Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (Coyoacán, July 6, 1907 - Coyoacán, July 13, 1954) better known as Frida Kahlo 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 naïf folk art style to explore issues of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.
Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo is described as a surrealist or magic realist. She is known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.
Born to a German father and a mestizo mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán - now accessible to the public as the Frida Kahlo Museum.
Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo was a promising student headed for medical school until she was in a bus accident at eighteen, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.
Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met her fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929, and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s traveling together in Mexico and the United States.
During this period, she developed her artistic style, drawing primarily on Mexican popular culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements of pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings aroused the interest of the surrealist artist André Breton, who organized Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938;
the exhibition was a success, and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. Although the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre acquired a painting by Kahlo, The Picture, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in its collection.
During the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado ("La Esmeralda") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo's ever-fragile health began to worsen in the same decade.
She held her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.
Frida 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 the Chicano Movement,
the feminist 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 her uncompromising representation of the female experience and form.[6]
Frida Kahlo's Biography
Childhood and youth
Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in her parents' home, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán, at the time a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City and now a district.[7] Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, whose official name was Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, was born in Pforzheim Germany
, the son of Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Heinrich Kahlo. Frida claimed that her father was of Jewish-Hungarian descent,[8] but researchers have shown that his parents were not Jewish, but German Lutheran.[9] Guillermo Kahlo arrived in Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19, and soon changed his German name, Wilhelm, to the Spanish equivalent, "Guillermo".
Kahlo later described that the atmosphere of his home during his childhood was often sad. His parents were often ill, and the marriage was devoid of love. His relationship with his mother, Matilde, was extremely strained. Kahlo described her mother as "kind, active, and intelligent, but also calculating, cruel, and fanatically religious."
Her father's photography enterprise suffered greatly due to the Mexican Revolution, as the overthrow of the government commissioned him from jobs, plus the civil war limited the number of private clients.
Frida's mother, Matilde Gonzalez y Calderón, was a devout Catholic of indigenous and Spanish origin. Frida's parents married soon after the death of Guillermo's first wife, during the birth of their second child.
Although the marriage was very unhappy, Guillermo and Matilde had four daughters, Frida being the third. She had two older half-sisters. Frida stressed that she grew up in a world full of women. For most of her life, however, she remained close to her father.
In 1913, at the age of six, Frida contracted polio, the first of a series of illnesses, accidents, injuries, and operations she suffered throughout her life. Polio made her right leg smaller and thinner than her left leg.
She started wearing pants, then long, exotic skirts, which became one of her personal trademarks. Although Frida from early childhood received artistic tutoring from Fernando Fernández, she was not particularly interested in art as a career.
In 1922 she was accepted into the National Preparatory School of the Federal District of Mexico and during 1922 until 1925 she attended the school. During her academic period, Frida focused on natural science subjects with the goal of becoming a physicist.
The institution had recently begun admitting women, having only 35 female students out of the total 2000 students enrolled. She performed well academically, was a voracious reader and quickly became "deeply immersed and engaged in Mexican culture, political activism, and social justice issues."
During this period, Kahlo was particularly influenced by 9 classmates, in which they formed an informal group that called itself the "Cachuchas" - many individuals in this group later became important figures in the Mexican intellectual elite.
Frida Kahlo's Bus accident
On September 17, 1925, Frida suffered a serious bus accident caused by a collision with a streetcar. The bus handrail pierced her back, causing a pelvic fracture, perforation of her abdomen and uterus, 3 fractures in her spine, her right foot was crushed and dislocated, and she had a fractured collarbone.
Frida spent one month in hospital and two months at home recovering before returning to her work. This accident forced her to wear orthopedic vests for three months, she even painted some of them (such as the plaster vest from the canvas entitled The Broken Spine').
The accident ended her dreams of becoming a physicist and caused pain and illness for the rest of her life, turning her into a Person with Disabilities (PcD). her friend Andrés Henestrosa quoted that Kahlo "lived dying."
Although there was no formal definition at the time for her illness, doctors and historians believe she suffered from post-traumatic fibromyalgia. During her long convalescence, she began painting, using her father's paint box and an easel adapted to her bed.
Frida Kahlo'sRelationship with Diego Rivera
In 1928, she joined the Mexican Communist Party and met muralist Diego Rivera, whom she married the following year. Under the influence of her husband's work, she adopted the use of broad and simple color zones, in a style purposely recognized as naive.
She sought in her art to affirm Mexican national identity, so she very often adopted themes from Mexican folklore and popular art.
Trips abroad
Between 1930 and 1933 he spent most of his time in New York and Detroit with Rivera. Between 1937 and 1939, he received Leon Trotski at his home in Coyoacán. In 1938, André Breton qualifies her work as surrealist in an essay he wrote for Kahlo's exhibition at the Julien Levy gallery in New York.
Nevertheless, she herself later declared: They thought I was a surrealist, but I was not. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality. In 1939, she exhibits in Paris at the Renón et Colle gallery.
Back to Mexico
From 1943, he teaches at the La Esmeralda school in D.F. (Mexico). In 1953, the Contemporary Art Gallery of this same city organizes an important exhibition in his honor. Some of his early works include Self-portrait in a velvet dress (1926), Portrait of Miguel N. Lira (1927), Portrait of Alicia Galant (1927) and Portrait of my sister Cristina (1928).
Frida Kahlo's Personal life
Married at 22 to Diego Rivera in 1929, a tumultuous marriage as both had strong tempers and extramarital affairs. Kahlo, who was bisexual, had an affair with Leon Trotski after separating from Diego.
Rivera openly accepted Kahlo's relationships with women, even though they were married, but did not accept his wife's affairs with men. Frida discovers that Rivera was in a relationship with her younger sister Cristina.
After this other tragedy in her life, she separates from him and lives new loves with men and women, but in 1940 she unites again with Diego. The second marriage was as stormy as the first, marked by violent fights.
Upon returning to her husband, Frida built a house just like his, next to the house where they had lived. This house was connected to the other by a bridge, and they lived as husband and wife, but without living together. They met at her house or his house in the early morning hours.
Although she became pregnant more than once, Frida never had children, because the accident that perforated her compromised her uterus and left serious sequels, which made it impossible for her to carry a pregnancy to its end, and she had three miscarriages (in 1929 she had her first miscarriage, and in 1932, her second).
She attempted suicide several times with knives and hammers.
On July 13, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had contracted severe pneumonia, was found dead. Her death certificate registers pulmonary embolism as the cause of death. But the possibility that she died of an overdose (accidental or not), due to the large number of drugs she took, cannot be ruled out.
The last note in her diary, which reads "I hope my departure is a happy one, and I hope never to return - Frida", allows for the hypothesis of suicide. Her body was cremated, and her ashes are deposited in an urn in her former home, now the Frida Kahlo Museum.
Posthumous Tributes
Blue House, the museum
"The Blue House," the residence of Frida and her family members.
Four years after her death, her family home known as the "Blue House" becomes the Frida Kahlo Museum. Frida Kahlo, recognized as much for her work as for her personal life, gets a retrospective of her work, with unpublished objects and documents, as well as photographs, drawings, dresses and books.
Centennial
Kahlo's centennial was celebrated with the largest ever exhibition of her paintings at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the site of her first exhibition in Mexico. Paintings were gathered from Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Nagoya.
The exhibition included a third of his artistic output, as well as manuscripts and letters that had not yet been exhibited. The exhibition was open from June 13 to August 12, 2007, and broke all museum attendance records.