Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico’s most famous artists and has become a pop culture icon. Her story is told in paintings; international exhibitions; books; her house and her studio become museums and even souvenirs that are sold everywhere.
Born in Mexico City, in the well-known Casa Azul, she was the daughter of the German photographer Wilhelm Kahlo (Guillermo Kahlo) and Matilde Calderón. The painter herself wrote in her diary that she was born in 1910, so she, she said, she was a daughter of the Revolution; however, her date of birth is July 6, 1907. According to the Frida Kahlo Museum, the artist recalled that the Casa Azul helped those wounded in the Mexican War.
Her father, who was a photographer and painter, became an example for the artist and they became extremely close. Guillermo Kahlo suffered from epileptic episodes and when Frida suffered from polio at the age of six, her father was the one who took care of her. The same when she had the bus accident that marked her life and her spinal conditions. Frida describes him in her diary as an example of tenderness and work, and above all, she says, of understanding.
Kahlo was the third of four sisters. She wanted to study Medicine and was one of 35 women accepted by the National Preparatory School, along with 2,000 men. During those school years she met Alejandro Gómez Arias, who in addition to being her partner, was the one with whom Kahlo discussed and was interested in social classes and the uprising of the town. Both are part of the student group “Las Cachuchas”. At the same time, she spends her spare time in her father’s studio, where she learns to color photographs with a brush.
Kahlo’s militancy was always present, such as when, many years later, she gave asylum to the Russian politician and leader Leon Trotsky. After the Spanish Ramón Mercader murdered him, Frida Kahlo and Cristina Kahlo, her sister, must spend two days in jail after hours of interrogation.
The accident that marked his art
While Alejandro and Frida were traveling by bus, on September 17, 1925, a tram crashed into them. In this accident an iron tube pierced her hip and pelvis. The severity of the accident was such that they had to wrap her in plaster and bandages for her multiple fractures to heal.
Due to his injuries and paralysis, he had to stay in bed. She was admitted to the Red Cross for a month. It was then that she began to paint more frequently. Her friends praised her work and she gave them her canvases, which at that time had no value. The painter strengthened her work and made innumerable self-portraits that would later be the essence of her work.
Three years after the accident, in 1928, Frida was able to get out of bed and began to frequent political debate circles where she met the photographer Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera, who by then was already a renowned painter.
One of the anecdotes of their first meetings tells that Frida Kahlo looked for Diego Rivera to criticize her paintings. After Diego asked her to paint a picture, the famous artist told her that she had talent. Just a year after they met, they got married.
Maternity
The couple of artists lived in Cuernavaca, in the State of Morelos. Due to her accident, she had a high possibility of dying and having a high-risk pregnancy. In August 1929, upon becoming pregnant, Kahlo decided that the best thing to do was to have an abortion.
On a second occasion, the doctors present her with a caesarean section as an option, but after losing the baby, she paints an unfinished painting in which she portrays Diego, the medical procedure and herself in the center with a baby in her womb. In 1934 she had a third miscarriage. In addition, that year, she was hospitalized to remove her appendix and cure some ulcers that she had on her sick foot.
The impossibility of having children is one of the recurring themes in his work. The artist shows sorrow and also portrays fetuses and unborn children that reflect her constant thoughts. The work ‘Moisés’, recipient of an honorable mention from the Mexican Presidency and the Ministry of Public Education, shows two infants in the center, one before birth and the other newborn. Her work ‘Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed)’, which had as its first headline ‘The Lost Desire’ also shows the trauma of her second abortion.
His legacy in art
With more than 150 works, the painter is known for her self-portraits and scenes that André Breton tried to classify as surreal and that Frida Kahlo denied, saying they were simply scenes from her life. Breton’s impression was such that he offers to promote Kahlo’s art throughout the world.
His work was exhibited for the first time at the Art Gallery of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his first individual exhibition was held at the Julien Levy gallery in New York in 1938, under the curatorship of André Breton, in which he managed to sell several of his works and has very good reviews in the media.
A year later, she exhibited in Paris, also invited by André Breton, as part of the Mexique exhibition that took place at the Colle Gallery. There she knows more about the European avant-garde and those close to the surrealist. One of them, Marcel Duchamp, opens the doors of the Renou et Colle gallery for her, where she exhibits alongside the photographs of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
The art collector Peggy Guggenheim also invites her to exhibit in London; however, the imminent outbreak of World War II, in 1939, causes Kahlo to leave Europe to return to Mexico. The War broke out in September, six months after Guggenheim’s offer.
The Louvre museum acquired his work ‘Self-portrait: The Frame’ and in 1941 he exhibited at the Contemporary Art Institute in Boston. A year later he presents his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where ‘Self-portrait with short hair’ is now on display..
It was not until 1953 that the work of Frida Kahlo was exhibited individually in Mexico. Organized by photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kahlo arrives at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo by ambulance and participates lying in a hospital bed. In that year her health was extremely deteriorated but the painter did not want to miss the exhibition. By then, Kahlo had already taught classes at the “La Esmeralda” National School of Painting and Sculpture, had exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Arte de este siglo gallery with other women artists under the curatorship of Peggy Guggenheim. He had also won an honorable mention from the Presidency of the Republic and the Ministry of Public Education for his work ‘Moisés’.
The inspiration of Frida Kahlo
On one of the pages of her diary, the painter talks about El Bosco and Brueghel the Elder, who perhaps were her true inspiration for her paintings: “Hyeronymus Bosch died in Hertongenbosch in 1516, a wonderful painter. He maybe he was born in Aachen. It disturbs me very much that almost nothing is known about this fantastic man of genius. Almost a century later (less) lived the magnificent Brueghel, El Viejo, my beloved”.
Among his most famous paintings are ‘Las dos Fridas’, ‘A few little piquetitos’, ‘Viva la vida’, ‘La columna rota’, ‘Mi nana y yo’, ‘El bus’, ‘La venadita’ or ‘Self-portrait as tehuana’.
his last days
Frida Kahlo passed away on July 13, 1954. Before that, she had already been taken to surgery for her spinal problems. In 50 she had seven interventions and two toes on her right foot were amputated. The last years of her life she remains in bed. Friends and colleagues from the artistic and entertainment world, such as Dolores del Río, María Felix or Jorge Negrete, visit her frequently, while she continues to paint and sell her work.
The last words he wrote in his diary were: “Thanks to the nurses, stretcher-bearers, maids and waiters of the English Hospital. Thanks to Dr. Vargas, Navarro, Dr. Polo and my willpower. I look forward to leaving and I hope never to return.”
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