frida kahlo biography article

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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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

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

Henry Ford Hospital

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

Self Portrait with Monkey

Self Portrait as a Tehuana

Fulang Chang and I

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Frida Kahlo

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Frida Kahlo by Adriana Zavala LAST REVIEWED: 25 July 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 30 March 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920105-0108

Although Frida Kahlo (b. 1907–d. 1954) is one of the world’s most widely recognized artists, that attention is often focused more on her dramatic life story than on the complexity of her intellect and artistic production. She is known for her self-portraits, which may appear straightforward and narrative, but throughout her career she employed allegory and complex symbolism. Like the muralists, not least her husband Diego Rivera (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “ Diego Rivera ”), Kahlo considered painting a social and political act central to the creation of a revolutionary Mexico, yet she produced fewer than two hundred paintings and fewer than one hundred works on paper. In a 1943 essay, Rivera praised her as the paragon of Mexican revolutionary painting. While her formal academic training was relatively minimal, her proximity to Rivera provided access to intellectual and political circles in Mexico and abroad, and this influenced both the style and conceptual basis of her painting. Kahlo was also exceptionally educated; she read or spoke English, German, and French. She enrolled at Mexico City’s prestigious National Preparatory School in 1922 where she was one of only thirty-five women among the 2000 students; early on, her aim was to study medicine. In 1925 she was involved in a traffic accident that ended her formal studies. She turned to painting. Early works demonstrate intellectual curiosity about avant-garde innovations, combined with the deliberately naïve style of painting in vogue in postrevolutionary Mexico and elsewhere that drew inspiration from folk art and provincial and nonacademic painting. She deployed both to create work that was culturally and politically resonant as well as transgressive and transcultural. Kahlo’s work must therefore be examined in relation to her knowledge of art history, avant-garde movements, and modernist innovation, as well as her life’s events and cultural context. Her influences range from Italian early Renaissance and Mannerist painting to Indian miniatures, Mexican folk art and social realism, and German Neue Sachlichkeit and the Italian pittura metafisica , and of course, surrealism. While she may have drawn inspiration from her life’s experience, her art was much more than unmediated psychological expression or autobiography in paint as some sources claim. During her life, she was known principally as Rivera’s flamboyant wife, but in the early 21st century, Kahlo is one of the world’s most celebrated women. Biographies, monographs, and retrospective exhibitions abound, and the market for trade and scholarly publications on Kahlo is evidently insatiable. There is no question that she was an extraordinary personality. Her approach to depicting physical pain and emotional complexity along with her interest in self-portraiture has fueled the myth that her paintings are illustrations of her life events in chronological order rather than allegorical works that spring from the personal, as well as mediated engagements with political and cultural trends. Kahlo’s present iconic status results in part from an oversimplified understanding as well as admiration for her creativity and perseverance, all of which fuel the mythologizing phenomenon known as Fridamania .

Biographies

Kahlo biographies are a lucrative commercial industry aimed at readers at all levels from children to teens, general audiences, and college students. Even the best tend to sublimate her artistic production to a narrative focused on tragedy, emotional and physical pain, and marital strife. Given the personal basis of much of Kahlo’s iconography, there is no question that her biography can be of value in interpreting her painting, but serious students are cautioned not to reduce her work to autobiographical painting. Claims, explicit and implicit, that Kahlo herself is more interesting than her painting are unfounded but not uncommon. Students of Kahlo should be sure to seek informed art historical analysis. Kahlo lived during one of Mexico’s most tumultuous eras, yet even the best biographies tend to decontextualize her art and intellect, treating her work in relative isolation. Several widely cited biographies lack citations to primary or secondary sources, and this approach often perpetuates a psychologized interpretation of her painting. Biographies are, therefore, grouped as Scholarly Biographies and General Interest Biographies .

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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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Frida Kahlo, in her own words: A new documentary draws from diaries, letters

Mandalit del Barco

A new documentary about Frida Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art. Leo Matiz/Fundación Leo Matiz hide caption

A new documentary about Frida Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art.

"I paint myself because that's who I know the best," the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo once wrote in her illustrated diary. So it's fitting that a new documentary about Kahlo's life, now streaming on Amazon Prime, tells her story using her own words and art.

In the 70 years since Kahlo's death there have been countless efforts to revisit her complicated life, politics and artwork. Most famous is probably the 2002 fictional film starring Salma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor that depicted Kahlo's tempestuous relationship with painter Diego Rivera. Many of these treatments have relied on actors, interviews with academics, art historians and contemporary artists. Filmmaker Carla Gutiérrez wanted a fresh take.

"Instead of having that historical distance of other people explaining [to] us what she meant with her art," Gutiérrez says, "I really wanted to give that gift to viewers of just hearing from her own words. We wanted to have the most intimate entry way into her heart and into her mind."

In Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from letters and diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles. Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C. hide caption

In Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from letters and diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

In Gutiérrez's documentary Frida, Kahlo's words are taken from handwritten letters and illustrated diaries, and voiced by Mexican actor Fernanda Echevarría del Rivero. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Gutiérrez says she wanted to get inside Kahlo's head. "What was she thinking? what was she feeling? I felt that as a Latina, somebody that grew up in Latin America, there was this connection I have with the world that created Frida."

Gutiérrez was born in Peru and saw her first Frida Kahlo painting, as a college student in Massachusetts. It was an image of Kahlo standing with one foot in Mexico, another in the U.S. "Her impressions of the United States and yearning [for] home for Mexico, that painting really reflected my own experience," says Gutiérrez. "And then I became obsessed, like millions of people around the world."

As an editor, Gutiérrez has worked on documentaries on other what she calls "badass women", including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg , singer Chavela Vargas and chef Julia Child . But Frida is her first film as director.

The Picture Show

Frida kahlo's private stash of pictures.

She enlisted the help of Hayden Herrera, who wrote the definitive Frida Kahlo biography in 1983 . Gutiérrez' team combed through Herrera's closets and attic, looking through her archives.

"We had a good time," Herrera says. "I basically gave them all my research material."

That included transcripts of interviews with people who knew Kahlo. One of the film's archivists, Gabriel Rivera, also scoured university libraries, museums and private collections finding photos and handwritten messages.

"These letters often have little doodles on them," Rivera says. "She would, like, do kind of lipstick kisses on these letters."

The film includes the words written by or about Kahlo's contemporaries, including Diego Rivera, who she married twice, her friends such as surrealist André Breton and her lovers such as Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.

Some of Kahlo's paintings are slightly animated in the new film. Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C. hide caption

Some of Kahlo's paintings are slightly animated in the new film.

Gabriel Rivera says they tried to follow any lead, including a tip about some footage of Kahlo dancing in the streets of New York City with a rose stem gripped in her mouth. He discovered through writings that the film canister had been left on an airplane in the late 1960s, which Rivera said is "just devastating." They tried to find lost luggage and are still hoping it shows up one day.

But there is plenty of material they did find.

In Mexico, another archivist, Adrián Gutiérrez, was able to collect some rarely seen photos and footage of Kahlo and Rivera together, and of Rivera kissing another woman. There's footage of the Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata and of Red Cross workers in Mexico City bandaging trolley accident victims like Kahlo, who was famously injured as a teen. She painted about that and other pain she suffered.

For the documentary, composer Víctor Hernández Stumpfhauser created a soundtrack of electronic music with folkloric guitar and the ethereal voice of his wife, Alexa Ramírez.

Hear Mandalit del Barco's 1991 radio documentary about Frida Kahlo

"The idea was that Frida herself was so ahead of her time, with her thoughts, her ideas. She was a very modern person," says Stumpfhauser. "So we thought, well, let's let's do something modern, but of course, with a with a Mexican flair."

Gutiérrez also made the decision to slightly animate some of Kahlo's paintings. Frida's open heart beats and bleeds, tears roll down her face, and when she cuts her hair in desperation over her divorce, her scissors move and pieces of her hair fall to the floor.

Latin America

As mexico capitalizes on her image, has frida kahlo become over-commercialized.

The Salma Hayek film also animated some of Kahlo's work. But Herrera says doing so in a documentary was gutsy.

"When I saw the first animation, I thought, Oh my God," says Herrera. "But then I found it really seductive and really added so much to the understanding of her paintings. I found them very astute and actually quite witty. And they brought you closer to Frida."

Art Where You're At

5 lesser-known, late-in-life works by frida kahlo now on view in dallas.

Herrera says its remarkable that Frida mania is still very much alive.

"I think she would have been pleased that we're still talking about her, and I think she would have liked this film," she says. "Although seeing your own paintings animated might not be easy, but she might have given one of her big guffaws and laughed and thought it was amusing."

Herrera says this latest documentary is her favorite telling of Frida Kahlo, and is itself a work of art.

Detroit's 'Frida' Aims To Build Latino Audiences For Opera

Music Interviews

The villalobos brothers match music with frida kahlo.

• frida kahlo

• IN PRAISE OF DIFFICULT WOMEN

The inconvenient spectacle of Frida Kahlo

The eccentric Mexican artist forced others to recognize her chronic physical and emotional pain.

Legendary artist Frida Kahlo spent most of 1950 in a hospital bed in Mexico City, recovering from a series of spinal surgeries. Her recuperation involved bed rest, during which her torso was immobilized in a heavy plaster cast. In a telling contemporary photograph of the painter and future global feminist icon, she is propped up against her pillows, embellishing the front of her latest plaster corset with the aid of a hand mirror and a tiny brush. Her pointy nails are lacquered with dark polish. Her center-parted hair is pulled back neatly. A pile of satin ribbons and flowers adorns the crown of her head. She sports dangly earrings, chunky rings on every finger, and a pair of bracelets.

Frida Kahlo stands next to her work “The Two Fridas”, a response to her recent divorce from her husband Diego Rivera in 1939.

Regardless of the degree to which she was suffering, Frida Kahlo always enjoyed the spectacle of herself. She was a playful exhibitionist, a fervid and erotic provocateur dispatching updates from the land of female suffering. It was part of what made her difficult: She forced people to look at her, to share her feelings, when they would prefer to look away.

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón was born in Coyoacán, a tidy suburb of Mexico City, in July 1907. Until the day Frida (she dropped the “e” in 1922) was hit by a streetcar—literally, at the age of 18—nothing in her upper-middle-class background would disclose her future: that she would one day become Mexico’s most celebrated painter, a sexy international art megastar and pop icon who would produce unnerving masterpieces that would hang in the world’s major museums. Or that she would “enjoy” a passionate, tumultuous marriage to Mexico’s most famous muralist and womanizer, Diego Rivera. Frida and Diego married for the first time in 1929, divorced in 1939, remarried in 1940, and remained wed until Frida’s untimely death in 1954, at the age of 47. Years after both artists were dead, a travel squib appeared in the New York Times , which included the sentence: “Though they created some of Mexico’s most fascinating art, it’s the bizarre Beauty-and-the-Beast dynamic that has captivated the world and enshrouded both figures in intrigue.”

It’s often said that girls who grow up to be women at ease with themselves had loving, nurturing relationships with their fathers. To be appreciated and accepted by the first man in our lives gives us confidence to march that self out into the world, to feel that we will not be shunned for being both a woman and a complex human being. Frida’s father, German-born Guillermo Kahlo, was one such dad. Among his five daughters, Frida—high-spirited, clever, and entertaining—was his favorite. Frida would steal fruit from a nearby orchard in lieu of attending catechism class, or sneak up on her sisters when they were using the chamber pot and shove them off. But these high jinks ended when she contracted polio at age six. Learn about the final push to end polio.

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Frida was confined to her bed for nine months—an eternity for an active six-year-old. Her father tended to her with care, and when she was finally given the go-ahead to return to school, Guillermo prescribed sports. Frida excelled in soccer, swimming, roller-skating, and boxing. She grew stronger, but her right leg remained puny and withered. She was ostracized at school for her “peg leg.” To help compensate for her loneliness, her father, who believed her to be the most like him of all his daughters (smart, artistic, strong-willed—practically a son!), gave her books from his library and taught her how to take and develop photographs.

Frida’s relationship with her mother, Matilde, was fraught—as is generally the case with clever daughters poised to escape the limited existence of an older generation who played by the rules. Beautiful, pious, and illiterate, Matilde had dutifully married a man with “prospects,” managed the household, and kept the babies and delicious meals coming. Frida dared to hope for a bigger life.

A photograph of Frida Kahlo, right, with her mother, Matilde, and two sisters, Cristina and Adriana.

When she was 15, Frida was enrolled in the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she focused on biology with the hope of one day becoming a doctor. Still shy about her smaller right leg, she wore extra pairs of socks to help disguise it. But she seemed to have more or less recovered. She was bright, engaged in her studies, and a star of the Cachuchas, an elite club of brainiacs and mischief makers. She had a popular boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias.

On September 17, 1925, Frida and Alex were riding home from school on the bus when it was T-boned by a streetcar. She was impaled by a handrail that entered her just above her left hip and exited through her vagina. Her back and pelvis were each broken in three places. Her collarbone was broken. Her withered, polio-afflicted leg was fractured, her smaller foot dislocated and mangled. Someone at the scene thought it was a good idea to pull out the handrail before the ambulance arrived. Frida’s screams, and the sounds of bones cracking, were louder than the approaching sirens.

Alex, who suffered only minor wounds, recalled it this way: “Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her, they cried, ‘ La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.”

I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident. I was bored as hell in bed... so I decided to do something. Frida Kahlo

For a month, Frida lay in a plaster body cast. No one expected her to survive. When she was released from the hospital, the treatment was bed rest—at first, months of bed rest. Then, two solid years of bed rest. Gone was Alex the boyfriend, gone were Frida’s dreams of becoming a doctor. The medical bills piled up, and her father mortgaged the house to pay them. Her life of chronic pain began. The next year, a new set of doctors examined her spine and realized the first set of doctors had failed to see that several vertebrae had healed incorrectly. This would become a running theme, new doctors shaking their heads at the ineptitude of previous doctors. The solution: another plaster body cast and more bed rest. Read how the mind can heal the body.

“I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident,” she wrote to gallery owner Julien Levy before her 1938 show. “I was bored as hell in bed . . . so I decided to do something. I stoled [sic] from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel because I couldn’t sit down [the letter was written in English; she meant sit up], and I started to paint.”

Frida’s letter was crafty, disingenuous. After the accident, flat on her back in bed, painting presented itself as one of the only activities available to her. She pretended not to care about the quality of her work, but in 1927, once she was up and around, she sought the professional opinion of the celebrated artist Diego Rivera . As popular lore and the 2002 biopic Frida would have it, she cornered the artist one day while he was atop a ladder working on a mural; she demanded he come down, have a look, and tell her straight out whether she was good enough. “Look, I have not come to flirt or anything, even if you are a woman-chaser,” she told him. “I have come to show you my painting. If you are interested in it, tell me so; if not, likewise.” (More likely, Frida met Diego at a party hosted by photographer and activist Tina Modotti. But the story of tracking him down and challenging him from her place beneath the ladder better suited her sense of self-drama.)

Rivera and Frida were both members of the Mexican Communist Party, and Rivera was captivated by Frida’s bohemian élan. She was one of those tiny women who could drink men twice her size under the table. She lived on a diet of candy, cigarettes, and a daily bottle of brandy. When this diet (and, presumably, casual dental hygiene) caused her teeth to rot in early middle age, she promptly ordered two sets of dentures: one solid gold, another studded with diamonds. As anyone who’s ever purchased a Frida tote bag, postcard, coffee mug, or T-shirt knows, she was proud of her unibrow and her mustache, which she kept neat with a small comb reserved for that purpose.

On a sweltering August day in 1929, Frida and Diego were married, to the consternation of her family and friends. Frida was a somewhat sheltered 22—she had spent three of those years bedridden—and Rivera was a 43-year-old man of the world, an established artist whose murals celebrating the 1910 Mexican revolution had made him famous. He came equipped with two ex-wives and three daughters; when he and Frida first fell in love, he was still married to wife number two.

People are rarely surprised when a beautiful woman marries an average-looking man. Even so, people were mystified by Frida’s adoration of and devotion to Diego Rivera. I’m reluctant to objectify Diego in the same way men routinely objectify women, but despite some fairly extensive research I’ve been unable to find a single photograph of the great muralist in which he isn’t completely repulsive. “Twenty-one years older, 200 pounds heavier, and, at more than six feet, nearly 12 inches taller than she, Rivera was gargantuan in both scale and appetites,” wrote Amy Fine Collins in Vanity Fair . “As irresistible as he was ugly, Rivera was described by Frida as ‘a boy frog standing on his hind legs.’”

(It’s safe to say that of all the traits men possess that are catnip to women—sense of humor, great hair, nice shoulders, lead guitar player in a band—“boy frog standing on his hind legs” rarely makes the average woman’s must-have list.)

There was a window of time during the first years of their marriage when Frida, more or less recovered from her accident, happily and with fervor performed the role of exemplary wife. She devoted herself to cooking for her husband, fussed over his clothes and comfort, gave him his nightly bath in which she floated bath toys for his amusement. Her 1949 painting “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl,” in which she cradles a naked Diego in her lap while she is in turn cradled by Aztec Earth Mother Cihuacoatl, pretty much sums up the way she viewed their marriage: Her husband was a giant baby.

In 1930, Frida traveled with Rivera to San Francisco, where he’d been commissioned to paint a mural for the San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club. This required him to seek out a female model that would represent the essence of California womanhood. He was put in touch with international tennis star Helen Wills. She was the real deal, having won 31 Grand Slam titles and two Olympic gold medals. In the name of making a “study” of Wills for the mural , Rivera disappeared with her for a few days.

Frida wept at Diego’s endless extracurricular canoodling, which he had no intention of giving up despite the anguish he caused. He would explain patiently that for him monogamy was simply out of the question, and that he viewed sexual intercourse as essential and uncomplicated as taking a piss. Frida would howl in fury, hurling the occasional ceramic plate against a brightly painted wall, then lock Rivera out of her bedroom. He would retaliate by throwing himself into his latest mural commission, and maybe take on another mistress or two. Sometimes, upon discovering the identity of the new mistress, Frida would enjoy a little spicy revenge by seducing the woman. Then they would have another argument in which Frida hurled another ceramic plate, and so on and so forth.

Frida Kahlo poses next to a portrait of a socialite she painted while her husband worked on a mural for the San Francisco Stock Exchange.

Frida’s hot temper was the most generic aspect of her difficult nature, handily reinforcing the stereotype of females as prone to hysteria. A teary, pissed-off woman slouched on the sofa eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s is exhausting and irritating, but acceptable—in part, because a weeping woman doesn’t have to be taken seriously.

Consider this: A recent study of jury dynamics conducted by the journal Law and Human Behavior found that although an angry man can influence the feelings and opinions of his fellow jurors, the same is not true for women. In fact, the angrier a woman gets, the more jurors were convinced their own opinions were correct. The more furiously a woman juror behaved, the less anyone listened to her. Translated into the domestic realm, this means that husbands don’t actually mind the type of behavior Frida often displayed. It turns their woman into someone they don’t have to take seriously, and it also allows them to do something they rather enjoy, which is to throw up their hands, go to their local bar, order a stiff drink, and complain with other men about the impossibility of women.

But Frida had other, less predictable traits. She could be sly and misleading. A now infamous 1933 profile in the Detroit News, headlined “ Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art ,” was written during the couple’s sojourn in Detroit that year (Diego was painting “Detroit Industry,” a celebration of the city’s workers). The accompanying black-and-white photo shows Frida at the easel, her head turned toward the camera at an angle that mirrors exactly the one in the self-portrait she’s painting. She wears an apron tied around her waist, as if she’s come straight from the kitchen. Regarding hubby Diego, her quote reads: “He does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”

She was being facetious—something that was lost on the writer, who wasn’t prepared for Frida’s wit. But the joke contains the beating heart of her ambition. Frida may have started painting to amuse herself during her convalescence, but by the early 1930s she was determined to make her mark. During her time dabbling in Detroit, she painted two pictures that would one day be considered masterpieces: “Henry Ford Hospital” and “My Birth.” The latter depicts a woman, presumably Frida, giving birth to herself. The picture is startling, even today. The figure on the bed is covered by a white sheet from the waist up. Her legs are splayed open, and a full-grown female head bearing the distinctive unibrow protrudes from her vagina. Pop icon Madonna currently owns the painting. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Madonna said, “If somebody doesn’t like this painting, then I know they can’t be my friend.”

In the summer of 1938, at the age of 31, Frida made her first sale. The actor Edward G. Robinson was also an art collector, and while he was in Mexico City he purchased four little pictures, for $200 apiece. French artist André Breton also discovered her work, and heralded it as surrealist. Her paintings, he enthused, were like “a ribbon around a bomb.

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”You might imagine that after laboring in the shadow of her husband for almost a solid decade, Frida would be thrilled and even grateful to be tapped for inclusion in a big-deal art movement that included powerhouse painters Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and René Magritte. But she wasn’t much interested. She found the French to be insufferable, cold, and bourgeois. And anyway, she was her own movement.

In the fall of that year, Frida traveled to New York for her first solo exhibition, at the Julien Levy Gallery. Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Time magazine magnate Henry Luce, was enjoying a moment with her hit Broadway play The Women and attended the opening. Frida was notoriously charming, even among the capitalist gringos she disparaged. She and Clare hit it off, and by the end of the evening Clare had commissioned Frida to paint a portrait. The subject was the late Dorothy Hale, a depressed young socialite and friend of Clare’s who had lived beyond her means in an upper-floor apartment at the newly opened Hampshire House on Central Park South. Key details that will become important: On the night before she died, Dorothy threw herself a farewell cocktail party. After the last guest left, she put on her favorite black velvet dress and a corsage of tiny yellow roses. Then, at 5:15 a.m. or thereabouts, she threw herself out the window. Hear from an 18-year-old suicide survivor.

Clare and Frida had both known Dorothy and agreed that the situation was tragic. Clare also felt guilty. Her relationship with Dorothy had been complicated by money; Clare would loan her rent money, and Dorothy would spend it on a cocktail dress. Dorothy was that annoying friend. At some point Clare had cut Dorothy off. And now she was dead. To help assuage her guilt, and as a kind gesture, Clare intended to give Frida’s beautiful portrait of Dorothy to Dorothy’s bereaved mother, as a remembrance.

Time-out for a thought experiment: You are Frida, perpetually strapped for cash. Your marriage is shakier than usual. You also have an ongoing cavalcade of medical problems. You are beginning to gain an audience for your paintings, and the only way you can or want to earn some extra money is by selling them. Clare Boothe Luce is rich and powerful, and if she’s happy with the picture she has commissioned, she will tell her rich and powerful friends, who then might also commission a picture from you. You know this is how it works. It’s the golden rule: He who has the gold, rules.

Married Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo read and work in a studio. Kahlo's self-portrait, “The Two Fridas”, hangs in the background with other works.

What do you do? Do you give Clare Boothe Luce what you know she wants—a pleasant, decorative picture to present to her friend Dorothy’s grieving mother? Or do you respect your own talent and vision and give her the shocking “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale,” as well as a near heart attack?

Unlike Frida, I have been permanently scarred by the number one rule drilled into my head at every retail and fast-food job of my youth: Customer satisfaction is our number one goal. In other words, like many women (like you?) I was conditioned to please from a young age. I would have been delirious with joy to have received a commission from someone like Clare Boothe Luce. Keeping in mind that I was painting the portrait for Dorothy’s poor mother, I would have made Dorothy look even prettier than she had been in real life. My goal would have been to make everyone weep with joy, including the spirit of Dorothy herself.

But then, I’m not difficult. Frida was.

In the center of the painting, behind what appears to be a feathery layer of cirrus clouds, the cream-colored Hampshire House rises up with its many small windows and mansard roof. In the background, a tiny figure plummets past the upper stories. In the middle ground there is another, larger falling woman, clearly Dorothy Hale, her arms extended, her skirt billowing around her knees. In the foreground, resting on the brown earth is Dorothy in her black velvet dress and yellow corsage, her neck clearly broken. The banner running along the bottom of the painting says, In the city of New York on the 21st day of the month of October, 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. DOROTHY HALE committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory [a strip of missing words] this retablo, executed by FRIDA KAHLO. Blood flows from beneath Dorothy’s head and dribbles onto the banner and frame.

Horrified does not begin to describe the reaction of Clare Boothe Luce. “I will always remember the shock I had when I pulled the painting out of the crate,” she wrote later. “I felt really physically sick. What was I going to do with this gruesome painting of the smashed corpse of my friend, and her blood dripping down all over the frame?”

Clare Boothe Luce’s first impulse was to cut up “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” with a pair of shears. But at the last minute she called an illustrator friend who did covers for the New Yorker . Intrigued, he rushed over and took it off her hands.

Currently the picture hangs in the Phoenix Art Museum and is routinely cited as one of Frida Kahlo’s masterpieces.

Frida may have been thrilled to receive a commission, but her gratitude didn’t poison her vision. Frida obeyed her own heaving feelings, always, and could only paint what they dictated. If people were alarmed, so much the better. She wasn’t about to make an exception, thinking, “I’ll hold off doing my wacky Frida thing just this once.” Nope. Frida expressed what was in her heart with every brushstroke, and what was in Frida’s heart that fall of 1938 was despair. Her marriage was over. The final straw had been Diego’s latest affair. Of all the women available to Diego in Mexico City—and according to historians, that would have been all the women in Mexico City, so charming and irresistible was he—his choice for an extramarital affair was Frida’s sister, Cristina.

In 1939, Frida and Diego Rivera were divorced. Perhaps they would have remained forever estranged, if not for the assassination of exiled Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky .

Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky (second from right) and his second wife, Natalia Sedova (far left), are greeted by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Polish-born American Marxist theoretician and pro-union activist Max Shachtman (far right) on their arrival in Tampico, Mexico.

Several years earlier, while Frida and Diego were still relatively happy, Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico City to live with them, having been expelled from the Soviet Union. The short version of the Trotskys’ time with the Riveras: tequila, tequila, tequila;Trotsky and Rivera argue politics; Trotsky and Frida have a fling, sending Madame Trotsky into an understandable depression; Trotsky escapes several assassination attempts by Stalinist operatives dispatched from the Soviet Union, only to be murdered on August 20, 1940, by a demented local man with an ice ax. Frida and Diego, now living separately, were both suspects! Rivera fled to San Francisco, while Frida was taken into custody for questioning. She was released after a few days, and also left for San Francisco to consult Dr. Leo Eloesser about some kind of chronic fungal infection; Eloesser had treated her for various maladies in 1930, and had become a trusted friend.

So devoted was Frida to “doctorcito,” as she liked to call him, that she painted two pictures for him: “Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser” (1931), a somewhat straightforward and inexpert rendering of the good doctor standing with his elbow on a high table in front of a sailboat (Frida was never as good painting other people) and “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser” (1940), which displays her trademark nightmarish razzle-dazzle. She captures herself in her favorite three-quarter angle, looking straight at the view from beneath her infamous unibrow. Dangling from her one visible ear is a golden earring of an open palm. A choker of thorns digs into her neck, drawing a few drops of blood.

In San Francisco Frida and Diego got back together. Perhaps the calamity of being persons of interest in Trotsky’s homicide reunited them. Or maybe the romance of the City by the Bay was just impossible to resist. In any case, they remarried in 1940 at a small civil ceremony. Trying to parse the logic behind their reconciliation is above my pay grade.

During Friego 2.0, Frida painted most of her masterpieces.

Inspiration is mysterious in its complexity. What fires up any given artist is as unique as a fingerprint. Frida seemed to require a carefully titrated mixture of despair at Diego’s disappearing acts, loneliness, and active engagement with her own broken body. To date, her complete medical history remains unknown. She is said to have had 30 surgeries over the course of her lifetime, most of them attempts to repair the damage from the bus accident she’d suffered at 18. She saw a round of doctors, most of whom contradicted each other. Mexican doctors once declared she had “a tuberculosis in the bones” and wanted to operate; Dr. Eloesser disagreed. In 1944 her chronic back pain worsened (treatment: steel corset prescribed to reduce “irritation of the nerves” that she wore for five months). Read how modern medicine reaches the public.

In the first part of 1946, she sought out a “high-up doctor of Gringolandia” to perform a complicated surgery in which four vertebrae were fused using bone from her pelvis. The operation was performed in June. Her recovery was a success, but eventually she suffered again from shooting pains. A new doctor in Mexico examined her and claimed the New York doctor had performed the fusion on the wrong vertebrae. But there’s another version of this story: The fusion was a success and Frida made a full recovery. Then one night Diego didn’t come home, and in a fit of rage and frustration, she either opened her own incisions or else threw herself on the ground and compromised the barely knitted bones.

Frida’s bone grafts developed infections, requiring exquisitely painful injections. Her circulation suffered so much from inactivity and a terrible diet that one day she woke up to find that the tips of the toes on her right foot were black. Eventually, they were amputated, followed by her leg, amputated below the knee in 1953, a year before she died.

Diego’s love for Frida seemed directly related to her invalidism. The worse his wife’s pain—the more she suffered—the less Diego philandered. He would sit beside her bed and read poetry aloud, or hold her as she fell asleep. When the pain became manageable (often with the aid of heavy-duty meds to which she would eventually become addicted), he would go back to work, become distracted by a new lover, and leave her alone. Again.

Then, she would paint. Some of Frida’s most arresting work—her certifiable masterpieces—come from this period. “The Broken Column” (1944) shows her naked form split jaggedly in half, her skin pierced with nails. Inside her open body, crumbling steel replaced her spine, her torso held together by the white straps that run under and above her pretty breasts. In “The Wounded Deer” (1946) her face, in its standard three-quarters angle, has been placed atop a wounded deer running in the forest. Antlers extend from either side of her head, and nine arrows pierce the deer’s body. Her anguish at being force-fed what was essentially baby food is on display in “Without Hope” (1945). She lies in a four-poster bed in what appears to be a postapocalyptic landscape; a wooden frame looms over her, holding a funnel overflowing with fish heads, a strangled chicken, some kind of offal, and a skull. She gazes at the viewer with her classic stare, tears on her cheeks, the end of the funnel pressed between her lips.

The degree to which Frida helped facilitate her own misery will forever remain a mystery. Her questionable medical care is inferior only in retrospect. Her doctors were for the most part top-notch, practicing the most up-to-date methods of the time. But regardless of how she came by her suffering, Frida wasn’t about to do it in silence. She wasn’t interested so much in communicating her situation as expressing it. This is how it feels to be in this broken female body. This is how it feels to be alone and without my beloved. This is how it feels to be me. I dare you to look—and once you look, I’m going to make sure you cannot look away.

The degree to which Frida helped facilitate her own misery will forever remain a mystery. Karen Karbo

“I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work,” Diego once wrote to Picasso. “Acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.” Follow Picasso's journey from prodigy to icon.

When Frida died in 1954 at the age of 47, she was known primarily as Diego Rivera’s exotic little wife. The rise of feminism in the late 1970s brought with it the question “Hey, where are all the women artists? Where are all the women of color?” and the answer was the rediscovery of Frida Kahlo. Discover six women scientists who were snubbed due to sexism.

In 2016, Frida’s 1939 painting “Two Nudes in the Forest (the Earth Itself)” sold at Christie’s for a record eight million dollars—the most expensive Latin American art piece sold at auction to date. A small, somber oil on metal, the painting depicts one naked Frida resting her head in the lap of another naked Frida, amid the thick vines and heavily veined leaves of a voluptuous jungle that existed only in her mind.

Fifty-five of Frida Kahlo’s 143 pictures are self-portraits. Many of them depict the woes of living in a human female body, including the mess of female reproduction and its sometime failures. Metal hospital beds, bloody instruments, a snarl of internal organs she seems to be vomiting in despair. A delicate, anatomically correct image of her own heart beating inside her chest, her naked body splayed open, giving birth to her mustachioed adult self. The female nude, so beloved of fine artists, had never been nude like this.

Then as now, it’s a well-known truism that men are uncomfortable when women cry. One can only imagine how squirmy they must have been—how squirmy they are—in the presence of Frida’s pictures. But Frida was a woman comfortable among the chaos of her feelings. She never denied them, never dialed them down. It made her strong. Or, in the view of some—difficult.

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Why We Need To See Frida Kahlo Beyond Her Biography

Author frances borzello explains how the artist revealed her true self within her works.

By Google Arts & Culture

Untitled (Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird) (1940) by Frida Kahlo Harry Ransom Center

With the rise of Frida Kahlo’s fame and fandom, especially since her death in 1954, it’s easy for different versions of the artist to be created. Since she started out, her identity has been blurred and influenced by the biographical details of her life, for instance her success constantly being measured against her husband Diego Rivera, or her work being dismissed as Mexican folk art because of where she was from. While these elements of Kahlo’s life are of course important to consider when looking at her work, they only provide a surface level understanding of the complexities that resided within her mind.

To get a better understanding of the artist beyond the factual details of her life, we spoke to author Frances Borzello. In 2016, Frances wrote Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits , a diverse exploration of female artists and self-portraits from the 12th century to modern day. Frances also co-wrote Frida Kahlo: Face-to-Face with artist Judy Chicago, which dissects hundreds of Kahlo’s portraits to discover her many facets as a woman, artist, historical figure and inspiration.

Here Frances explains what we can learn about Kahlo’s politics, her feminist attitudes, her relationship with her body and her personal philosophy when looking at her work, in the hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the artist.

Marxism Will Give Health to the Ill (1954) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

In what ways did Kahlo create her own myth of herself while working as an artist? How do you think she wanted to be perceived by the world? Frida Kahlo is one of a handful of artists whose work is immediately recognizable. The mono-browed self-portrait and Mexican references that inhabit most of her paintings all signal Kahlo to even the most art-allergic. The figure she cut in terms of her looks, her behavior and her beliefs was her life’s work, and paintings were a branch of this. In constant pain, unable to carry a child, one leg shorter than another, encased in a corset to enable her to hold herself straight, she wanted to dance and debate and be admired – and through her paintings she told the world that she did and she was.

Portrait of Frida Kahlo (Retrato de Frida Kahlo) (1939) by Diego Rivera Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Why do you think she wanted her image as the focus of her creative output? It is not so much that she ‘wanted’ her image as her focus, more that she could not have painted any other way. All of her passions and convictions were filtered through her self, expressed through her own face, her own body, her own clothes. Never abstract statements but personal – which of course accounts for their power to speak to us. The other reason is that as an untrained artist, elaborate compositions were beyond her. It was far simpler to start with her own image and work out from that, something she did increasingly successfully as she matured.

Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932) by Frida Kahlo Detroit Institute of Arts

How do Kahlo’s self-portraits differ from other artists working at a similar time? What makes them unique? As the center of her own drama, her self-portraits go way beyond that famous eyebrow. Within their – often surprisingly small – frames she presents the viewer with vivid presentations of her sufferings, joys, and politics. Just as with a charismatic character from fiction, we identify with a life laid out before us. In Seeing Ourselves , I suggested that women artists have developed a new branch of self-portraiture, the personified self-portrait that is a gate to bigger ideas. Using their self image as a point of entry, they build on it by including references that universalize the portrait, making it a starting point for wider ideas. Her self image adds humanity to her abstract ideas, which of course accounts for her art’s power to reach us on an emotional level.

Weeping Coconuts (Cocos gimientes) (1951) by Frida Kahlo Los Angeles County Museum of Art

What motifs and themes did she continually go back to? Her themes and motifs divide into the personal and the political and in most paintings they are entwined. Politically speaking, she waved the flag for Mexican nationalism – literally so in Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States , 1932. But even when she bared her personal feelings – for Diego, for the split between her Mexican and European selves and for her physical pain – these too display her nationalist concerns.

Family portrait (Unfinished) (1949 - 1950) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

What was Kahlo’s personal philosophy? And how is that seen within her work? The paintings say it all: live life to the full, visualize everything within it as part of a whole. Barriers between private and public do not exist in Frida World. Your marriage ends so you paint Self Portrait with Cropped Hair , 1940, the brown strands at your feet symbolic of the way you feel castrated. You identify with Mexico so you paint yourself with your damaged body as a thriving plant rooted in the Mexican soil. Her ‘religion’ was equally inclusive: with a mestizo Christian mother and a German, possibly Jewish, father she forged her own pantheistic vision of humanity at one with nature in an unceasing cycle of birth and death.

Self-portrait wearing a velvet dress (1926) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

In what ways can we see Kahlo’s feminist attitudes within her work? Are there any paintings in particular which are especially revealing of this? I see Kahlo’s feminism with its use of her sexuality, her interest in self-decoration, her devotion to Diego, as a variant of the ‘never underestimate the power of a woman, I Love Lucy’ kind of 1950s feminism in which women marshall their powers of beauty and intuition to get what they want. Endowed with a limp from childhood polio, a disabling teenage bus accident that left her with over 40 operations in her future, and a restless mind, I am convinced that all her life she sought validation that she was ‘all woman’ as the cliché has it, overcoming her disabilities with looks, personality, intelligence and her art. Her lovers may have been a retaliation against the womanizing Diego, but they also added to her sense of self-worth. As a strategy to deal with Diego’s fame and eye for other women on their North American stay in the early 1930s, she eschewed western clothes for the costume of the Tehuana women (much admired by Diego for their spirit), even at parties with the patrons who were paying for Diego’s murals. She chose exoticism and thereby avoided competition. Her indomitable refusal to be squashed or silenced and the physical space she dominated with her personal style forces our admiration across the decades. I see her as much a guerrilla fighter for the cause of women as a feminist.

Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) by Frida Kahlo National Museum of Women in the Arts

How did Kahlo’s politics manifest themselves in her work? Kahlo’s work is imbued with her nationalist and left wing politics. Even a seemingly innocent work like the self-portrait she made for Trotsky ( Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky ) after their short affair has a format based on Mexican versions of baroque portraiture. Look at any image, and the clothing, the animals, the jewelery, the mythic references, the borrowings from folk art, the anti-Americanism all reveal her commitment to her country’s history, products, and beliefs.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving (1934) by Frida Kahlo Museo Frida Kahlo

How did Kahlo depict disability in her self-portraits? What does this reveal about her relationship with her body? I would say Kahlo is a painter of pain. Her image of her body pierced with arrows ( The Broken Column , 1944) is a brilliant transposition from the religious imagery of St Sebastian shot through with arrows for refusing to disavow his faith, to herself encased in a steel brace after a spinal operation. Frida’s body lies under all her work. When she feels fine, it looks out at the viewer, made up and dressed to face the world. At times of pain, like Diego’s affair with her sister, she spares us nothing, not even the severed hand and damaged foot in Memory , 1937. But never forget that this is art, not life. Her gift for the visual metaphor is shown in Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird , 1940, as she turns the icon of the Virgin Mary into a defiant self image surrounded by the animals she saw as soul mates, and makes a daring reference to her suffering by transforming Christ’s crown of thorns into a thorny necklace, a queen of nature not of Christianity.

The Two Fridas (1939) by Frida Kahlo Museo de Arte Moderno

It’s clear Kahlo worked to create an impression of herself – was there a point when this slipped and another side was revealed? The very idea of an impression ‘slipping’ takes away from Kahlo’s power as a creator of imagery. Whatever appeared in those paintings was meant to appear in those paintings. The only time you could argue that her control slips is near the end, when addled by drugs and drink, and in mental agony as her journal reveals, the uncontrolled brushstrokes and limbless body of The Circle , 1950 attests to her distress. Though even here as nature threatens to subsume the torso, there is a positive hint of her body being taken into the arms of the Mexican earth that sustained her.

Frida Kahlo painting The Wounded Table (ca. 1940) by Bernard Silberstein Cincinnati Art Museum

What was Kahlo’s experience in art education? Who taught her to paint and explore her ideas? Frida Kahlo had no formal art school training. Her experience was closer to those female would-be artists in the centuries before art schools allowed them in than to the trained women artists of the 20th century. Her mother’s gift of paints and a mirror above her bed when she was recuperating from the bus accident was the starting gun. Interest in art history, Diego’s recognition of her natural talent, and no doubt her first few sales, gave her the confidence to develop the art that is so admired today. As she matured, her inbuilt artistic intelligence expanded. The folk art that she and Diego so respected did not stop at subject matter, but also provided a format: retablos, those personal primitive scenes of lives saved by divine intervention, complete with written explanations, gave Kahlo a way to talk about herself and her concerns.

Frida Kahlo (ca. 1940, printed 1984) by Bernard Silberstein Cincinnati Art Museum

Why is her education an important factor to consider when looking at her work? Her sparse artistic education can lead one to see Kahlo as an inspired innocent, a kind of sexy Grandma Moses . This is a trap. She may have had little training but she found a way to present an original vision. No artist works outside their time, particularly not a middle class artist with a photographer father, a muralist husband and an artistic social circle. No one, stylistically speaking, could call Kahlo up to date with her invisible brush marks and reliance on a central personal image as a means of avoiding the potholes of elaborate composition and accurate drawing. But the truth is that the roots of her brilliance lay in those limitations. Her innate poetry and the visual alertness that opened her to such metaphors as depicting herself as a baby nourished at the breast of a woman in a Mexican burial mask, led Andre Breton in France to call her a surrealist – a “ribbon tied round a bomb” was his expression.

Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) by Frida Kahlo San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

In the past, the fact that Kahlo is often evaluated in terms of her biography has been talked about a lot – why is it important to see not only her, but all female artists, beyond this perspective? Kahlo is an artist who put herself into her art, not just her appearance, but her love for Diego, her distress at his affair with her beloved sister, her pain from the operations, her conviction that she carried the blood of Mexico in her veins. However, the biographical approach is only partially helpful because it denies the artist any artistic skill or brains and it certainly can’t explain the vivid poetic gift that made her vision so compelling. As with all the best artists, Kahlo’s art is not a diary ingenuously presented in paint but a recreation of personal beliefs, feelings and events through her particular lens into something unique and universal. Recently, I leafed once more through a book of her paintings, and once again – as I always do – I thought how helpless words are in the face of the strange richness of those images.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Museo frida kahlo, u.s. history, cincinnati art museum, the two fridas, 1939, museo de arte moderno, self-portrait with monkey, 1938, albright-knox art gallery, reigning men: fashion in menswear, 1715 - 2015, los angeles county museum of art, diego rivera's detroit industry, detroit institute of arts, artist spotlight: hung liu, national museum of women in the arts, robert s. duncanson, ordinary people by extraordinary artists, mamacita linda: letters between frida kahlo and her mother.

Frida Kahlo – Mother of Mexican Magical Realism

Frida Kahlo’s art frequently utilizes pictorial depiction of bodily suffering in an effort to properly comprehend psychological trauma. One of the most significant Frida Kahlo facts is that prior to her work, the lexicon of bereavement, mortality, and individuality had been fairly successfully explored by certain male creators of art, yet had not been seriously deconstructed by a female artist. In this article, we will be taking an in-depth look into the art and life of this incredible artist and answering questions such as “What is Frida Kahlo known for?” and “How did Frida Kahlo die?”

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Childhood
• 1.2 Early Training
• 1.3 Mature Period
• 1.4 Later Years and Death
• 2.1 Mexicanidad
• 2.2 Iconography and Symbolism
• 3.1 Frida (2017) by Sebastien Paerez
• 3.2 Frida Kahlo: Her Universe (2021) by Frida Kahlo
• 4.1 How Did Frida Kahlo Die?
• 4.2 What Is Frida Kahlo Known For?

A Frida Kahlo Biography

Frida Kahlo’s artwork not only embraced an established vernacular, but she also elaborated on this, making it her own. Kahlo peeled herself open to reveal her inner workings to further illustrate people’s behavior on the surface by actually displaying internal organs and showing her own anatomy in a wounded and damaged condition.

Frida Kahlo’s portraits are iconic and offer lifelong trauma therapy, and her impact cannot be overlooked as not just a “talented painter,” but also a woman deserving of our affection. But before we explore the symbolic subtleties of her work, let us explore her life and career by answering questions such as “When was Frida Kahlo born?” and “Where was Frida Kahlo born?” You can find all important information about her in our article “ Frida Kahlo Facts “. Her famous quotes can be found in our article “ Frida Kahlo Quotes “.

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, a small village situated on the fringes of Mexico City on the 6th of July 1907. Wilhelm, Kahlo’s father, was originally from Germany and had migrated to Mexico in his youth, where he continued for the remainder of his life, eventually assuming her family’s photographic company. Her mother, on the other hand, was a mix of Mexican and Spanish descent, and she raised her children in a disciplined religious environment. 

Besides her family’s conservatism, religious extremism, and inclination to erupt, numerous other incidents in her upbringing had a profound impact on her.

Kahlo developed polio when she was six years of age; a lengthy rehabilitation separated her from other youngsters and irreversibly crippled one of her legs, requiring her to move with a hobble after rehabilitation. All of her siblings attended a convent school, suggesting that Kahlo had a need for broad study, which resulted in her father making distinct selections specifically for her. Wilhelm enrolled the young woman at the German College. 

Kahlo was thankful for this, and notwithstanding her rocky ties with her mother, she always ascribed her father with tremendous empathy and intelligence. Nonetheless, she was fascinated by both lines of her ancestors, and her blended Mexican and European origins generated a life-long curiosity in her attitude to both her art and life. At the German School, she had a dreadful encounter where she was physically molested and compelled to quit. Fortunately, the Minister of Education had revised the schooling policies at the time, and females were accepted to the National Prep School commencing from 1922.

She was amongst the first 35 female students enrolled, and she began studying health, horticulture, and sociology. Frida excelled academically, had a strong appreciation for Mexican culture, and then became politically and socially involved.

Early Training

Diego Rivera was creating a mural in her school’s amphitheater when Kahlo was 15 years old. When she saw him painting, Kahlo had an instant of attraction and intrigue that she would go on to pursue later in life. Simultaneously, she helped her father in his photographic shop and took sketching lessons from her father’s colleague, Fernando Fernandez, for whom she worked as an assistant engraver.

At the same time, Kahlo encountered the “Cachuchas,” a rebellious organization of pupils who affirmed the adolescent creator’s defiant nature and fostered her interests in reading and philosophy.

In 1923, Frida Kahlo fell in love with another member of the group, Alejandro Arias, and the two were intimately connected until 1928. Unfortunately, on their ride home in 1925, the two were injured in a near-fatal bus accident. Her body was fractured all over, which included a shattered pelvis, and a bar pierced her womb. She was immobilized and tied in a plaster corset for four weeks in the hospital, and she was immobile at home for many months after that.

During her lengthy rehabilitation, she decided to explore with small-scale autobiographical portraits, leaving her medical studies owing to pragmatic considerations and shifting her concentration to painting.

Throughout her period of recuperation in solitude, Kahlo’s parents set up a customized workstation, provided her with a set of colors, and hung a mirror above her head so that she could observe her own image and create self-portraits. She spent hours contemplating metaphysical concerns created by her experiences, such as alienation from her personality, increased introspection, and an overall feeling of impending death.

She leaned on the intense graphical realism familiar from her father’s photography portraits and tackled her own early photographs with the same emotional sensitivity. Throughout this period, Kahlo strongly contemplated pursuing a career as a medical illustrator because she viewed it as a way to combine her talents in art and science.

In 1927, she was sufficiently strong enough to depart her bedroom, rekindling her friendship with the Cachuchas organization, which had become increasingly political by this time. She entered the Mexican Communist Party and started to become acquainted with Mexico City’s cultural and political communities.

She made good friends with the photographer Tina Modotti and Cuban rebel Julio Antonio Mella. In June 1928, she was formally presented to Diego Rivera during one of Modotti’s frequent parties, who was arguably one of Mexico’s most recognized painters and a highly prominent figure of the PCM.

Shortly after, she openly requested him to judge if her artwork was suitable for maintaining a profession as a painter after examining one of her pictures.

He was blown away by the sincerity and uniqueness of her artwork and convinced her of her abilities. Regardless of the fact that Rivera had been previously married before and was reputed to have an unquenchable affection for ladies, the two rapidly established a passionate connection and were wedded in 1929.

Mature Period

By the beginning of the 1930s, Frida Kahlo’s artwork had grown to encompass a more forceful perception of Mexican nationality, a feature of her art that arose from her connection to Mexico’s contemporary indigenous culture and her desire in protecting Mexicanidad during the advent of fascism in Europe. Her desire to distance herself from her German ancestry is indicated by her title from Frieda to Frida, as well as her desire to adopt the indigenous Tehuana attire from previous matriarchal periods.

Two failed pregnancies at the period increased Kahlo’s paradoxically brutal and beautiful expression of the uniquely feminine situation through metaphor and autobiographical.

During the early 1930s, Kahlo and Rivera resided in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York as Rivera worked on murals. She also accomplished key pieces such as Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932) and Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931), the former conveying her impressions of the competition between environment and commerce in the two regions.

During this period, she met and befriended Ansel Adams , Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston. While in San Francisco, she also met Dr. Leo Eloesser, the physician who would become her nearest health consultant through to her eventual death. Shortly after the inauguration of Rivera’s massive and contentious painting for the Rockefeller Center in New York, the pair returned to Mexico because Kahlo was unhappy. They relocated to a new home in San Angel’s affluent area. The home was divided into two sections that were connected by a bridge.

This arrangement was suitable because their marriage was under extreme stress.

Rivera, who had already been adulterous, was having a relationship with Kahlo’s younger sister Cristina at the time, which naturally wounded Kahlo more than her husband’s past indiscretions. At this moment, Kahlo decided to pursue her own adulterous relationships. She met Nickolas Muray, a photographer from Hungary who was on vacation in Mexico, not long after her return from the United States. The two had an on-again, off-again romance that lasted ten years, and Muray is recognized for capturing Kahlo most vibrantly on camera.

While residing in her own apartment away from San Angel after her relationship with her sister, Kahlo also had a brief romance with the artist Isamu Noguchi. Till Kahlo’s passing, the two socially and politically minded painters remained good friends. In 1938, during a trip to Mexico City, André Breton, the father of the Surrealist movement , was fascinated by Frida Kahlo’s art and contacted his art dealer friend, Julien Levy, who promptly asked Kahlo to organize her first solo display at his art gallery.

This time, Kahlo came to the United States without Rivera and made quite a stir when she arrived. Her bright and exotic (but truly traditional) Mexican outfits drew a crowd, and her show was a hit.

One of the famous attendees that attended Kahlo’s launch was Georgia O’Keeffe. Kahlo spent many months partying in New York before sailing to Paris in early 1939 to showcase with the Surrealists . That show was not as popular, and she rapidly became bored with the Surrealists’ over-intellectualism. Kahlo went to New York with the intention of continuing her love interest with Muray, but he ended the affair since he had found someone else. As a result, Kahlo returned to Mexico City, and Rivera demanded a divorce.

Later Years and Death

Kahlo returned to La Casa Azul after her separation. She started working on significantly larger canvases after abandoning her smaller works. Kahlo and Rivera wedded in 1940, and their marriage grew less tumultuous as Kahlo’s health declined. Between 1940 and 1956, the ailing artist frequently had to wear supporting back corsets to alleviate her spinal difficulties; she also suffered an infectious skin ailment and syphilis. Her despair and health were aggravated after her father passed away in 1941.

Kahlo was often housebound afterward, and she discovered simple joy in being surrounded by pets and caring for the gardens at La Casa Azul.

She had to make a livelihood from her work, refusing to accommodate clients’ desires if she did not agree with them, but she was rewarded with a national award for her artwork Moses (1945), and The Two Fridas artwork was purchased by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947.

Furthermore, the artist became more unwell. She had a difficult procedure to attempt to align her spine, but it flopped, and she was often wheelchair-bound from 1950 onward.

In her later years, she managed to work rather voluminously while still being politically active and condemning nuclear testing by Western governments. Kahlo showed in Mexico for the final time in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo’s gallery, her very first standalone display in the country. She arrived at the occasion in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed trailing behind on the back of a truck. The cot was then put in the middle of the gallery, where she could recline for the length of the exhibition. Kahlo died in La Casa Azul in 1954. While the stated manner of death was a blood clot, suspicions have been raised concerning suicide, whether intentional or unintentional. She was 47 years old at the time.

Frida Kahlo’s artwork has been identified with Magic Realism , Primitivism, and Surrealism as an individual who was divorced from any formal aesthetic trend. Frida Kahlo’s artwork has proven immensely significant for feminist research and postcolonial discussions after her death, and she has become a global cultural figure.

For public audiences, the creator’s celebrity status has led to the encapsulation of the artist’s work as indicative of Latin American arts in general, distanced from the nuances of Kahlo’s intensely intimate subject matter.

Kahlo’s legacy cannot be understated or overstated. Not only is it possible that each and every female painter working since the 1950s would cite her as an inspiration, but she inspires more than just artists and art enthusiasts. Her work also helps those who have suffered as a consequence of a tragedy, a miscarriage, or a broken marriage. Kahlo expressed complicated experiences via visuals, making them more bearable and offering viewers hope that people might survive, recuperate, and begin again.

Frida Kahlo’s Art Style and Influences

Assessments of how many artworks Kahlo created throughout her lifetime range from fewer than 150 to approximately 200. Her early works, created in the mid-1920s, are influenced by Renaissance artists and European avant-garde painters such as Amedeo Modigliani .

Toward the close of the decade, Kahlo was intrigued by Mexican folk art for its aspects of “magic, innocence, and obsession with death and violence.”

One of Kahlo’s early supporters was Surrealist painter André Breton, who proclaimed her as a member of the group as a painter who created her style “in absolute ignorance of the ideals that prompted my friends’ and my own activity.” Bertram D. Wolfe agreed, writing that Kahlo’s work was a “kind of ‘nave’ Surrealism, which she constructed for herself.” Although Breton saw her as primarily a female influence in the Surrealist movement, Kahlo pushed postcolonial problems and topics to the front of her Surrealist style.  

Breton also regarded Kahlo’s work as “wonderfully located at the junction of the philosophical line and the aesthetic line.” Her art combined reality with surrealistic aspects and frequently showed suffering and death. Although she later appeared in Surrealist shows, she declared that she “abhorred Surrealism,” which she saw as “bourgeois artwork” rather than “genuine art that the masses desire from the artist.”

Some art historians have argued that her work should not be regarded as part of the movement at all.

Kahlo, according to Andrea Kettenmann, was a symbolist who was more interested in depicting her interior feelings. Emma Dexter has suggested that because Kahlo got her combination of imagination and reality mostly from Aztec myth and Mexican tradition rather than Surrealism, her works are more akin to magical realism. It mixed realism and imagination and used flattened viewpoints, finely drawn figures, and vivid colors, akin to Kahlo’s.

Mexicanidad

Kahlo, like many other contemporaneous Mexican painters , was profoundly affected by Mexicanidad, a sentimental nationalistic ideology that arose after the revolution. The Mexicanidad movement purported to be against colonialism’s “attitude of cultural degradation,” and it emphasized indigenous traditions in particular. Prior to the uprising, Mexican folk culture – a blend of indigenous and European components – was derided by the aristocracy, who professed completely European lineage and saw Europe as the model of civilization that Mexico should emulate.

Kahlo’s creative goal was to create for the people of Mexico, and she claimed that she hoped “to be deserving, with my works, of the citizens to which I represent and the beliefs that empower me.”

To reinforce this impression, she chose to hide her art studies from her father and Ferdinand Fernandez, as well as her preparatory school education. Instead, she portrayed herself as a “self-taught and unsophisticated artist.” Muralists controlled the Mexican art landscape when Kahlo started her profession as a painter in the 1920s. They made big public works in the style of Renaissance artists and Russian socialist realists: they frequently represented crowds, and their political statements were simple to understand.

Her aesthetic was mainly influenced by votive canvases, which were postcard-sized religious pictures created by amateur painters, in the 1930s. Their objective was to express gratitude to saints for their safety during a tragedy, and they often showed some occurrence, such as a disease or an accident, from which its client had been protected. The emphasis was on the characters shown, and they rarely included realistic perspective or rich surroundings, reducing the action to its essence.

Kahlo amassed a large collection of retablos, which she placed on the walls of La Casa Azul.

The retablo design, according to Peter Wollen, allowed Kahlo to “explore the limitations of the simply iconic and permitted her to incorporate story and metaphor.” Several of Frida Kahlo’s portraits resemble the traditional bust-length portraits used during the colonial period, but they disrupt the norm by showing their subject as less beautiful than she is in reality. She shifted her focus to this genre more regularly around the close of the 1930s, mirroring shifts in Mexican culture.

Mexicans were rejecting the spirit of socialism for individuality, disenchanted by the aftermath of the revolution and straining to deal with the impacts of the Great Depression. This was echoed in the “personality cults” that sprang up around Mexican cinema actresses like Dolores del Ro.

“Frida Kahlo’s portraits recall the contemporary preoccupation with the close-up of female beauty, and the mystery of feminine specialness represented in film noir,” according to Schaefer.

Kahlo took inspiration from the representation of gods and saints in native and Catholic cultures by continually repeating the same facial characteristics. Among Mexican folk painters, Kahlo was particularly inspired by Hermenegildo Bustos, whose paintings showed Mexican heritage and peasant life, and José Guadalupe Posada, whose works satirized accidents and criminality.

Kahlo was also inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch , whom she referred to as a “man of genius,” and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose attention on peasant life paralleled her own concern in the Mexican people. Another of her inspirations was the poet Rosario Castellanos, whose poetry frequently chronicled a woman’s situation in patriarchal Mexican culture, a preoccupation with the feminine body, and stories of extreme physical and mental anguish.

Iconography and Symbolism

Frida Kahlo’s artworks frequently include root imagery, with roots sprouting out of her body to connect her to the earth. This highlights the topic of personal progress in a positive sense; being stuck in a certain location, time, and position in a bad sense; and an unclear feeling of how recollections of the past impact the current for good or evil. Kahlo depicted herself as a ten-year-old in My Grandparents and I, carrying a ribbon that expands from an old tree that carries photographs of her grandparents and other forefathers, whilst her left foot is a big tree starting to grow out of the surface.

This mirrored Kahlo’s perception of humanity’s unification with the planet as well as her own sense of solidarity with Mexico.

Trees appear in Kahlo’s works as emblems of optimism, power, and a connection that spans generations. Furthermore, hair appears in Frida Kahlo’s paintings as a sign of development and the feminine, and in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair , Kahlo depicted herself donning a young man’s outfit and sheared off her long hair, which she had just chopped off. She holds the scissors ominously nearby to her genital area, which can be construed as a threatening gesture to Rivera – whose regular infidelity incensed her – or a risk to endanger her own body in the same way she has struck her own hair.

This stood as a sign of how women frequently project their rage for others onto themselves.

Furthermore, the image expresses Kahlo’s dissatisfaction not just with Rivera, but also with Mexican patriarchal ideals, since the scissors represent a malicious idea of masculinity that promises to “rip up” women, both metaphorically and practically. Traditional Spanish norms of macho were largely accepted in Mexico, but Kahlo was always uneasy with machismo. As she endured for the remainder of her life as a result of the bus accident in her childhood, Kahlo expended much of her time in hospitals and having surgery, much of it was conducted by “quacks” who Kahlo felt could return her to her pre-accident state.

Many of Frida Kahlo’s artworks deal with medical imagery, which is expressed in terms of anguish and hurt, with Kahlo hemorrhaging and showing her gaping sores.

Several of Kahlo’s medical paintings, particularly those dealing with delivery and miscarriage, contain a large feeling of guilt, of spending one’s life at the price of someone who has died so that one may live. Although Kahlo included herself and situations from her life in her works, the message was frequently vague.

She didn’t only use them to demonstrate her subjectivity; she also used them to raise problems about Mexican culture and the production of identification within it, including gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Kahlo constructed a sophisticated iconography to address these problems via her work, heavily integrating pre-Columbian and Christian symbolism and folklore in her works.

In most of Frida Kahlo’s portraits, she displays her face as if it were a mask, but it is accompanied by visual signals that allow the spectator to understand deeper meanings.

Aztec mythology is prominent in Kahlo’s works, with motifs such as apes, bones, skeletons, blood, and hearts; these motifs frequently alluded to the stories of Quetzalcoatl, Coatlicue, and Xolotl. Hybridity and duality were two more key concepts that Kahlo took from the Aztec myth.

Many of her works show polar opposites, such as death and life, European and Mexican, and masculine and female. In addition to Aztec traditions, Kahlo regularly featured two important female figures from Mexican mythology in her works of art: La Llorona and La Malinche as interconnected with difficult situations, sorrow, disaster, or condemnation, as being catastrophic, miserable, or “de la chingada.”

For instance, after her miscarriage, she depicted herself as sobbing, with disheveled hair and an unprotected heart, all of which are regarded as part of the look of La Llorona, a lady who killed her children. Originally, the picture was viewed as a simple portrayal of Kahlo’s anguish and pain over her lost pregnancy.

However, interpretations of the symbolism in the artwork and data from Kahlo’s letters about her true thoughts on parenting, the picture have been interpreted as showing the unorthodox and forbidden decision of a woman staying childless in Mexican culture.

Kahlo frequently included her own body in her works, portraying it in various states and conceals, such as injured, shattered, as a kid, or costumed in various clothes, such as a man’s suit, or European clothing. She utilized her body as a symbol to investigate her role in society. Her paintings frequently showed the female body in unusual situations, such as miscarriage, delivery, or cross-dressing. By graphically displaying the female body, Kahlo placed the spectator in the role of voyeur, “making it practically difficult for a viewer not to establish a deliberately held attitude in reaction.”

Recommended Reading

Today discovered a little about life and art and Frida Kahlo. We have tried to go a little deeper than just asking the basic questions such as When was Frida Kahlo born and where was Frida Kahlo born, but there is always more to discover. Perhaps you would like to discover more about her through reading a Frida Kahlo biography and interesting Frida Kahlo facts. Here is a list of selected books on that very subject.

Frida (2017) by Sebastien Paerez

Frida is a magnificent feast of a book that transports the reader into the world of this acclaimed artist, both physically and spiritually. One is lured in by a sequence of sequential die-cut pages, moving through facets of her life, art, and design side while addressing the topics that most inspired her, such as love, death, and pregnancy. Her art has always had the potential to traverse borders and resound with its genuine and realistic representation of the human condition, making it iconic and emotional. There has never been a more fitting tribute.

• A sumptuous feast of a book with a series of die-cut pages
• Allows the reader to enter this revered artist's world
• With excerpts from Frida Kahlo's personal diaries

Frida Kahlo: Her Universe (2021) by Frida Kahlo

Painter Frida Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, are presented in this collection. More than 300 images from the Museo Frida Kahlo’s archives in Mexico City show the audience Kahlo’s unique wardrobe, the remarkable compilations of famous and pre-Hispanic paintings she gathered with Rivera, her correlation with photography, and the background of La casa Azul, her adored blue home which now functions as the gallery’s main house. This book invites us inside Frida Kahlo’s universe, delving into the legacy of a pivotal figure in 20th-century art and culture in her own Mexico and beyond the world.

• The iconic Mexican painter as seen through 300 archival items
• A compendium of a rich diversity of themes, concepts, and emotions
• Catch a glimpse into the lives of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Through her works, Kahlo transformed herself into the primary character of her own narrative, as a female, a Mexican, and a person in anguish. She understood how to transform each into a metaphor or symbol worthy of conveying humanity’s immense spiritual struggle and beautiful sexuality. The wide array of topics, ideas, thoughts, and emotions developed by two key, iconic icons of contemporary Mexico: She used her physique as a metaphor to analyze her place in society. Her paintings typically depicted the female body in odd circumstances, such as miscarriage, childbirth, or cross-dressing. Kahlo put the spectator in the role of voyeur by graphically showing the female body, “making it nearly impossible for a viewer not to create a purposefully maintained attitude in reaction.”

Frequently Asked Questions

How did frida kahlo die.

In 1954, Kahlo died in La Casa Azul. While the cause of death was declared to be a blood clot, doubts have been raised about suicide, whether deliberate or inadvertent. At the time, she was 47 years old.

What Is Frida Kahlo Known For?

Frida Kahlo reinvented herself via her works as a feminist, a Mexican, and a woman in agony, she is the central figure in her own mythology. She understood how to transform each into a symbol or sign capable of conveying humanity’s immense spiritual resistance as well as its magnificent sexuality. Frida Kahlo’s artwork typically depicts physiological agony pictorially in order to adequately understand psychological trauma.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Frida Kahlo – Mother of Mexican Magical Realism.” Art in Context. March 8, 2022. URL: https://artincontext.org/frida-kahlo/

Meyer, I. (2022, 8 March). Frida Kahlo – Mother of Mexican Magical Realism. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/frida-kahlo/

Meyer, Isabella. “Frida Kahlo – Mother of Mexican Magical Realism.” Art in Context , March 8, 2022. https://artincontext.org/frida-kahlo/ .

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Frida kahlo.

The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art brings photographs and letters together in  Frida Kahlo: Notas Sobre una Vida / Notes on a Life . Kahlo expressed emotion and identity in art that was intimate in scale and subject matter.

Art History and Artists

Frida kahlo.

• Occupation: Artist
• Born: July 6, 1907 Mexico City, Mexico
• Died: July 13, 1954 Mexico City, Mexico
• Famous works: Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, The Two Fridas, Memory, the Heart, Henry Ford Hospital
• Style/Period: Surrealism

• Her full name is Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon.
• In 1984, Mexico declared the works of Frida Kahlo part of the country's national cultural heritage.
• Her painting The Frame was the first painting by a Mexican artist acquired by the Louvre.
• Her paintings often featured aspects of Aztec Mythology and Mexican folklore.
• The major motion picture Frida told the story of her life and earned 6 Academy Award nominations.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page: