Frida Kahlo in her studio with her Doctor, Juan Farill, the subject of her last signed self-portrait, Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (in the background).
Frida Kahlo, in full Frida Kahlo de Rivera, was a Mexican painter. Her largely autobiographical portraits and self-portraits full of such motifs as Mexican popular culture artifacts, ribbons, hair, and personal animals, touched the themes of identity, the human body, loss and death. Khalo's works have been often attributed to Surrealism and magic realism, though she denied the fact.
Background
Ethnicity:
Khalo's father, a Hungarian-Jewish, relocated from Germany to Mexico in 1891, and her mother's parents were of Native American and Spanish descent.
Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico. She was a daughter of a professional photographer Guillermo Kahlo and his wife Matilde Calderón y González. Frida had three sisters, Matilde, Adriana, and Cristina. Frida's paternal half-sisters, María Luisa and Margarita, were brought up in a convent.
Education
Frida Kahlo later recalled her home environment as "very, very sad." Having tense relationships with her strict and fanatically religious mother, Frida was more attached to her father, a photographer.
Frida's childhood was full of sad events. A six-years-old girl, she was diagnosed with poliomyelitis. The illness shortened her right leg that led to a chronic slight limp which she would endure for the rest of her life.
Kahlo went to school later than her peers because of the polio. She attended the local nursery school and primary school, and then, as being bullied by her schoolmates, studied at home for the fifth and sixth grades. Kahlo learned a lot about nature, philosophy, and literature, including the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer, through her father, whom she helped in his photo studio. While assisting, Kahlo also received some drawing lessons from an engraver Fernando Fernandez who was her father's friend.
While Kahlo's sisters continued their studies at convent schools, she was enrolled at the German School in the Mexico City by her father. Expelled for rebelling against discipline, she was transferred to a vocational teachers' school. Kahlo had to leave the institution after she experienced a sexual abuse from a female teacher.
Passionate about science, Frida Kahlo enrolled at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in 1922 with a strong intention to become a doctor. Her dream was damaged three years later by a terrible traffic accident in which she was very seriously injured.
During the long period of recovery, Kahlo was self-educated in painting, both practically and theoretically. She read a lot about the art of the Old Masters.
Although Frida Kahlo was trained in painting in her childhood and youth, it was during convalescence period, after a car accident in autumn 1926, that she produced one of her important early artworks, Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress. The canvas was quite abstract but the soft modeled face demonstrated her interest in realism.
Kahlo's parents encouraged their daughter in her aspiration toward painting. They constructed a special easel, that allowed her to work while staying in bed, and provided her with brushes and boxes of paints. While recovering, Frida Kahlo didn't give up hope of devoting her life to medicine. She thought of a profession of a medical illustrator, which could combine her interests in science and art. However, after her works were highly appreciated by Diego Rivera, one of the most well know artists in Mexico at the time, she devoted herself to painting only.
In the early 1930s, while accompanying Rivera on his trip in the United States where he worked on several murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City, as his wife, Kahlo produced works which showed her growing interest to Mexican folk art. The subjects became more flatter and abstract in comparison with her previous canvases. The change was also evident in the artist's own look as she started to wear the traditional Tehuana dress that became her trademark. Frieda and Diego Rivera and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States are among the vivid examples of such works. Kahlo also developed friendships with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, and met the surgeon Dr. Leo Eloesser who became her closest medical advisor.
A series of miscarriages that Frida had while in the States as well as the death of her mother resulted in some of her most frightening canvases such as Ford Hospital and My Birth. Rivera and Kahlo came back to Mexico in 1933 after he completed a mural for the Rockefeller Centre in New York City. They settled in a new house situated in the neighborhood of San Angel.
The house became a gathering spot for artists and political activists, like Leon Trotsky and André Breton. The latter was so impressed by Kahlo's works that he proposed his friend in New York City, an art dealer Julien Levy, to organize the solo exhibition of Frida's art. The show which took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1938 was a great success. The audience appreciated a lot Kahlo's colorful and traditional Mexican costumes. Although the solo show in Paris the next year didn't receive such warm welcome as the debut one, The Louvre acquired Kahlo's The Frame. After spending some more time in New York City, the artist finally returned to Mexico.
From 1939 to 1940, Kahlo lived in the official divorce with Rivera. One of her major works, The Two Fridas, dates to the period. In 1940, Kahlo and Rivera, remarried, took up residence in her Coyoacán childhood home, La Casa Azul ("the Blue House"). Kahlo turned attention to much larger paintings. The death of her father in 1941 had a bad impact on her already weak health and nervous system. She stayed at home more and more often, preferring to spent time with animals or by working in the garden.
Meanwhile, Kahlo's popularity continued to increase throughout the decade, and her art was in a high demand among art dealers and collectors the United States and in Mexico, including Peggy Guggenheim who featured some of Kahlo's paintings at the show Women Artists held at the Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York City in 1943. That same year, Frida Kahlo became a professor of painting at La Esmeralda, the Education Ministry’s School of Fine Arts in Mexico City.
Although her health condition deteriorated, Kahlo remained active during the 1940s, both in painting and politics. She produced many self-portraits with varying hairstyles, clothing, and iconography, including Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill, always showing herself with an impassive, steadfast gaze, for which she became famous.
Frida Kahlo had a succession of surgeries late in the decade and the early '50s, often followed by prolonged hospital stays. Toward the end of her life, she required assistance with walking. She attended her first and last solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953 lying on a bed.
Frida Kahlo was one of the most important painters of the Mexican modernist movement, which thrived in the years between World War I and World War II. Although she gained popularity while alive – the National Prize of Arts and Sciences awarded to her in 1946 is a keen proof – the interest to her art and personality steadily grew from the 1970s and turned into a kind of Fridamania by the 21st century.
Four years after her death, La Casa Azul, her home in Coyoacán, was transformed into a museum which soon gained the satus of the most popular in Mexico City. There is also Parque Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán with a bronze statue of the artist, and Frida Kahlo Way in San Francisco.
Frida Kahlo made a significant impact on a great number of female artists, feminist studies and postcolonial debates. Creative persons from many cultural fields found and continue to draw inspiration from both her strong personality and art. A biopic Frida, naturaleza viva by Paul Leduc, Frida's Bed by a novelist Slavenka Drakulic, Suite for Frida Kahlo by a composer James Newton, many stage performances, and a 2002 movie by Julie Taymor are few examples.
In 2001, the first of Hispanic women, Kahlo was honored with a postage stamp issued in the United States. Eleven years later, the artist was added to Legacy Walk in Chicago, dedicated to the LGBT personalities who made a significant contribution to the development of their areas of activity.
Self Portrait with a Portrait of Diego on the Breast and Maria Between the Eyebrows
My Birth
Self Portrait (Time Flies)
Self Portrait Dedicated to Sigmund Firestone
Still Life
Fulang-Chang and I
Self Portrait with Necklace of Thorns
My Grandparents, My Parents and Me
Self Portrait with Monkeys
Weeping Coconuts or Coconut Tears
Frieda and Diego Rivera
Self Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill
Self Portrait
The Bus
The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xólotl
Self Portrait
Self Portrait with a Monkey
Self-Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States
The Broken Column
Portrait of My Father
Portrait of Lucha Maria, A Girl from Tehuacan
Self Portrait with Cropped Hair
Portrait of Cristina, My Sister
Portrait of Alejandro Gómez Arias
Portrait of Alicia Galant
Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress
Diego and Frida
Still Life with Parrot and Flag
Portrait of Natasha Gelman
My Dress Hangs There
Self Portrait with Monkey
Thinking About Death
Roots
Self Portrait with Loose Hair
Tree of Hope, Remain Strong
Still Life with Watermelons
Religion
Being not devoted to religion as an adult, Frida Kahlo was most likely an atheist.
Politics
Frida Kahlo immersed in the political and social life of her native country since her studies at the National Prepatory School in the early 1920s. She shared the School's policy for the Mexican identity, so called indigenismo, which stressed the importance of the Mexican identity and heritage. Kahlo was among the founding members of the Cachuchas informal group which gathered the activists who would later form the elite of the country.
Aftrer the long period of recovery from the car accident, Frida Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. Along with her husband Diego Rivera, she was its active member and kept in touch with many political activists and artists, such as the exiled Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella and the Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti. The exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky stayed in her house, La Casa Azul, from January 1937 to the middle of 1939.
In 1936, Kahlo became a member of the Communist organization the Fourth International. The artist remained politically active till the end of her life, although she had constant health problems. In July 1954, Frida took part in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala.
Views
The mixed, European and Mexican, roots of Frida Kahlo to a large extent shaped her lifelong interest to both cultures and influenced her approach to art.
Kahlo used the image of body on her canvases as the allegorical symbol of different societal roles. She depicted herself as wounded, broken, as a kid, or wearing various outfits, including the Tehuana costume, a man's suit, or a European dress. Expressing her own emotional distress through a variety of states of the body, depicted during cross-dressing, childbirth or spontaneous abortion, Kahlo touched the most compound sides of female identity.
Quotations:
"Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
"I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better."
"At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can."
"Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure."
"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."
“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
"The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become 'somebody,' and frankly, I don't have the least ambition to become anybody."
"Pain, pleasure, and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence."
"I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return."
"I was born a bitch. I was born a painter."
"I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."
"I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of 'madness.' Then: I'd arrange flowers, all day long, I'd paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: 'Poor thing, she's crazy!' (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else's – my madness would not be an escape from 'reality'."
"I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim."
"You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts."
"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."
"There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst."
Membership
Mexican Communist Party
,
Mexico
1927
Fourth International
1936
Personality
Because of the constant health problems which exacerbated through years, closer to the end of her life, Frida Kahlo enjoyed to spent free time in her La Casa Azul (The Blue House) garden in a company of her friends, servants, and especially different pets such as spider monkeys, Xoloitzcuintlis, and parrots.
Meanwhile, she remained true to such bad habits as smoking and drinking tequila till the end of her life, even on her deathbed.
Frida was a great fan of music. Her favorite song was "Cielito Lindo," which translated as "little beautiful sky."
Physical Characteristics:
Frida Kahlo was a petite woman of a delicate constitution. The dress of women from the allegedly matriarchal society of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was her favorite clothing. The wearing helped the artist to express her feminist and anti-colonialist views as well as to hide the injuries she had received in a car accident in youth. She probably also referred to her husband Diego Rivera who stated that "Mexican women who do not wear [Mexican clothing] ... are mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wish to belong." Kahlo loved to use nail polish which matched her red lipstick. Revlon was her favorite brand of cosmetics.
The consequences of the terrible car accident, that Frida Kahlo lived in 1925, accompanied her for the remainder of her life. The artist had to wear twenty-eight separate special supportive back corsets because of the constant spinal problems. All the operations that she had in order to straighten her spine failed, and, since 1950, she moved more and more often in a wheelchair.
Quotes from others about the person
Nancy Deffebach, art historian, researcher, and writer: "Kahlo created herself as a subject who was female, Mexican, modern, and powerful."
Oriana Baddeley: "The twenty-first-century Frida is both a star – a commercial property complete with fan clubs and merchandising – 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."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Karl Marx
Politicians
Joseph Stalin
Writers
Rosario Castellanos
Artists
Sandro Botticelli, Bronzino, Hieronymus Bosch, New Objectivity art movement, Cubism
Sport & Clubs
soccer, swimming, wrestling
Connections
Frida Kahlo met her first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias, while studying at the National Prepatory Scholl in Mexico City. The relationships were disapproved of by Kahlo's parents. As Arias and Kahlo were often far apart because of the strained political situation in the county, they regularly sent passionate love letters to each other.
Kahlo married a well known Mexican artist Diego Rivera a year after they were introduced o each other, on 21 August 1929. Khalo's parents named the union "a marriage between an elephant and a dove," as their daughter was small and fragile in comparison with tall and overweight Rivera. It turned to be a complicated marriage full of infidelities from both sides. Rivera and Kahlo often lived separately for long periods.
In the early 1930s, Khalo started a love affair with a Hungarian-born photographer from the United States, Nickolas Muray. The on-and-off relationship lasted a decade. After discovering the short love affair which her husband had with her younger sister Cristina, Frida Kahlo separated from Diego for some time. In the middle of the decade, she was, in her turn, in a brief romantic relationship with Japanese-born American artist and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi became her lifelong friend.
Kahlo had also a brief love affair with the exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky who stayed with his wife Natalia Sedova in her house, La Casa Azul, from January 1937 to the middle of 1939. She then was in romantic relationships with a German art collector Heinz Berggruen. Kahlo and Rivera remained on friendly terms after their divorce in 1939 and eventually remarried the following year.
Kahlo couldn't have children because of the serious injuries that she received in a traffic accident in her youth. The artist had several miscarriages throughout her life.
Father:
Guillermo Kahlo
(born 26 October 1871 – died 14 April 1941)
Kahlo was a German-born Mexian photographer. He took photos of significant architecture, including churches, streets, landmarks, and industrial companies.
Noguchi was a Japanese-American artist, sculptor and landscape architect, who fused Eastern and Western influences in his works. His artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. He was associated with the style of Abstract Art. Throughout his innovative work, Noguchi experimented with biomorphic forms to produce unexpected aesthetic combinations.
Trotsky was a Soviet communist theorist and agitator, a leader in Russian October Revolution in 1917, and later commissar of foreign affairs and of war in the Soviet Union. In the struggle for power following Vladimir Lenin’s death, however, Joseph Stalin emerged as victor, while Trotsky was removed from all positions of power and later exiled.
Lover:
Heinz Berggruen
(born 6 January 1914 – died 23 February 2007)
Berggruen was a a German art dealer and collector. The 165 artworks sold by him to the German federal government laid the foundation of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin.
Friend:
Andrés Henestrosa
(born 30 November 1906 – died 10 January, 2008)
Andrés Henestrosa, in full Andrés Henestrosa Morales, was a Mexican writer and politician. As an author, he dealt with prose and poetry. He served three terms in the Chamber of Deputies, and was a senator for the state of Oaxaca from 1982 to 1988.
Sweetheart:
Alejandro Gómez Arias
(born 1906 – died 3 March 1990)
References
Frida Kahlo
The Little People, BIG DREAMS series book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of Frida Khalo's life.
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
The book offers readers the account of the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman, with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.
2002
Frida Kahlo: The Artist who Painted Herself
Through original artwork by the renowned artist Tomie dePaola, a longtime aficionado of Frida Kahlo's work, as well as beautiful reproductions of Kahlo's paintings, the book explores the creative, imaginative world of Mexico's most celebrated female artist.
2003
Kahlo
The book introduces the rich body of Kahlo's work to explore her unremitting determination as an artist, and her significance as a painter, feminist icon, and a pioneer of Latin American culture.
