mortality. London: Redstone Press, in association with the South Bank Centre, 1989.
• Rummel, Jack. Frida Kahlo: A Spiritual Biography . Crossroad Pub Co, June 2000.
• Russell Jesse, Cohn Ronald. Frida Kahlo. Book on Demand Ltd., March 23, 2012.
• Sainz, Gustavo.  Una nina llamada Frida Kahlo . 1996.
• Sánchez Ambriz, Mary Carmen. Frida: de frente y de perfil.(psicoanálisis de la obra de la pintora Frida Kahlo)(TT: Frida: art and profile.)(TA: psychoanalysis of works of painter Frida ... An article from: Siempre! October 17, 2001 [HTML] (Digital, available from amazon.com)
• Sorondo Sanchez, Gabriel. Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo: El amor entre el elefante y la paloma. (Grandes amores de la historia nº 1). Kindle edition.
• Santagat Sabrina, Renaud Roger. Frida Kahlo, l'art d'être: Essai pour une approche ethnologique de l'art.  FeniXX réédition numérique (Publications universitaires Denis Diderot) (January 1, 1998) Kindle, 2019
• Santangelo, Marella.  Lo spazio del corpo. I templi di Frida Kahlo . LetteraVentidue, 2014.
• Scheiman, Alexandra.  Il diario perduto di Frida Kahlo . BUR Biblioteca Univ. Rizzoli, 2018.
• Schaefer, Claudia. Frida Kahlo: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies) Greenwood Press, Nov. 30 2008.
• Secci, Maria Cristina. Con l’immagine allo specchio. L’autoritratto letterario di Frida Kahlo . Aracne Editrice, 2007.
• Secci M.C. a cura di, Doppio ritratto Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera , Nottetempo (12 giugno 2008).
• Secci, Maria Cristina. Querido doctorcito. Lettere di Frida Kahlo a Leo Eloesser. Abscondita, 2010.
• Sheiman Alexandra, Il diario perduto di Frida Kahlo , Rizzoli (6 Nov. 2013)
• Schmeckebier, Laurence E. Modern Mexican Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1939.
• Sileo, Diego a cura di.  From Frida with love. Lettere di Frida Kahlo . 24 Ore Cultura, 2018
• Sills, Leslie. Inspirations: Stories about Women Artists: Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold , Albert Whitman, November 1998.
• Souter, Gerry. Frida Kahlo: Beneath The Mirror. Parkstone Press (August 30, 2005)
• Souter, Gerry. Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera ( two books in slip case). Parkstone Press (January 1, 2008)
• Souter, Gerry. Frida Kahlo . Parkstone International, 2011 ebook.
• Stahr, Celia.  Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist.  Brilliance Corporation, 2020.
• Stellweg, Carla.  Frida Kahlo: The Camera Seduced . Chronicle Books, 1992.
• Tate Modern and other authors. Frida Kahlo.  Tate Publishing, 2005.
• Taymor Julie and Lynda Sunshine (Editor), Clancy Sigal (Editor). Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film. Newmarket Press, October 2002.
• Tibol, Raquel. Frida Kahlo: Crónica, Testimonios y Aproximaciones. Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, S.A., 1977.
• Tibol, Raquel. Frida Kahlo. Translated by Helga Prignitz. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1980.
• Tibol , Raquel. Frida Kahlo : An Open Life. Translated by Elinor Randall. University of New Mexico Press, 1993.
• Tibol , Raquel. Frida Kahlo en Su Luz Mas Intima. May 2008.
• Tibol , Raquel; Kahlo, Frida Frida by Frida, 2nd Expanded Edition Editorial RM (June 1, 2007).
• The History hour.  Vincent Van Gogh & Frida Kahlo: Contrasting Art Styles . The Biography Collection, 2019.
• Toor, FrancesH  A Treasury of Mexican Folkways. New York: Bonanza Books, 1985 (Originally published by Crown Publishers, 1947).
• Toussaint, Manuel. Colonial Art in Mexico. Translated and edited by Elizabeth Wilder Weismann. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1967.
• Trefflich, Cornelia. Hybriditaet und Koerper in Frida Kahlos "Henry Ford Hospital". GRIN Verlag, January 8, 2011.
• Trotsky, Leon. Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1936-1937 and 1938-1939. 12 volumes covering 1929-1940. Ed. Naomi Allen and George Breitman. New York: Pathfinder, 1969-1975.
• Tuer Dot, Frida & Diego - Passion, Politics and Painting , Edited by Elliott King, Illustrated by Diego Rivera, Illustrated by Frida Kahlo, 2013.
• Tyralla, Rebecca. Frida - Leben und Werk der Frida Kahlo in Julie Taymors Film. GRIN Verlag, March 22, 2011.
• Venezia, Mike. Frida Kahlo (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists). Children's Press, 1999.
• Vinci, Vanna.  Frida Kahlo. Operetta amorale a fumetti . 24 Ore Cultura 2016.
• Viné-Krupa Rachel.  Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954, portrait d'une identité. Hermann Glassin (14 février 2013)
• Viné-Krupa Rachel. Maud Guély (Illustrations). Un Ruban Autour d'une Bombe. Nada éditions; Illustrated édition (25 mai 2018)
• Ugalde, Nadia Gomez and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera. Frida Kahlo: La Metamorfosis De La Imagen / La Selva De Sus Vestidos, Los Judas De Sus Venas; the Metamorphosis of the Image / the Forest of Images. Editorial RM, Bilingual edition, November 30, 2006.
• Weißenbach, Andrea.  Frida Kahlo: Das Kunst-Sticker-Mal-Buch . Prestel, 2018.
• Westheim, Paul. The Art of Ancient Mexico. Trans. by Ursula Bernard. New York: Doubleday (Anchor), 1965.
• Wilcox, Claire and Henestrosa, Circe. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up . Victoria & Albert Pubns. 4 June 2018
• Wolf, Vincente. Frida Kahlo: Photographs of Myself and Others. Pointed Leaf Press, 2010.
• Wolfe, Bertram D. Diego Rivera: His Life and Times. New York and London: Knopf, 1939.
• Wolfe, Bertram D. The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. New York: Stein and Day,1963.
• Wolfe, Bertram D., and Rivera, Diego. Portrait of Mexico. Text by Bertram D. Wolfe. Illustrated with paintings by Diego Rivera. New York: Covici, Friede, 1937.
• Zamora, Martha. Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1990.
• Zamora, Martha. Frida Kahlo: I Painted My Own Reality (Artboxes). San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1995.
• Zavala, Adriana.  Frida Kahlo's Garden . Prestel, 2015.

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND TEENS

• Anholt, Laurence. Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World . Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd, 2017.
• Berenger, Al.  Pocket Bios: Frida Kahlo . Roaring Brook Press, 2018.
• Berne, Carlson Emma.  Frida Kahlo: Mexican Artist . ABDO Publishing Co, 2009.
• Brown Monica, Parra John.  Frida Kahlo And Her Animalitos . North-South Books, 2017.
• Browne, Anthony.  Little Frida: A Story of Frida Kahlo . Walker Books Ltd, 2020.
• Brownridge, Lucy.  Frida Kahlo. Ritratto d'artista. Scoprite l'artista e i suoi capolavori . IdeeAli, 2020
• Cercenà, Vanna. Frida Kahlo.  Einaudi Ragazzi, 2017.
• Cervantes, Angela. Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring . Scholastic Gold, 2019.
• Colloredo, Sabina.  Frida Kahlo, autoritratto di una vita . EL, 2016.
• Corlazzoli, Alex. Le ali per volare . Giunti Junior, 8/03/2023.
• Doeden, Matt. Frida Kahlo . Lerner Publishing Group, 2020.
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• Fink, Nadia. Frida Kahlo . Rapsodia, 2015.
• Frith, Margareth.  Frida Kahlo: The Artist Who Painted Herself . Grosset & Dunlap, 2003.
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• Zanotti, Carolina.  Io sono Frida Kahlo. La mia vita tra arte e genio . Nuinui, 8 aprile 2021

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www.fridakahlo.it

Edited and written by Daniela Falini

Courte biographie de Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)

Découvrez dans cet article une courte biographie de Frida Kahlo (1907, Mexique - 1954 id), artiste peintre incontournable du 20ème siècle. D'un père allemand et d'une mère mexicaine, Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo Calderón souffre dès l'âge de 6 ans de poliomyélite, une maladie qui fragilise les muscles et entraîne la paralysie partielle ou totale. Suite à un accident grave, elle sera hospitalisée longtemps, subira diverses interventions chirurgicales et deviendra une figure emblématique de la peinture et nationalisme mexicain.

L'accident, l'autoportrait et la vocation artistique

Malgré la poliomyélite qui déformera sa jambe et fragilisera son ossature, Frida entame de grandes études. Mais à 18 ans, un accident de bus lui laissera de graves séquelles, notamment à la colonne vertébrale. Au dessus de son lit d'hôpital, elle fait installer un miroir et commence à peindre des autoportraits.

En 1928, Frida Kahlo rencontre le peintre Diego Rivera (reconnu pour ses peintures murales), avec lequel elle se mariera un an plus tard, mais dont elle n'aura pas d'enfants, à cause de son accident.

En 1953, on lui ampute la jambe droite jusqu'au genou à cause d'une gangrène , ce qui soulage la douleur physique mais provoque chez elle une dépression (au point de vouloir se suicider). Fragilisée par une pneumonie, elle mourra d'une embolie pulmonaire à l'âge de 47 ans. Certains ont cru à un suicide.

Malgré toute cette souffrance physique et morale, Frida Kahlo peint juste avant de mourir un tableau qu'elle intitule Viva la Vida (Vive la Vie). Préférant être incinérée plutôt qu'enterrée, ses cendres reposent dans la Casa azul de Coyoacán, la ville où elle est née.

L'oeuvre de Frida Kahlo compte 143 tableaux, souvent des petits formats, dont 55 autoportraits, où on la voir seule ou aux côtés d'animaux. On trouve des portraits de famille et des portraits divers, dont certains sont des portraits d'indigènes, où la tradition mexicaine est omniprésente.

L'oeuvre (sur)réaliste de Frida Kahlo

On rattache souvent Frida Kahlo à la mouvance surréaliste , une école qui vise à libérer l'art de toutes contraintes en rompant avec la logique.

En 1939, Frida ira à Paris pour voir la grande exposition sur le Mexique (galerie Renou et Pierre Colle). Elle logera chez André Breton et rencontrera plusieurs peintres fameux, parmi lesquels Picasso et Kandinsky. Son séjour lui déplaît : elle n'aime ni l'exposition, ni la gastronomie et encore moins les intellectuels qu'elle y rencontre, et dont elle dit dans une lettre adressée à Nickolas Murray :

« Ils ont tellement de foutus intellectuels pourris que je ne peux plus les supporter. Ils sont vraiment trop pour moi. J'aimerais mieux m'asseoir par terre dans le marché de Toluca pour vendre des tortillas que d'avoir quoi que ce soit à voir avec ces connards artistiques de Paris… Je n'ai jamais vu Diego ni toi perdre leur temps à ces bavardages stupides et ces discussions intellectuelles. C'est pour ça que vous êtes de vrais hommes et non des artistes minables — Bon sang ! ça valait la peine de venir jusqu'ici juste pour comprendre pourquoi l'Europe est en train de pourrir, pourquoi tous ces incapables sont la cause de tous les Hitler et les Mussolini »

De surcroît, elle attrapera une colibacillose au cours de ce séjour. En 1942, Frida Kahlo commence un journal, où elle parlera de sa jeunesse et de sa vie artistique.

Frida Kahlo ne se disait pas surréaliste , mais réaliste, car elle ne peignait pas de "rêves" mais bien la crue réalité qui l'accablait : l'accident et la maladie sont les deux thèmes centraux dans son oeuvre (cf. L'autobus, La colonne brisée )

Outre la souffrance avec laquelle elle mène un combat quotidien, Frida Kahlo raconte ses origines (cf. Mes grands-parents, mes parents et moi ) et fait la part belle à la famille .

Autre thème majeur : le Mexique , le pays qui lui est cher. Elle s'engagera politiquement, parlera de sa mexicanité et changera même sa date de naissance pour le 7 juillet 1910, année de la révolution mexicaine.

Des articles à découvrir :

• Qu'est-ce que l'art contemporain ?
• Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973) Biographie courte

Si vous souhaitez lire plus d'articles semblables à Courte biographie de Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) , nous vous recommandons de consulter la catégorie Formation .

City College doesn’t want a new bike lane. It’s getting one anyway

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The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is moving forward with building a controversial bike lane project adjacent to the City College of San Francisco despite objections from the school’s leadership.

The SFMTA Board of Directors voted unanimously on Tuesday to greenlight the half-mile-long protected bike lane along the main drag of the City College Ocean Campus. The vote was the final hurdle for the street safety project, which will also modify bus stops along the route running on Frida Kahlo Way from Ocean Avenue to Judson Avenue and two blocks east on Judson Avenue.

Construction is slated to begin this summer and will eliminate 29 parking spaces.

“I don't think it's fair for a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, it's just 29 parking spots.’ Do you know how many thousands of students come from different counties to park there?” City College student Jess Nguyen said during public comment before the vote. She pointed out that students may put the money they save parking in the free spots along Frida Kahlo Way towards school books and that City College attendees haven’t received the free transit passes that regional transportation officials have made available to students at other Bay Area schools.

“It is a challenging one for me to vote for,” SFMTA Board of Directors Vice Chair Stephanie Cajina said, recognizing the outpouring of concern from City College students and leaders. But she took comfort in the fact that the project will be part of the SFMTA Quick Build program, which implements projects that are reversible if they don’t work out.

“If we do have a firm commitment to say this is a quick build in its true form, and we are committed to adjusting its design within a year’s time if need be, then that’s something I feel more comfortable with,” Cajina said.

As part of approving the project, the board instructed SFMTA staff to return a year after construction wraps to share how the project has impacted the community.

When SFMTA initiated the Frida Kahlo bike lane proposal in spring 2023, officials thought it would be “relatively uncontroversial.” Instead, it became the latest battleground in San Francisco’s long-running conflict between city officials who want to transform streets to better accommodate cyclists and local advocates who believe that preserving parking is essential to the health of neighborhood businesses and institutions.

The project faced staunch opposition from City College, whose campus straddles the public streets it would reshape.

While the bike lane project will eliminate less than 1% of City College’s parking supply, it's coming at a time when the school’s entire parking infrastructure is in upheaval. 

City College has plans in place to get rid of nearly 1,800 parking spots, roughly 60% of its cache. The city transferred ownership of one of the school’s main parking lots to a developer group, which plans to build about 1,100 housing units on the Balboa Reservoir site next year. There is an academic building being built in the other primary parking lot for the school, and a new theater building is also slated to go up in that car park. To address the loss, the school is preparing to put out a request for proposals to build a parking structure on campus.

“This isn’t just about parking or biking lanes,” said Emma Heiken, a legislative aid for Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who supports the project. “This is about a greater vision for our city. This is about generations of San Franciscans commuting together on their bikes.”

Noah Baustin can be reached at [email protected]

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