Frida Kahlo

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” – Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo (born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón; 1907 – 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. However, more than her art, she is now famous as an icon of the feminist, LGBT+, and BIPOC communities and movements.

Today would have been Frida’s birthday, and I spent literally hours today learning about her and admiring her strength. Frida’s image is ubiquitous in pop culture across the globe, and yet I knew shockingly little of the story behind that beautiful face. I tried SO hard to draft something short and snappy about her, but after 4 hours of redrafting I’ve decided that her story needs told so that (unlike me) people no longer just know that she was “the girl with eyebrows” and little else. 

“I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.”

CHILDHOOD

Kahlo was born one of three sisters, in a village on the outskirts of Mexico City to a German father and Mexican mother.  She described their childhood home as "very, very sad" owing to her parents’ loveless marriage and failing health. She had a tense relationship with her mother but worshipped her father, whom she credited with encouraging her art and education, and supporting her through their shared struggles with disability (Frida contracted polio aged 6).  Her later feminist principles could also be partly traced back to him, as he encouraged her to rebuild her strength through sport despite the fact that most physical exercise was seen as unsuitable for girls at the time. Her education was extremely fragmented owing to her illness, and having to move schools after being sexually abused by a female teacher.

Frida hoped to become a doctor. At university, she met her first love Alejandro Gomez Arias, of whom her family disapproved. They were often separated by political instability and violence but exchanged passionate love letters.

On 17 September 1925 was involved in a bus crash which killed several passengers. The 18 year old Kahlo was impaled with an iron handrail that went through her pelvis (which was removed by Arias and other passengers with a great deal of pain to Frida). She suffered several serious injuries including many broken and crushed bones, and her abdomen and uterus had been punctured by the rail. It was later discovered that she had also displaced three vertebrae and had to wear a plaster corset which confined her to bed rest for the better part of three months.The accident ended Kahlo's dreams of becoming a doctor and caused her pain and illness for the rest of her life; her friend Andrés Henestrosa stated that Kahlo "lived dying".

During her bedrest, Kahlo passed time by painting, given specially adapted equipment by her family. She considered a career as a medical illustrator so she could combine her interests in science and art. Painting became a way for Kahlo to explore questions of identity and existence. Most of the paintings Kahlo made during this time were portraits of herself, her sisters, and her friends.

Marriage

“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”

In June 1928, Kahlo was introduced to Diego Rivera. Kahlo asked him to judge whether her paintings showed enough talent for her to pursue a career as an artist. He believed she did. They soon began a relationship. Her mother disapproved of Rivera, who was 20 years her senior (and had two common-law wives), but her father was happy that Rivera was wealthy enough to provide for Kahlo and her expensive medica treatment.  They married a year later.

In late 1930, the couple moved to San Francisco where they were "feted, lionized, [and] spoiled" by influential collectors and clients. She also began her long love affair with Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray around this time. They travelled between Mexico and the States for Rivera’s work for a few years. By 1933, Kahlo had become bolder in her interactions with the press, impressing journalists with her fluency in English and stating: "Of course he [Rivera] does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist".

She then endured a difficult year in Detroit. Although she liked some cities, she disliked American society for its colonialism and capitalism, and was bored by the American socialities. She also expressed disgust at the anti-Semitism shown in New York City. This year was made more difficult by traumatic pregnancies – one abortion, one failed abortion which later resulted in a miscarriage causing a serious haemorrhage which hospitalised her for weeks. A few months after her miscarriage, her mother died too.

Rivera wished to remain in the USA but Kahlo was homesick and in December 1933 they returned to Mexico – where they lived in separate residences joined by a bridge. However, her health difficulties continued. Her marriage was also increasingly tense owing to Rivera’s resentment at having been forced to return to Mexico. Despite previous affairs, he caused his wife great distress by beginning an affair with her younger sister. When Frida found out in 1935, she moved into her own apartment and began her own affair with American artist Isamu Noguchi. 

“Diego was everything; my child, my lover, my universe.” – Frida Kahlo

After opening an exhibition in Paris, Kahlo sailed back to New York, eager to be reunited with her lover Muray. However, he ended this affair and married another woman. On returning to Mexico, she discovered that Rivera had requested a divorce. They were divorced in 1939 but remained amicable and she continued to manage his finances and correspondence.

Although Kahlo had a relationship with art dealer Heinz Berggruen during her visit to San Francisco, she and Rivera reconciled. They remarried in December 1940. Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico soon after their wedding. The union was more successful this time, as both were more independent and Rivera retained his own studio/apartment. However, both continued having extramarital affairs, Kahlo with both men and women.

When Rivera began yet another affair while Frida was extremely ill in 1954, she attempted suicide by overdose. She wrote in her diary: "They amputated my leg six months ago, they have given me centuries of torture and at moments I almost lost my reason. I keep on wanting to kill myself. Diego is what keeps me from it, through my vain idea that he would miss me. ... But never in my life have I suffered more. I will wait a while..."

LATER LIFE AND DEATH

“At the end of the day we can endure much more than we think we can.”― Frida Kahlo

In 1940,  Kahlo traveled to San Francisco for medical treatment for back pain and a fungal infection on her hand.  Her continuously fragile health had increasingly declined since her divorce and was exacerbated by her heavy consumption of alcohol. Kahlo's health problems continued throughout the 1940s. As well as spinal problems, she experienced pain in her legs, chronic infection in her hand, and received treatment for syphilis. She became deeply depressed after her father died in 1941.  Her health rendered her confined in her home, where she took joy in gardening and raising many animasls and birds.

By the mid-1940s, her back had worsened to the point that she could no longer sit or stand continuously. In June 1945, she travelled to New York for an operation to support her spine but it was unsuccessful. It is also said that Kahlo also sabotaged her recovery by not resting as required and by once physically re-opening her wounds in a fit of anger. Her paintings from this period reflect her declining health.

She spent most of 1950 in hospital enduring numerous infections and surgeries. She was eventually returned home where she needed a wheelchair and crutches to get around. In 1953, her right right leg was amputated at the knee owing to gangrene. She became severely depressed and anxious, and her dependency on painkillers escalated and she became suicidal.

She seemed to anticipate her death, as she spoke about it to visitors and drew skeletons and angels in her diary. The last drawing was a black angel. It was accompanied by the last words she wrote, "I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return – Frida".

After attending a demonstration, on the night of 12 July 1954, Kahlo had a high fever and was in extreme pain. At approximately 6 a.m. on 13 July 1954, her nurse found her dead in her bed, aged 47. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism but it is now suggested that she committed suicide. The nurse stated that Kahlo had taken an overdose the night she died and she had also given Rivera a wedding anniversary present that evening, over a month in advance.

The day after her death, her body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where it lay in a state under a Communist flag. The following day, it was carried to the Panteón Civil de Dolores for an informal funeral, attended by hundreds of fans. Rivera, who stated that her death was "the most tragic day of my life", died three years later, in 1957.

POLITICS

“I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.”

In 1922, Kahlo was accepted to the elite National Preparatory School (one of only 35 girls out of 2000 students), a school which promoted a new sense of Mexican identity that took pride in the country's indigenous heritage and sought to rid itself of the colonial mind. As well as excelling in her studies, Frida became "deeply immersed and seriously committed to Mexican culture, political activism and issues of social justice". To portray herself as a "daughter of the revolution", she began saying that she had been born on 7 July 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began. When her bedrest was over in late 1927, she was able to rejoin her friends’ interest in student politics. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and was introduced to a circle of political activists and artists.

When she and Rivera moved to Morelos, which had been hard hit by war, it heightened Kahlo's sense of a Mexican identity and history. Like other Mexican women, Kahlo began wearing traditional indigenous Mexican peasant clothing to emphasize her mestiza ancestry. She was particularly fond of women’s dress from the allegedly matriarchal society of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Thus, the Tehuana outfit allowed Kahlo to express her feminist and anti-colonialist ideals.

Similarly to many other contemporary Mexican artists, Kahlo was heavily influenced by Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that had developed in the aftermath of the revolution. Kahlo's artistic ambition was to paint for the Mexican people, and she stated that she wished "to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me".

Many of Kahlo's self-portraits mimic the classic portraits fashionable during the colonial era, but they subvert the format by depicting their subject as less attractive than in reality. She concentrated more frequently on this format towards the end of the 1930s, thus reflecting changes in Mexican society. Increasingly disillusioned by the legacy of the revolution and struggling to cope with the effects of the Great Depression, Mexicans were abandoning the ethos of socialism for individualism. Kahlo's "mask-like self-portraits echo the contemporaneous fascination with the cinematic close-up of feminine beauty, as well as the mystique of female otherness expressed in film noir."

“I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep… it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night whiles thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger."

Although she liked some cities, she disliked American society for its colonialism and capitalism, and was bored by the American socialities. She also expressed disgust at the anti-semitism shown in New York City.  She was considerably woke about racism and the patriarchy for a lady of her time, and advocated the need for representation of ‘women of colour’ in politics and art – something which sounds like it could have been tweeted yesterday!

In 1936, she resumed her political activities. She joined the Fourth International and became a founding member of a solidarity committee to provide aid to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. She successfully petitioned the Mexican government to grant asylum to former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky and offered  their home to him and his wife – despite Kahlo having a brief affair with him herself (and later being implicated in his assassination!)

Kahlo dedicated her time to political causes until her very last day. She had rejoined the Mexican Communist Party in 1948 and campaigned for peace. In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden but made a public appearance on 2 July 1954, participating with Rivera in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. This demonstration possibly cost her her life.

 

CAREER

““I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn’t say otherwise.”

Kahlo painted throughout her life, taking breaks when her ill health or personal circumstances necessitated it. She was influenced by her time in Mexico and the Us. Her first exhibited painting, Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931), was a double portrait based on their wedding photograph. She still identified primarily as Diego’s wife, rather than an artist herself, however. When she gave an interview to the Detroit News on her art; the article was condescendingly titled "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art" (this makes me want to vomit, quite frankly).

Following her divorce and then reconciliation with Rivera, she painted more "than she had done in all her eight previous years of marriage”. She made her first significant sale in the summer of 1938 when film star and art collector Edward G. Robinson purchased four paintings at $200 each.

In October, Kahlo traveled alone to New York, where her colorful Mexican dress "caused a sensation" and made her seen as "the height of exotica". The exhibition opening in November was attended by famous figures and received much positive attention in the press, although many critics adopted a condescending tone in their reviews. Despite the Great Depression, Kahlo sold half of the twenty-five paintings presented in the exhibition.

In January 1939, a less successful exhibition of her work was held in Paris.  The Louvre purchased The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. She was also warmly received by other Parisian artists, such as Pablo Picasso as well as the fashion world. In the United States and Mexico, Kahlo's paintings also continued to raise interest. She became a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of twenty-five artists commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education in 1942 to spread public knowledge of Mexican culture.

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“Painting completed my life.”

In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the recently reformed, nationalistic Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda. "She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art and to derive their subjects from the street. When her health problems made it difficult for her to commute to the school, she taught classes at home.

Kahlo struggled to make a living from her art until the mid to late 1940s, as she refused to adapt her style to suit her clients' wishes. She failed to complete two commissions from the Mexican government in the early 1940s. Nevertheless, she had regular private clients and her finances improved when she received a 5000-peso national prize in 1945.

In 1953, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo anticipated Kahlo did not have long left, and thus staged her first solo exhibition. Kahlo was supposed to be on bedrest, but she ordered her four-poster bed to be moved from her home to the gallery. She shocked guests by arriving in an ambulance and was carried on a stretcher to the bed, where she stayed for the duration of the party. The exhibition was a notable cultural event in Mexico and also received attention in mainstream press around the world. Estimates vary on how many paintings Kahlo made during her life, with figures ranging from fewer than 150 to around 200.

Although Kahlo featured herself and events from her life in her paintings, they were often ambiguous in meaning. She did not use them only to show her subjective experience but to raise questions about Mexican society and the construction of identity within it, particularly gender, race, and social class. Historian Liza Bakewell has stated that Kahlo "recognized the conflicts brought on by revolutionary ideology": “What was it to be a Mexican? – modern, yet pre-Columbian; young, yet old; anti-Catholic yet Catholic; Western, yet New World; developing, yet underdeveloped; independent, yet colonized; mestizo, yet not Spanish nor Indian.”

To explore these questions through her art, Kahlo developed a complex iconography, extensively employing pre-Columbian and Christian symbols and mythology in her paintings. Aztec mythology features heavily in Kahlo's paintings, many of which depict binary opposites such as life or death, Mexican and European, male and female.

LEGACY

“You didn’t understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure. I am essence. I am an idiot. I am tenacious. I am. I simply am.”

Kahlo's reputation as an artist developed late in her life and grew even further posthumously, as during her lifetime she was primarily known as the wife of Diego Rivera and as an eccentric personality among the international cultural elite. She gradually gained more recognition in the late 1970s when feminist scholars began to question the exclusion of female and non-Western artists from the art historical canon. In 1977, The Tree of Hope Stands Firm (1944) became the first Kahlo painting to be sold in an auction, netting $19,000 at Sotheby's.

Two events were instrumental in raising interest in her life and art for the general public outside Mexico. The first was a joint travelling exhibition of her paintings and Tina Modotti's. The second was the publication of art historian Hayden Herrera's international bestseller Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo in 1983.

By 1984, Kahlo's reputation as an artist had grown to such extent that Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage, prohibiting their export from the country. Regardless, her paintings have still broken records for Latin American art in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1990, she became the first Latin American artist to break the one-million-dollar threshold and her paintings have since been sold for $8 million.

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“Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they’re not at all the same. But they’re both symptoms inside the white male power structure.”

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, she had become not only a recognized figure in art history, but also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement and the LGBTQ+ movement. Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

Hair features as a symbol of growth and of the feminine in Kahlo's paintings and in Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo painted herself wearing a man's suit and having cropped her hair. She holds scissors menacingly close to her genitals, which can be interpreted as a threat to Rivera whose frequent unfaithfulness infuriated her and/or a threat to harm her own body, a sign of the way that women often project their fury against others onto themselves. Moreover, the picture reflects her unease with the patriarchal values of Mexico as the scissors symbolize a malevolent sense of masculinity that threatens to "cut up" women, both metaphorically and literally. In Mexico, the traditional Spanish values of machismo were widely embraced, and as a woman, Kahlo was always uncomfortable with machismo.

Given her constant ill-health and spells in hospital, many of her paintings contained medical imagery and portray her with injuries or wounds. Many such paintings, especially those dealing with childbirth and miscarriage, suggest a strong sense of guilt, of a sense of living one's life at the expense of another who has died so one might live. Following her miscarriage in 1932, she painted f as weeping, with dishevelled hair and an exposed heart, which are all considered part of the appearance of La Llorona, a woman who murdered her children. The painting was traditionally interpreted as simply a depiction of Kahlo's grief and pain over her failed pregnancies. However, since her actual views towards motherhood have become more well known, it is now seen as depicting the unconventional and taboo choice of a woman remaining childless in Mexican society. Kahlo often featured her own body in her paintings, presenting it in varying states and disguises: as wounded, broken, as a child, or clothed in different outfits, such as the Tehuana costume, a man's suit, or a European dress. She used her body as a metaphor to explore questions on societal roles. Her paintings often depicted the female body in an unconventional manner, such as during miscarriages, and childbirth or cross-dressing.

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"The twenty-first-century Frida is both a star –a commercial property… and an embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of a near-religious group of followers. This wild, hybrid Frida, a mixture of tragic bohemian, Virgin of Guadalupe, revolutionary heroine and Salma Hayek, has taken such great hold on the public imagination that it tends to obscure the historically retrievable Kahlo."

Kahlo has attracted popular interest to the extent that the term "Fridamania" has been coined to describe the phenomenon. She is considered "one of the most instantly recognizable artists". Some have compared the interest in Kahlo's life to the interest in the troubled life of Vincent van Gogh but has also stated that a crucial difference between the two is that most people associate Van Gogh with his paintings, whereas Kahlo is usually signified by an image of herself – an intriguing commentary on the way male and female artists are regarded. Peter Wollen has compared Kahlo's cult-like following to that of Sylvia Plath, whose "unusually complex and contradictory art" has been overshadowed by simplified focus on her life. Kahlo’s life and art have inspired a variety of merchandise, and her distinctive look has been appropriated by the fashion world. A Hollywood biopic, Julie Taymor's Frida, was released in 2002, grossing US$56 million worldwide.

Kahlo's posthumous popularity and the commercialization of her image have drawn criticism from many scholars and cultural commenters, who think that, not only have many facets of her life been mythologized, but the dramatic aspects of her biography have also overshadowed her art, producing a simplistic reading of her works in which they are reduced to literal descriptions of events in her life For journalist Stephanie Mencimer, Kahlo "has been embraced as a poster child for every possible politically correct cause… This elevation of the artist over the art diminishes the public understanding of Kahlo's place in history and overshadows the deeper and more disturbing truths in her work.’

““I am nothing but a “small damned” part of a revolutionary movement. Always revolutionary never dead, never useless.”

Kahlo's popular appeal is seen to stem first and foremost from a fascination with her life story, especially its painful and tragic aspects. She has become an icon for several minority groups and political movements, such as feminists, the LGBTQ community, and Chicanos. Oriana Baddeley has written that Kahlo has become a signifier of non-conformity and "the archetype of a cultural minority," who is regarded simultaneously as "a victim, crippled and abused" and as "a survivor who fights back.” Kirk Varnedoe believes that Kahlo's posthumous success is linked to the way in which "she clicks with today's sensibilities – her psycho-obsessive concern with herself, her creation of a personal alternative world carries a voltage.’

According to Nancy Cooey, Kahlo made herself through her paintings into "the main character of her own mythology, as a woman, as a Mexican, and as a suffering person ... She knew how to convert each into a symbol or sign capable of expressing the enormous spiritual resistance of humanity and its splendid sexuality". Similarly, Nancy Deffebach has stated that Kahlo "created herself as a subject who was female, Mexican, modern, and powerful", and who diverged from the usual dichotomy of roles of mother/whore allowed to women in Mexican society. Due to her gender and divergence from the muralist tradition, Kahlo's paintings were treated as less political and more naïve and subjective than those of her male counterparts up until the late 1980s: “Critical responses continue to gloss over Kahlo's reworking of the personal, ignoring or minimizing her interrogation of sexuality, sexual difference, marginality, cultural identity, female subjectivity, politics and power."

I’ve had a lot of messages from people saying they had no idea her life was so tragic and painful. I shared this shock at hearing her biography, and thus wanted to rise above the “Fridamania” and find the real Frida Kahlo – a survivor, a lover, a revolutionary, and above all, an artist.