Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird - 1940

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón de Rivera, better known as Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 to July 13, 1954), was a Mexican painter of the indigenous culture of her country in a style combining Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism. She was the wife of Mexican muralist and cubist painter Diego Rivera.

Kahlo's life was one marked by suffering, heroism, and genius. Stricken with polio as a child, then nearly crippled in a bus accident at the age of eighteen, Kahlo defied the odds, not only by learning to walk again, but by taking the world by storm with her unique artistic vision.[1]

During her life, Kahlo was recognized primarily by the intellectual elite, both in Mexico and internationally, but was not well known among ordinary Mexicans, particularly because she worked in mediums that did not lend themselves to mass distribution. [2]

A child during the Mexican Revolution, Kahlo grew up in an era of social change. In the 1920s Frida espoused a Communist anti-capitalist philosophy. She befriended the famed Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, Leon Trostky, who was assassinated in her home country of Mexico.

Known for her unconventional appearance and flamboyant Mexican clothing, Ms. Kahlo accomplished much in her short tragic life. To the public she was a high spirited rebellious woman. Her creative style was breathtaking yet bewildering. She was possibly the most idolized woman artist of her time. [3]

Today, she is a figure eliciting widely contrasting opinions. To some, she was a woman of legendary power who overcame incredible odds, whose work inspires excitement and awe. To others, she was a public figure of highly questionable morals and politics who betrayed her gifts and celebrity.

Family and Childhood

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón in her parents' house in Coyoacán, which at the time was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Heritage

Frida's father, of Hungarian Jewish descent, was born Wilhelm Kahlo in Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1872. At the age of nineteen he moved to Mexico City and began a new life by changing his name to its Spanish equivalent - Guillermo. He never returned to Germany.

In 1898 Guillermo married Matilde Calderon, a woman of Spanish and Native American descent. Frida was the third of four daughters born of their marriage. [4]

Frida later claimed she was born in 1910 in order to affiliate herself further with being a product of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. [5]

Health

Kahlo's life was one of physical suffering marked by several tragic events. When she was seven years old, she was stricken with polio. As a consequence, one of her legs was smaller and thinner than the other. She overcame her disability with the support of her father's constant encouragement. Known for having a feisty and brash personality, these traits no doubt assisted her as well.

Involved in an accident between a streetcar and a bus when she was 18 years old, Kahlo's body was impaled on a metal rod. Her spine was broken in several places, and her pelvis, ribs and collarbone were also broken. Her right leg and foot were severaly damaged; she again faced the challenge of re-learning to walk.

Extreme pain followed her throughout her life, causing her to be hospitalized numerous times. She was reported to have been confined to bed for months at a time due to this pain. Thirty-five operations eventually followed, due to the streetcar accident, mainly on her right leg and back. Later in life she had a leg amputated due to gangrene caused by complications from the accident.

Further physical difficulties were blamed on this accident and her resultant injuries, including three miscarriages she suffered in her adult life. [6]

Casa Azul

Frida Kahlo grew up in a fertile valley in Mexico. Her home in Coyoacán, now a suburb of Mexico City, which was called "Casa Azul" (meaning blue house), was filled with flowers trees and cacti — nature brought indoors. [7] Her childhood home was said to be a cheerful place, decorated in cobalt blue and bright yellows. She was born and spent her childhood in this home. She returned and lived there with her husband Diego Rivera, for the last thirteen years of her life.

Casa Azul is now known as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Rivera donated it to the Mexican people following his wife's death in 1954. It opened as a museum four years later, in 1958. [8]

The Adult Frida

Frida Kahlo with Diego Rivera in 1932

It is impossible to study Frida Kahlo's artistry, marriage, morals and politics in separate veins. These aspects of her life were intricately intermingled, each affecting the other.

The Artist

It was during Kahlo's long recuperation from the bus accident that she discovered her love for painting. Her mother had given her a lap easel, which she creatively coupled with a mirror she'd hung above her bed. Using this system she began painting self-portraits, for which she eventually gained her fame. [9]

Before this time, Kahlo had planned on a medical career, but gave it up for a full-time career in painting. Drawing on her personal experiences such as her troubled marriage, her painful miscarriages and her numerous operations, her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain.

Fifty-five of Kahlo's 143 paintings are self-portraits, often incorporating symbolic portrayal of her physical and psychological wounds. She was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which surfaced in her paintings' bright colors, dramatic symbolism, and unapologetic rendering of often harsh and gory content.

Frida Kahlo's character was reflected in her art. Both defied easy definition, most often being described as simply ambiguous. Volatile, obsessive, hopeful and despairing all seemed to describe both Kahlo and her works. [10]

She exhibited several times with European surrealists, and her work was sometimes classified as such, but she did not agree with the description. "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." she once said.

Like much of Mexican art, Frida's paintings "interweave fact and fantasy as if the two were inseparable and equally real," Hayden Herrera, her principal biographer stated. [11]

Gregorio Luke, Director of the Museum of Latin American Art, explained, "Her work was very inclusive. She was able to incorporate elements of pop culture, Indian, Aztec mythology, surrealism, a whole variety of things in which many people can identify. She is the multicultural artist par excellence." [12]

Kahlo's preoccupation with female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th century, though she was little known outside the world of art until the 1990's.

Married Life

Frida Kahlo (center) and Diego Rivera photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932

Frida married the famed artist Diego Rivera in August 1929 when she was 22 years old. Rivera, whose second marriage had just ended, was 42. Kahlo and Rivera had much in common; both were artists and both were avowed communist militants. [13]

The couple remained residents of Mexico City, but spent time in the United States due to Rivera's work in which he was commissioned to paint murals in several U.S. cities. During this time they lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. [14]

When the couple returned to Mexico in 1935, Rivera embarked on an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina, which marked a crucial turning point in their relationship. Kahlo was resigned to the understanding that Rivera had never been faithful to any woman, but the lines were crossed when her own sister became his brief partner.

She herself now embarked on a series of affairs with both men and women which continued throughout her life. Her husband tolerated her lesbian relationships, though her heterosexual ones made him violently jealous. Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader, was one of Kahlo's early and serious affairs. Trotsky had been offered refuge in Mexico in 1937 on Rivera's initiative while being hounded by his rival Josef Stalin. [15]

The Kahlo/Rivera marriage was tumultuous, surviving numerous extramarital affairs on both their parts. They separated, divorced and remarried. Kahlo expressed her suffering; "I suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down … The other accident is Diego."

Another source of anguish in their marriage was their inability to have children, stemming from Kahlo's streetcar accident years earlier. Without a child, Diego fulfilled all roles for Frida. She once referred to him as "my child, my lover, my universe."

Both artist were extremely productive. As a pair they were unrivaled, with both regarding the other as "Mexico's greatest painter". Frida referred to Diego as the "architect of life." As different as they were in habit and style, they each took pride in the other's work as if it were their own. [16]

Frida Kahlo was described as a vibrant, extroverted character whose everyday speech was filled with profanities. She had been a tomboy in her youth and carried her fervor throughout her life. She was a heavy smoker who drank tequila in excess, was openly bisexual, sang off-color songs, and told equally ribald jokes to the guests of the wild parties that she hosted.

Politics

Both Kahlo and Rivera were active in the Communist Party and Mexican politics. More importantly, when Kahlo met Rivera, he was a leading proponent of a post-revolutionary movement known as Mexicanidad, which rejected Western European influences and the "easel art" of the aristocracy in favor of all things considered "authentically" Mexican, such as peasant handicrafts and pre-Columbian art. Kahlo also became a diehard adherent, adopting her now-famous traditional Mexican costumes—long skirts and dresses, which also had the practical effect of covering up her polio-withered leg. Rejecting, too, conventional standards of beauty, Kahlo not only didn't pluck her heavy eyebrows or mustache, she groomed them with special tools and even penciled them darker.

More importantly, though, Kahlo's Communism—now treated as somehow sort of quaint—led her to embrace some untenable political positions. In 1936, Rivera, a dedicated Trotskyite, used his clout to petition the Mexican government to give Trotsky and his wife asylum after they were forced out of Norway. Rivera and Kahlo put up the Trotskys in Kahlo's family home, where Kahlo seduced the older man.

After Trotsky was assassinated, however, Kahlo turned on her old lover with a vengeance, claiming in an interview that Trotsky was a coward and had stolen from her while he stayed in her house (which wasn't true). Rarely is this unflattering detail included in the condensed Kahlo story. Nor is the fact that Kahlo turned on Trotsky because she had changed her politics to become a devout Stalinist. Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One of Kahlo's last paintings was called "Stalin and I," and her diary is full of her adolescent scribblings ("Viva Stalin!") about Stalin and her desire to meet him. [17]

The End and The Legacy

During Frida Kahlo's life she had three exhibitions: one in New York City in 1938, one in Paris in 1939, and finally one in Mexico City in 1953. But by the time of her final exhibition, Kahlo's childhood injuries were catching up to her. Her health was so fragile that doctors advised her to not attend. But Kahlo would not be dissuaded. Minutes after the exhibition started, a wail of sirens filled the air and an ambulance arrived. Kahlo emerged on a stretcher and was placed in the center of the gallery where she held court all evening. [18]

In July 1954, Frida made her last public appearance when she participated in a Communist demonstration protesting the U.S. subversion of the left-wing Guatemalan government and the overthrow of its president, Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterward, she died in her sleep, apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her last diary entry read: "I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to come back - Frida." [19]

Frida Kahlo leaves behind a mixed legacy: she is both greatly admired and starkly criticized.

Feminists might celebrate Kahlo's ascent to greatness, if only her fame were related to her art. Instead, her fans are largely drawn by the story of her life, for which her paintings are often presented as simple illustration. Her admirers are inspired by Kahlo's tragic tale of physical suffering and fascinated with her glamorous friends and lovers, among them photographer and Soviet spy Tina Modotti and Leon Trotsky.

Since her rediscovery in the 1970s, one of the few people to openly criticize Kahlo for her politics was her fellow countryman, the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. In Essays on Mexican Art, he questions whether someone could be both a great artist and "a despicable cur." In the end, he says they can, but suggests that, because of the way they embraced Stalin,

"Diego and Frida ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study—and of repentance . . . the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin. The two of them betrayed their great gifts, and this can be seen in their painting. An artist may commit political errors and even common crimes, but the truly great artists—Villon or Pound, Caravaggio or Goya—pay for their mistakes and thereby redeem their art and their honor." [20] .

External links

• The Life and Art of Frida Kahlo
• "The Frida Kahlo Museum", by Gale Randall
• Exhibition guide from Tate Modern
• Frida's House Yahoo! group
• "Frida Kahlo & contemporary thought"
• "Frida by Kahlo"
• "Frida Kahlo" at ArtCyclopedia
• "Dolor y arte: Frida Kahlo" from Psikeba Magazine
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Photos

Notes

Credits

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