Frida Kahlo, one of few Mexican female painters who is world-famous and also one of only a handful of internationally recognized artists from Mexico, is Frida Kahlo. A woman who is free and singular in her work as well as her personal life, she can be called the Mexican, the revolutionary Mexican, the non-conformist, surrealist, and the Mexican lame. Her life is far from being a quiet and long one. Many biographies and films have brought it to light. Do you know the full story of her life? Artsper shares 10 stories about this iconoclastic artist.
1. Frida Kahlo does not descend from mexican ancestry.
Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo Calderon was born July 6, 1907. She used to lie about her birth date and set it back to July 7, 1911, the year that the Mexican Revolution began.
She was born in Mexico City. She is of Mexican descent, however. Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez was her mother and she comes from a Spanish family of generals. Her blood is also infused with Indian blood. Her father, Carl Wilhelm Kahlo Kauffmann, was born in Germany. He was not Jewish, contrary to Frida’s claims. Her family belonged to the Grand Duchy of Baden’s middle class and was Lutheran. She was a photographer when she arrived in Mexico in 1891.
2. She did not have a happy childhood.
Frida Kahlo was the result of her mother’s loss of a son. Her mother was depressed and gave her to a babysitter. She was very cold.
The home atmosphere is especially melancholy. Her parents are not the only ones in tension. Two of her half-sisters were sent to the convent. Her father’s business was also not doing well during the Mexican revolution.
Frida is also fragile in her health. Her spine was deformed at birth, so she was born with spina Bifida. At six years old, she contracted polio. She suffers from chronic pain due to this serious infectious disease. Her right leg also stops growing, leading to a malformation. She is also isolated from her siblings due to the disease. She was nicknamed “Fria coja” meaning “Frida, the lame” and she is unable to go to school. Her first two years of schooling were turbulent. According to her father’s wishes, she entered a German school and was quickly expelled for disobedience. This incident shows that she was a strong, reckless young woman. After completing high school, she enrolled at a vocational school for female teachers where she remained for a brief time. Her parents found out that she had been abused sexually by one of the teachers and removed her from the institution.
3. She was almost a doctor.
Frida Kahlo wasn’t always interested in becoming a painter. Her father was a keen artist and passed his love to her from an early age. An engraver friend of her father gave her drawing lessons. She also assists her father with his professional activities by developing and coloring photos, as well as retouching them. She still considers art a hobby.
She was 16 years old when she was accepted into the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. There were 2,000 students. It was considered the best school in Mexico. She was a keen student of natural sciences, and she wanted to be a doctor.
4. Her career was founded on a bus-crash.
Her bus collided with a tramway on 17 September 1925 as she was returning from school. Her fate was sealed by this accident. Despite her survival, she sustained serious injuries. A metal bar was placed in her pelvic cavity, which caused systematic miscarriages. Her right leg also has 11 fractures. Her right foot is completely dislocated and her shoulder is dislocated. Her spine and femoral neck have been broken. She remained in bed for several weeks, suffering from pain that was excruciating. She will have 32 operations and 28 corsets until the end.
She is forced to remain in bed at home. She wrote that she was not dead, and that she had a reason to continue living. Painting is her reason. Her family encouraged her to paint, even though her medical studies were compromised. She was given a special easel, a canopy bed and a mirror to cover her ceiling. Her art became her outlet and her catalyst for healing. She starts a series of important self-portraits. They will continue to be her favorite subject.
5. She is a pioneer figure in feministism and a member of the Communist Party.
Tina Modotti, a photographer, encouraged her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1928. She was 21 years old and still recovering from an accident.
As a teenager, she had already been committed to social justice and promotion of Mexican culture. The Escuela Nacional Preparatoria even praised indigenismo. To assert Mexico’s superiority, this nationalist ideology stressed Mexico’s indigenous heritage and rejected the Western colonialist mentality. Frida Kahlo, nine of her female comrades, formed an informal group called the “Cachuchas”, which literally means “baseball caps”. They discussed Russian literature and politics, rejecting Mexico’s patriarchal and macho values. Many of them went on to become important figures in the Mexican intellectual elite.
She was also committed to the equality and emancipation of women within the Communist Party. So, she was a prominent figure among feminist artists. She was modern, unsubmissive, and protestant. She assumed her bisexuality in a time when few women were willing to.
6. She is Diego Rivera’s embodiment of one of the most mythical couples in History of Art…
Her decisive meeting in 1928 with Diego Rivera was another highlight of 1928. He is twenty years older than his counterpart and a member the Communist Party. He was well-known for putting his art to the service of the people, creating large frescoes that were commissioned by government. They are a fusion of their passions for politics and painting, and their mutual admiration makes them an amazing couple.
Their passionate, but also destructive relationship began in 1929 when they were married. She shared that she had suffered two major accidents in her life. The first was due to a bus and the second was Diego. Diego was the worst. Diego was the worst. He cheated on her many times, and she did the exact same thing in return. She saw her husband’s extramarital affair with her sister in 1935 as a betrayal. Their love is unbroken despite them leaving the marital home for several month. Frida has an affair with Leon Trotsky, a communist revolutionary. This also damages their marriage. In fact, the Russian politician was allowed to stay in their home in 1937 after being granted political asylum in Mexico. After their divorce in 1938, they remarried in 1940 and were still together until their deaths.
Their relationship is evident in the house they shared during their first marriage. They are linked by a bridge. It’s a metaphor for their relationship: independent, but unavoidably connected.
7. Frida Kahlo was not a Surrealist Painter.
Andre Breton, a surrealist, discovered Frida Kahlo’s works while traveling to Mexico City in 1938. He was so fascinated that he invited her to Paris to participate in a major Mexican exhibition.
She was dissatisfied by both the city, and the exhibition. According to her, the event was a “smokehouse”. It was too stoic and picturesque of her country. Moreover, not all her paintings were preserved and her painting was misinterpreted. She believes that it is unfair. Dreams are not something I ever painted. My reality was what I depicted. Her paintings are, in fact, autobiographical for her. She is misunderstood and rejects this group. In a letter to Nickolas Murray, she wrote: “I’d rather sell tortillas on the Toluca Market floor than to have any contact with those poor Parisian artists.”
But her first international recognition comes with her visit to France. She was admired in Paris’s art world. Picasso gifted her ivory earrings in the form of hands. Schiaparelli, fashion designer, made Madame Rivera dresses for her. The Louvre purchased a self-portrait.
8. Her works are the metaphorical biography about her life.
Her work is an integral part of her life. Frida Kahlo was immobilized by her accident at the beginning of her artistic career. She chose her own image to be her favorite subject. Without compromising her moral or physical suffering, she depicts it without shame. The Broken Column (1944), one of her most well-known paintings, shows her bruised body after a series of operations.
Nearly 70 self-portraits are her stories. In retrospect, she portrays herself as a child as seen in My Nurse and I (1937), and sometimes together with her parents. She also depicts her husband and talks about their miscarriages in Henry Ford Hospital (1932).
She claims more of her Mexicanness in the images she makes. It shows her deep love for Mexico’s cultural heritage. She often wears the China Poblano (a traditional Chinese dress that is very colorful and decorated with floral embroidery), which she loves. She often wears flowers-adorned braids and buns. In many of her paintings, Mexican culture is represented, particularly through its fauna and flora. Her compositions include parrots and cacti as well as elements from local folklore (flags , beautiful corpses ).
Her political commitment can be seen in several of her paintings. This is evident in her Self-Portrait with Stalin (1954), or Marxism Will Restore Health to the Sick (1954). Many evocations are evident in her final moments of life as she portrays herself as a deer with arrows and beside corpses.
9. She was in constant pain her whole life, and her final years were a nightmare.
Frida Kahlo is a woman who lives with optimism and joy. However, she has constant pain from her spine to her feet. Particularly since 1950, her health has deteriorated. She had 7 spine operations. Her first monographic exhibition was held 1953. However, her doctor prohibited her from leaving her bed. The doctor ordered that her bed be moved into the gallery. She made a triumphant entrance like a queen sitting on her throne.
She had to have her right leg amputated shortly afterward because she developed gangrene from one of her surgeries. She fell into deep depression after this event. She died in 1954 from pneumonia. She wrote, “I hope it will make my exit joyful and I’ll never return.” The possibility of suicide is possible even if you are willing to wait and see if she dies.
She wishes that she be cremated. Because she had suffered too much from this position, she didn’t want her body to be buried in a solitary grave.
10. Frida Kahlo was awarded national recognition throughout her life.
Her husband was her shadow for many years. In 1942, she was elected to the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. This is a testament to her recognition by the public institutions. The Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of prominent cultural figures, was established by the government to promote Mexican culture through conferences, exhibitions, and publications.
In 1943, the School of Fine Arts gave her the responsibility of teaching painting in one of its classes. The Mexican Federal Bank decorated one side of the 500 peso banknote with her portrait, and the other with Diego Rivera’s. It is not only an iconic in the history and art of art but also became policy for Chicano, a movement for civil rights for Mexican-Americans in the 1990s.
Keep these things in mind
Frida Kahlo, in conclusion, is more than an artist. She is also a symbol. She is a symbol of Mexico and a symbol especially for women. She is an emblem of the feminist and LGBT movements because of her strength and independence. Her figure has been used commercially after being a source of inspiration for many artists. She has been immortalized on posters, mugs and T-shirts and many other items. The anti-capitalist she was must be sighing in pain at the theft of her work and image. She would be relieved to know that her political and artistic influence has not diminished.
