Frida Kahlo

(Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo; Coyoacán, Mexico, 1907 - id., 1954) Mexican
painter. Although she moved in the environment of the great Mexican
muralists of her time and shared their ideals, Frida Kahlo created an
absolutely personal painting, naïve and deeply metaphorical at the same
time, derived from her exalted sensitivity and from several events that
marked his life.

Frida Kahlo

At the age of eighteen Frida Kahlo suffered a very serious accident that
forced her to a long convalescence, during which she learned to paint, and
that influenced in all probability the formation of the complex psychological
world that It is reflected in his works. In 1929 she married the muralist
Diego Rivera; three years later she suffered a miscarriage that deeply affected
her delicate sensitivity and inspired two of her most valued works: Henry Ford
Hospital and Frida and abortion, whose complex symbology is known as the
explanations of the painter herself.
His self-portraits are also highly appreciated, also of complex interpretation:
Self-portrait with monkeys or The two Fridas. When André Breton met
the work of Frida Kahlo, he said that the Mexican was a spontaneous
surrealist and invited her to exhibit in New York and Paris, the latter city in
which he did not have a great welcome. Frida never felt close
of surrealism, and at the end of his days he openly rejected that his artistic
creation was framed in that trend.

Next to his painting The Two Fridas

In her search for Mexico's aesthetic roots, a trait she shared with Diego
Rivera and the muralists (David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco), Frida
Kahlo made splendid portraits of children and works inspired by Mexican
iconography prior to the conquest. it is the canvases that focus on herself and
her eventful life that have made her a leading figure in twentieth-century
Mexican painting.
The work of Frida Kahlo

The production of the Mexican artist is an example of that type of art that
serves as a powerful instrument with which to exorcise the anguish of a hostile
reality. The tragic sign of his existence, marked by the fight against the
disease, had begun when at the age of six he contracted polio that left him
with important sequelae. In 1925 he suffered a serious traffic accident that
fractured his spine and pelvis. In addition to making it impossible for her to
have children, the accident was the cause of numerous future operations and
her always precarious health.

Through painting, which she began to practice in the long months of

immobility after the accident, Frida Kahlo would superbly reflect the collision
between her desire for happiness and the insistent threat of its destruction, at
the same time that she conjured the irreducible duality between dreams (of
love, of love, of children) and reality (pain and helplessness).
During the convalescence of the accident, without being able to even get up,
she began to paint taking herself as the main model. A mirror was placed
under the baldachin of her bed and a carpenter made her a kind of easel that
allowed her to paint while lying down. This was the beginning of a long series
of autoretrates, a theme that occupies the bulk of his production, of a
fundamentally autobiographical nature. She once said, "I portray myself
because I spend a lot of time alone and because I'm the subject I know best."
In a short time Frida developed a symbolic vocabulary of her own; With him
he accompanied his portraits to metaphorically represent his experiences and
thoughts.

Self-Portrait with Monkeys (1943)

Influenced by the ideas of vindication of identity propagated by revolutionary
nationalism, Frida dressed in long Mexican skirts, bows
braided with colored ribbons and pre-Columbian necklaces and earrings. This is
how we find her in Self-portrait as Tehuana (1943, Natasha Gelman
Collection, Mexico City), represented as "authentic" Mexican and accentuating
her mestizo features (she had Spanish, Indian and German blood). Product of
that same nationalist ideology are the funds of some of his works such as
Self-portrait with monkeys (1943, Colection Natasha Gelman, Mexico City), in
which his figure appears cut out on jungle plants and surrounded by animals,
or those in which he takes up images of pre-Columbian culture, such as Mi
nana y yo (1937, Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City).
Other times, as in Self-portrait - The Frame (1938, National Museum of
Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), he is inspired by popular
imagery and very specifically by the altarpieces loaded with that naïve and
colorful baroque so specifically Mexican. that vividly combines the
spectacular with the eschatological.

One of the most common forms of Mexican folk art is exvotos. Frida links her
narrative development pictures to this tradition, representing in a synthetic
way the most significant and expressive elements. The small size of the
paintings and the technique (oil on metal plate) also comes from them.
Henry Ford Hospital (1932)
This fusion between personal themes and the forms of popular imagery is
expressed in an emblematic way in the work Henry Ford Hospital (1932,
Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City). Despite the accident, Frida hoped
that her second pregnancy would come to fruition, but her fractured pelvis
could not accommodate the development of a child. The traumatic experience
of a new abortion was the origin of the picture.
The adoption of the narrative forms of votive offerings is best exemplified in a
singular piece entitled Retablo (1943, private collection). Frida had found a
votive offering depicting the collision between a train and a bus; a
wounded girl lay on the tracks and the image of Our Lady of Sorrows floated
above the scene. Adding to the girl her own eyebrows and some signs to
the train and the bus, he turned it into the representation of his own accident.
At the bottom he wrote: "The spouses Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde C. de
Kahlo give thanks to the Virgin of Sorrows for having saved their child Frida
from the accident that occurred in 1925 at the corner of Cuahutemozin and
Calzada of Tlalpan."
Altarpiece (1943)

After overcoming some serious health crises, and in the same way as
believers do with the saints of their devotion, Frida showed her gratitude
to the doctors through paintings that rigorously follow the conventions of the
ex-voto. Examples of this are the works dedicated to Dr. Eloesser and Dr.
Farill.

But not only the disease was the cause of his disorders and metaphor of his
paintings; The setbacks of his affective life were also thematized in paintings
that consist of refined symbolic syntheses. In The Heart (1937, Michel
Petitjean Collection, Paris), the absence of hands expresses his helplessness
and despair in the face of the love entanglement between Diego Rivera and his
sister Cristina. His heart, literally torn out, lies at his feet and has an
inordinate size that reflects the intensity of his pain. Next to her, a feminine
dress, which alludes to her sister, hangs by a thread, while from her
sleeves comes a single arm that links and a stick crosses the gap she has
left his own heart.
The Heart (1937)
Frida and Surrealism

The dreamlike appearance of her images favored the relationship of her

symbolism with surrealism, something that Frida Kahlo would flatly deny: "I
was taken for a surrealist. This is not correct, I have never painted dreams,
what I have represented was my reality."
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

But Frida not only rejected the surrealist character of her painting, but
professed a deep aversion to the representatives of the movement. He had
met Breton in Mexico in 1938 and the following year, on the eve of World
War II, he spent several months in Paris, wherehe had the opportunity to
come into contact with the other Surrealists. The opinion they deserved was
expressed without restraint in a letter he wrote from there to Nicolas Muray:
"You cannot imagine how joputas these people are; They make me vomit.
They are so thoroughlyintellectual and degenerate that I can't take them
anymore."

In contrast to the dreamlike representations or the psychic automatism of the

Surrealists, the numerous symbols that Frida Kahlo introduces in her paintings
have precise meanings and are the product of conscious activity. Her work
originates and proceeds from a continuous inquiry into herself, and manifests
moods precisely and deliberately, materializing the oscillations between
suffering and hope. The symbolic character of his painting gives way to the
vehement expression of a passionate personality for whom art is challenge
and combat, violent struggle against disease, but also self-absorbed
withdrawal towards his inner self and trace of the painful recognition of his
Identity battered.