Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter, who has achieved great international popularity. She painted using vibrant colors in a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico as well as European influences that include Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically express her own pain. Kahlo was married to and influenced by the Mexican/Spanish muralist Diego Rivera and shared his Communist views. Although she has long been recognized as an important painter, public awareness of her work has become more widespread since the 1970s. Her "Blue" house in Coyoacán, Mexico City is a popular museum, donated by Diego Rivera after his death in 1957.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, as her name appears on her birth certificate was born on July 6, 1907 in her parents' house, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán, which at the time was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim, Germany, the son of painter and goldsmith Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriett E. Kaufmann. Kahlo claimed her father was of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry, but a 2005 book on Guillermo Kahlo argued that he was descended from a long line of German Lutherans. Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19 and, upon his arrival, changed his German forename Wilhelm to its Spanish equivalent, 'Guillermo'. Until the late 1930s, in the face of rising Nazism in Germany, Frida acknowledged her German heritage by spelling her name "Frieda" (an allusion to "Frieden", which means "peace" in German).
Frida's mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, and also Spanish descent. Frida's parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo's first wife during her second childbirth. Their marriage was largely unhappy. Guillermo and Matilde gave birth to four children (where Frida was the third of their four girls) and having two older half sisters, Frida grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her life, however, Frida remained close to her father.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three years old. In her writings, she recalled that her mother would usher her and her sisters inside as gunfire echoed in the streets of her hometown which was extremely poor at the time. Men would occasionally leap over the walls into her backyard and her mother would sometimes prepare a meal for the hungry revolutionaries. Later, Kahlo would claim that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with the revolution.
Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg looking thinner sometimes than the other (a deformity Kahlo hid by wearing long skirts). It has also been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that would have affected both spinal and leg development. As a girl, she participated in boxing and other sports. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico's premier schools, where she was one of only 35 girls. Kahlo joined a gang at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued.
On 17 September 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail impaled her abdomen, piercing her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. Though she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She would undergo as many as 35 operations in her life as a result of the accident, mainly on her back and her right leg and foot.
After the accident, Frida Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she recovered in a full body cast; she painted to occupy her time during her temporary state of immobilization. Her self-portraits became a dominant part of her life when she was immobile for three months after her accident. "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best" reflects her inner feelings about both her art and her psychological state. Frida's mother had a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed, and her father lent her his box of oil paints and some brushes. Drawing on personal experiences including her troubled marriage, her painful miscarriages, and her numerous operations, Kahlo's works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, fifty-five are self-portraits, which frequently incorporate symbolic portrayals of her physical and psychological wounds. While Kahlo's paintings have a distinct unrealistic quality, she insisted "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." It is evident that her paintings reveal a personal truth about her life, her experiences, and her inner personal emotion. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. She frequently included the symbolic monkey: in Mexican mythology it was a symbol of lust, yet Kahlo used them as tender and protective, even nurturing symbols. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition with surrealist renderings. While her paintings are not overtly Christian they certainly contain elements of the Mexican Christian style of religious paintings. In 1939, at the invitation of André Breton she went to France and had an exhibition of her paintings in Paris. The Louvre bought one of her paintings, The Frame, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist.
As a young artist, Kahlo approached the famous Mexican Diego Rivera, whom she had previously admired, and asked him for his advice on pursuing art as a career. He immediately recognized her talent and her unique expression as truly special and uniquely Mexican. He encouraged her development as an artist, and began an intimate relationship with Frida. They were married in 1929, to the disapproval of Frida's mother. They were often referred to as "The Elephant and the Dove." The nickname originated when Kahlo's father noticed their extreme difference in size.
Their marriage was often tumultuous. Both Kahlo and Rivera had notoriously fiery temperaments and both had numerous extramarital affairs. The openly bisexual Kahlo had affairs with both men and women (including Leon Trotsky); Rivera knew of and tolerated her relationships with women, but her relationships with men made him jealous. For her part, Kahlo was outraged when she learned that Rivera had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina. The couple eventually divorced, but remarried in 1940; their second marriage was as turbulent as the first.
Active communist sympathizers, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Leon Trotsky as he sought political sanctuary from Joseph Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. Initially, Trotsky lived with Rivera and then at Kahlo's home, where he and she reportedly had an affair. Trotsky and his wife then moved to another house in Coyoacán where he was later assassinated.
A few days before Frida Kahlo died on July 14, 1954, she wrote in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida.". The official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism, though some suspected that she had died from overdose that may or may not have been accidental. An autopsy was never performed. She had been very ill throughout the previous year and she had her right leg amputated at the knee (owing to gangrene). She had also had a recent bout of bronchopneumonia that had left her quite frail. In Diego Rivera's autobiography, he later wrote that the day Frida died was the most tragic day of his life, adding that, too late, he had realized that the most wonderful part of his life had been his love for Frida. The pre-Columbian urn holding her ashes is on display in her former home La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacán, today a museum housing a number of her works of art and numerous relics from her personal life.
For most of the 20th century, Kahlo's work was not recognized as it is now: she was largely remembered just as Diego Rivera's wife. It was not until the early 1980s when in Mexico the artistic movement known as the Neomexicanismo started, that actual stardom began. This movement recognized the values of contemporary Mexican culture; it was the moment when artists like Kahlo, Abraham Angel, Angel Zárraga, Helguera's classical calendar paintings and more became household names. During the same decade several other factors helped to establish her success. The movie Frida, Naturaleza Viva (1983), directed by Pablo Leduc and with Ofelia Medina and Juan Jose Gurrola as Frida & Diego was a huge success, and Medina remained for the rest of her life in a sort of Frida's spell, still depicting Kahlo even now. Also during the same time Haydeen Herrera published a determinant and influential biography: Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, a worldwide bestseller. In addition, Raquel Tibol's (the most influential Mexican art critic for the second half of the 20th century, and a personal friend of Frida's) own effort: Frida Kahlo: una vida abierta; and a biography by Teresa del Conde, and texts by other Mexican critics and theorists like Jorge Alberto Manrique. Fridamania had begun, and many artists, particularly the Mexicans Adolfo Patiño aka 'Adolfrido', Marisa Lara, Arturo Guerrero, Lucia Maya and Nahum B Zenil, took Frida's imaginings into their own work and transported her interests and obsessions into the 1980s. In 2002 the American biopic Frida introduced new audiences to her work.
Frida Kahlo was photographed by many artists including Edward Weston, Héctor García, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Lola Alvarez Bravo, Nicholas Murray, Guillermo Zamora and Lucienne Bloch. Many Chicana/o artists have included versions of her self portraits in their work, among them Rupert García, Alfredo Arreguín, Yreina D. Cervántez, Pietro Psaier, Marcos Raya, Gilbert Hernandez, and Carmen Lomas Garza.
The 100th birthday of Frida Kahlo was honored with the largest-ever exhibit of her paintings at the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace, Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico. Works were on loan from Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan. The exhibit included one-third of her artistic production, as well as manuscripts and letters that have not been previously displayed. The exhibit was open 13 June through 12 August 2007 and broke attendance records at the museum. Some of her work is on show in Nuevo León, and will move in September 2007 to museums in the United States.
Previously, the most recent international exhibition of Kahlo's work was in 2005 in London, which brought together 87 works.
Biographical information from Wikipedia.