Frida Kahlo

en español

Frida Kahlo
Kahlo en 1932
Información personal
Nombre de nacimiento	Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo y Calderón​
Nacimiento	6 de julio de 1907 Coyoacán (México)
Fallecimiento	13 de julio de 1954 (47 años) Coyoacán (México)
Causa de muerte	Embolia pulmonar no traumática flebitis en un miembro inferior derecho no traumática​
Sepultura	Museo Frida Kahlo
Nacionalidad	Mexicana
Familia
Padres	Guillermo Kahlo (padre)
Cónyuge	Diego Rivera (matr. 1929; div. 1940) Diego Rivera (matr. 1940-1954)
Información profesional
Ocupación	Pintora
Movimientos	Realismo mágico, naïf
Género	Autorretrato y grabado
Obras notables	Autorretrato con mono Las dos Fridas El abrazo de amor de El universo, la tierra (México), Yo, Diego y el señor Xólotl La columna rota
Partido político	Partido comunista​
Firma

Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo y Calderón (Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, 6 de julio de 1907-Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, 13 de julio de 1954), conocida como Frida Kahlo, fue una pintora mexicana. Su obra gira temáticamente en torno a las vivencias de su vida personal. Realizó un total de 150 obras, principalmente autorretratos, en los que proyectó sus dificultades por sobrevivir. También es considerada como un icono pop de la cultura de México.​

Su vida estuvo marcada por un grave accidente de autobús en su juventud que la mantuvo postrada en cama durante largos periodos, llegando a someterse hasta a 32 operaciones quirúrgicas.​ Llevó una vida poco convencional.​ La obra de Frida y la de su marido, el pintor Diego Rivera, se influyeron mutuamente. Ambos compartieron el gusto por el arte popular mexicano de raíces indígenas, inspirando a otros pintores mexicanos del periodo posrevolucionario.

En 1939, sus pinturas fueron expuestas en Francia tras haber recibido una invitación de André Breton, quien intentó convencerla de que eran «surrealistas». Sin embargo, Frida no veía su arte reflejado en esta tendencia ya que ella consideraba que no pintaba sueños, sino su propia vida. Una de las obras de esta exposición (Autorretrato-El marco, que actualmente se encuentra en el Centro Pompidou) se convirtió en el primer cuadro de un artista mexicano adquirido por el Museo del Louvre. Su obra gozó de la admiración de destacados pintores e intelectuales de la época como Pablo Picasso, Vasili Kandinski, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Tina Modotti y Concha Michel. Falleció el 13 de julio de 1954, a los 47 años. Su cuerpo fue cremado y sus cenizas fueron llevadas a la Casa Azul, hoy conocida como museo Frida Kahlo.

Biografía y carrera

1907-1925: primeros años

Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo y Calderón nació el 6 de julio de 1907 en Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, siendo la tercera hija del fotógrafo Guillermo Kahlo y Matilde Calderón.​​ Tenía dos medias hermanas del primer matrimonio de su padre; María Luisa y Margarita, que fueron criadas en un internado tras el matrimonio de sus padres. Sus dos hermanas mayores fueron Matilde y Adriana. En 1906 nació su único hermano, Guillermo, que solamente sobrevivió por algunos días. En junio de 1908, nació su hermana menor, Cristina.​

Fotografiada a los 11 años, 15 de junio de 1919.

Mientras la relación familiar con su mamá era complicada y distante, el vínculo fraternal con su papá era muy cercano y cariñoso. Su lazo padre e hija se hizo aún más estrecho luego de que esta última contrajera poliomielitis, ya que su progenitor era quien principalmente la acompañaba a sus ejercicios y programas de rehabilitación. A su vez, Frida se daba cuenta de los continuos desmayos que su padre tenía, para los que a su temprana edad nadie le ofrecía una explicación. Guillermo Kahlo sufría de ataques epilépticos, adquiridos como secuela de una lesión cerebral en su infancia. Con el tiempo, Frida aprendió a prestarle asistencia en estas circunstancias y finalmente se enteró de su causa. La experiencia compartida de lidiar contra el infortunio de las enfermedades siempre los mantuvo muy unidos.​

No se ha logrado identificar con exactitud la escuela a la que concurrió Frida antes de 1922. Repetidamente se ha señalado, sin embargo, que fue alumna del Colegio Alemán hasta 1921 y que allí habría obtenido su certificado escolar.​ Sin embargo, las actas del colegio no brindan una prueba de ello, ni tampoco tenía Frida el dominio del idioma alemán esperable, tal como ella misma escribió en una carta —redactada en idioma inglés— de 1949 a Hans-Joachim Kahlo, donde intentaba averiguar sobre sus ancestros y familia en Alemania.​

En 1922 ingresó a la Escuela Nacional Preparatoria de Ciudad de México, prestigiosa institución educativa de México, que recientemente había comenzado a admitir estudiantes de sexo femenino. Eran solo 35 mujeres, de un total de dos mil alumnos.​ Entonces aspiraba a estudiar medicina. En esta escuela conoció a futuros intelectuales y artistas mexicanos, como Salvador Novo, y formó parte de un grupo de alumnos conocidos como Los Cachuchas, llamados así por las gorras que usaban. A este grupo solo pertenecían dos mujeres: Carmen Jaime y la propia Frida. Los demás eran todos hombres que en sus vidas de adulto tuvieron éxito intelectual o profesional en la sociedad mexicana: Agustín Lira, Miguel Lira, Alfonso Villa, Manuel González Ramírez, Jesús Ríos y Valles, José Gómez Robleda y quien se convirtiera en su novio, Alejandro Gómez Arias. Los cachuchas eran rebeldes, se autodefinían como un grupo político, crítico de la autoridad, protestaban contra las injusticias y se movilizaban por las reformas del sistema escolar. Pero además se divertían y gastaban bromas en la escuela con gran entusiasmo. Su actividad y posición política calzaba en algún espacio entre las ideas anarquistas y revolucionarias románticas.​ Más adelante, Frida plasmaría sobre la tela una escena típica de sus encuentros con estos amigos. El óleo, pintado en 1927 y con estilo cubista, lleva por título Los Cachuchas (o, alternativamente, Si Adelita...) y transmite, con ayuda de símbolos, la atmósfera grupal y los intereses de los miembros del grupo.​

1925-1928: accidente e inicios como pintora

El 17 de septiembre de 1925 Frida sufrió un grave accidente cuando el autobús en el que ella viajaba fue arrollado por un tranvía, quedando aplastado contra un muro y completamente destruido. Regresaba de la escuela a casa junto a Alejandro Gómez Arias, su novio de entonces. Su columna vertebral quedó fracturada en tres partes, sufriendo además fracturas en dos costillas, en la clavícula y tres en el hueso pélvico. Su pierna derecha se fracturó en once partes, su pie derecho se dislocó. Al respecto, Kahlo comentaba que habría sido esta la forma brutal en la que había perdido su virginidad. La medicina de su tiempo la atormentó con múltiples operaciones quirúrgicas (por lo menos 32 a lo largo de su vida), corsés de yeso y de distintos tipos, así como diversos mecanismos de «estiramiento».​

Kahlo en 1926.

A comienzos de 1925, poco antes de este accidente, había trabajado como aprendiz en el taller de grabado e imprenta de Fernando Fernández Domínguez, un amigo de su padre que, en medio del trabajo, le enseñaba a dibujar copiando grabados de Anders Zorn, dado que creía haber detectado en ella dotes especiales para este arte.​​ Aparte de esta experiencia, Frida no había mostrado antes de su accidente ningún interés especial por la pintura. Tampoco seguía con mayor interés la asignatura de artes plásticas en la escuela. La batalla contra las secuelas de la poliomielitis la hacían inclinarse más bien por actividades deportivas: Cuanto más se moviera y más ejercicio físico sistemático hiciese, mejores eran sus posibilidades de recuperación. Tras el accidente, en cambio, trataba de moverse lo menos posible para ayudar a la sanación. Es así como la pintura cobra un lugar central en su vida.​ Durante su larga convalecencia comenzó a pintar de manera más constante. En septiembre de 1926 pintó su primer autorretrato al óleo, que dedicó a Alejandro Gómez Arias.​ En esta primera obra emprendió una dinámica que continuaría el resto de su existencia: reflejar en sus cuadros los sucesos de su vida y los sentimientos que le producían.​

En 1927 su pintura se volvió más compleja. Ese mismo año pintó el Retrato de Miguel N. Lira, un óleo sobre lienzo de 99,2 X 67,5 cm donde muestra a su compañero cachucha en un fondo muy particular y simbólico lleno de objetos y signos que aluden a su nombre. Apenas un año más tarde realizó el retrato de su hermana Cristina con líneas muy puras y tonos muy suaves.​

Por esta época, Frida ya había comenzado a frecuentar ambientes políticos, artísticos e intelectuales. A través de Germán de Campo, un dirigente estudiantil muy admirado por Frida, conoció al comunista cubano Julio Antonio Mella, quien vivía exiliado en México con su pareja de origen italiano, la fotógrafa Tina Modotti, a través de quienes Frida entró en contacto con el pintor Diego Rivera, 21 años mayor que Frida y con quien iniciaría una relación. Frida y Tina entablaron rápidamente amistad y esta última empezó a llevar a Frida a las reuniones políticas del Partido Comunista Mexicano, organización de la que ya formaban parte varios de sus amigos cachuchas y a la que también se incorporó formalmente Frida. Diego Rivera era militante del Partido Comunista desde 1922,​​​ pero fue expulsado del partido en 1929. Frida no fue expulsada, pero no había tenido una militancia formal muy activa (se había afiliado recién en 1928) y también se alejó del partido tras la expulsión de Rivera. A mediados de la década de 1930, la pareja se consideraba trotskista, cuestión que cambió radicalmente en 1939, cuando consideraron aquello un error y comenzaron a defender las ideas de la dirigencia soviética.

1929-1940: primer matrimonio con Diego Rivera

La artista contrajo matrimonio con Diego Rivera el 21 de agosto de 1929.​ En 1930, Frida se embarazó por primera vez. Sin embargo, debido a la posición anómala del feto y a las secuelas del accidente de 1925, el embarazo de tres meses debió ser interrumpido, según decidió el médico Jesús Marín. Por aquel entonces otros médicos opinaron que probablemente Frida nunca podría tener hijos.​

Fotografiada por Carl van Vechten junto a Diego Rivera en 1932.

En 1932, le encargaron a Diego Rivera los Murales de la Industria de Detroit para el Instituto de Artes de Detroit. En abril, Frida pintó Aparador en una calle de Detroit, obra muy influenciada por Giorgio de Chirico. Se vuelve crítica con la forma de vida estadounidense y lo dejó reflejado en sus pinturas de entonces.​ En agosto, contempló un eclipse solar, por lo que incorporó a algunos de sus cuadros el dualismo noche y día, convirtiéndose en un elemento iconográfico frecuente y recurrente de su obra.​

Encontrándose en Detroit, sufrió un segundo aborto. Durante su recuperación pintó su autorretrato, Aborto en Detroit, realizado con un estilo más penetrante, inspirado en los pequeños cuadros votivos del arte popular mexicano que recibían el nombre de retablos. Esta pintura era totalmente independiente de lo que hacía su esposo. Rivera, consciente del valor de la obra y de este periodo, dijo:

Frida empezó a trabajar en una serie de obras maestras sin precedentes en la historia del arte, pinturas que exaltaban la cualidad femenina de la verdad, la realidad, la crueldad y la pena. Nunca antes una mujer había puesto semejante atormentada poesía sobre la tela como Frida en esta época de Detroit.​

Volvieron a México en 1933.​ En 1937, ella y Diego conocieron a León Trotski, un revolucionario soviético exiliado, a quien le ofrecieron su casa de Coyoacán para que pudiera vivir con su esposa. Al poco tiempo, Frida comenzó un fugaz amorío con él.​

Retratada desnuda en 1938 por Julien Levy, quien un año antes le ayudó a organizar su primera exposición individual en Nueva York.​

En 1938 el poeta y ensayista del surrealismo André Bretón calificó su obra de surrealista en un ensayo que escribió para la exposición de Kahlo en la galería Julien Levy de Nueva York. No obstante, ella misma declaró más tarde: «creían que yo era surrealista, pero no lo era. Nunca pinté mis sueños. Pinté mi propia realidad».​

En 1939, Kahlo terminó un autorretrato, en el que reflejó sus dos personalidades: Las dos Fridas. En este cuadro, asimilaba la crisis marital, a través de la separación entre la Frida en traje de tehuana, el favorito de Diego, y la otra Frida, de raíces europeas, la que existió antes de su encuentro con él. Los corazones de las dos mujeres están conectados uno al otro por una vena, la parte europea rechazada de Frida Kahlo amenaza con perder toda su sangre. Cerca de este año, Diego Rivera adoptó la ideología trotskista de León Trotski, y en el Sindicato Único de Trabajadores de la Construcción de la Ciudad de México, gremio sindical de Juan R. de la Cruz que Fernández Vilchis capacitó y formó políticamente, se comenzó a tocar el tema de formar parte de un grupo de la IV Internacional.​ Ante discordia entre los miembros, y debido a que el movimiento se estaba sacrificando a los intereses personales de Trotski, Diego Rivera consideró necesario disolver esta sección mexicana. Posteriormente, Kahlo y Rivera cambiaron sus pensamientos políticos, pasando a ser estalinistas, lo que provocó un distanciamiento entre ellos con Trotsky. No obstante, este último trató de reavivar su relación con Frida, escribiéndole para que no lo abandonara, pero ella nunca respondió.​

Luego de llevar un matrimonio disfuncional de maltratos emocionales e infidelidades cometidas por parte de los dos, destacando en especial una aventura que Diego tuvo con Cristina Kahlo, su hermana menor, Rivera le pidió el divorció el 6 de noviembre de 1939.​ Frida regresó temporalmente a su casa de Coyoacán, donde padeció una temporada con un ánimo depresivo en el que consumió alcohol como una forma de aliviar sus sufrimientos físicos y psicológicos. Hay dos producciones pictóricas importantes en este período de separación: Las dos Fridas y Dos desnudos en un bosque. Su separación matrimonial se consumó oficialmente en enero de 1940.​

1940-1950: segundo matrimonio con Diego Rivera y ascenso artístico

El 24 de mayo de 1940, David Alfaro Siqueiros intentó asesinar a León Trotski, quien aún se encontraba residiendo en la casa de Frida en Coyoacán. A raíz de este ataque, se realizó un allanamiento en dicha vivienda y ella fue detenida por la policía durante algunas horas. El 21 de agosto, Trotski fue asesinado a los 60 años, lo que provocó que ella y Diego Rivera fueran acusados de haberlo matado por la cercanía que tenían con él. Ambos fueron arrestados, pero al final fueron dejados en libertad.​ Esta situación hizo que, a pesar de haberse divorciado, los dos formaran un vínculo fraternal más fuerte. Sin soportar estar separados el uno del otro, tomaron la decisión de contraer matrimonio nuevamente el 8 de diciembre del mismo año.​​

Posando para una foto junto a Nayantara Sahgal (derecha) y Rita Dar (izquierda), en 1947.

A partir de 1943, empezó a dar clases en la escuela La Esmeralda de Ciudad de México. En los años posteriores de los cuarenta, el reconocimiento artístico a su obra fue incrementando, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Participó en importantes exposiciones colectivas en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, en el Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo de Boston y en el Museo de Arte de Filadelfia.​ También formó parte de la exposición The Exhibition by 31 Women organizada por la mecenas y coleccionista Peggy Guggenheim.​

1950-1954: deterioro de salud y últimos años

En 1950, fue hospitalizada en Ciudad de México, donde permaneció un año.​

En 1953, en Ciudad de México se organizó la única exposición individual en su país durante la vida de la artista. En una de las críticas se dijo: «Es imposible separar la vida y obra de esta persona... sus pinturas son su biografía».​ La exposición fue en la Galería de Arte Contemporáneo. La salud de Frida estaba ya muy deteriorada y los médicos le prohibieron concurrir a la misma. No obstante, llegó en una ambulancia, asistiendo a su exposición en una cama de hospital. Los fotógrafos y los periodistas se quedaron impresionados. La cama fue colocada en el centro de la galería y Frida contó chistes, cantó y bebió la tarde entera. La exhibición había sido un rotundo éxito.

Ese mismo año, le tuvieron que amputar la pierna por debajo de la rodilla debido a una infección de gangrena. Esto la sumió en una gran depresión que la llevó a intentar el suicidio en un par de ocasiones, utilizando para ello los opiáceos prescritos. Durante ese tiempo escribía poemas en sus diarios, la mayoría relacionados con el dolor y el sufrimiento.

En febrero de 1954, escribió explícitamente en su diario sus ideas suicidas. En ellas describió sus dolencias físicas y emocionales padecidas seis meses después de su amputación, y señaló que, aunque continuaba pensando en quitarse la vida, lo único que la detenía era Diego Rivera, a quien no deseaba abandonar porque tenía «la vanidad» de creer que ella le haría falta. El 19 de abril de 1954 ingresó al hospital inglés tras un intento de suicidio y, aunque escribió en su diario que había prometido no recaer, el 6 de mayo fue hospitalizada nuevamente por el mismo motivo. En sus últimos días, estuvo postrada en cama la mayor parte del tiempo debido a una bronconeumonía, aunque hizo una aparición pública el 2 de julio, participando con Rivera en una manifestación contra la invasión en Guatemala por la CIA.​ Parecía anticipar su muerte, ya que hablaba de ello con las personas que iban a visitarla y dibujaba esqueletos y ángeles en su diario.​ Su último dibujo fue un ángel negro, que la biógrafa Hayden Herrera interpretó como el «Ángel de la Muerte».​ La ilustración fue acompañada por las palabras que ella misma escribió: «Espero alegre la salida – y espero no volver jamás.»​​

Muerte

La noche del 12 de julio de 1954, sufrió de fiebre alta y dolores extremos.​ Aproximadamente a las seis de la mañana del 13 de julio, su enfermera la encontró muerta en su cama.​ Kahlo tenía 47 años al morir, y sus causas de muerte oficiales fueron una embolia pulmonar no traumática y una flebitis en un miembro inferior derecho no traumática.​ No obstante, no se le realizó una autopsia.​ Ante esto, una versión alterna asegura que en realidad se suicidó.​​ Los puntos que apoyaron dicha hipótesis fueron las declaraciones de su enfermera, quien aseguró que contaba los analgésicos de la artista para poder tenerle un control de los mismos, pero la noche antes de su muerte se provocó una sobredosis. Tenía prescrito una dosis máxima de siete pastillas, pero ingirió once.​ En adición, esa noche le dio a Rivera un regalo de aniversario de bodas, con más de un mes de antelación.​

Su cuerpo fue velado en el Palacio de Bellas Artes y su ataúd fue cubierto con la bandera del Partido Comunista Mexicano, hecho que la prensa nacional criticó profusamente.​ Concluidas sus ceremonias de despedida, fue cremada en el Panteón Civil de Dolores. Sus cenizas fueron llevadas a descansar a la Casa Azul en Coyoacán, el mismo lugar donde nació y que años más tarde se convirtió en museo.​​ Rivera, quien afirmó que su muerte fue «el día más trágico de su vida», falleció tres años después, en 1957.​

Legado

Obra pictórica

Un año más tarde, Frida participó con dos de sus obras (La mesa herida y Las dos Fridas) en la versión mexicana del gran evento en París de 1938: la Exposición Internacional de Surrealistas de la Galería de Arte Mexicano de Inés Amor. Una exposición que además contó con el apoyo de Breton y en la que participaron además Leonora Carrington y Remedios Varo.​

Comenzó a pintar durante su convalecencia del accidente que sufrió cuando regresaba a su casa de la escuela en autobús el 17 de septiembre de 1925 que la dejó gravemente herida y con secuelas el resto de su vida. Así lo explicó:

Mi padre tenía desde hacía muchos años una caja de colores al óleo, unos pinceles... y una paleta en un rincón de su tallercito de fotografía... yo le tenía echado el ojo a la caja de colores. No sabría explicar el porqué. Al estar tanto tiempo en cama, enferma, aproveché la ocasión y se la pedí a mi padre... Mi mamá mandó hacer con un carpintero un caballete... que podía acoplarse a la cama donde yo estaba, porque el corsé de yeso no me dejaba sentar. Así comencé a pintar mi primer cuadro, el retrato de una amiga mia... Junto a la cama había un espejo donde Frida se veía así misma, se descubría y experimentaba con ella su propio modelo, este fue el inicio de sus numerosos autorretratos. Este primer estilo juvenil estuvo influenciado por la pintura retratística mexicana del siglo XIX de inspiración europea.​

Casada con Diego Rivera en agosto de 1929, la influencia de Diego en la pintura de Frida se reconoce a partir de entonces con un importante cambio de estilo orientado hacia el mexicanismo, hacia la afirmación nacional mexicana. Así se unió al grupo de artistas, en el que participaba Diego, que propugnaba un arte autóctono mexicano, integrando objetos del arte popular y de la cultura precolombina. En sus autorretratos, Frida se representaba vestida de campesina o de indígena, expresando su identificación con la población indígena.​

Durante cuatro años el matrimonio vivió en Estados Unidos, desde noviembre de 1930 y hasta 1934. En Detroit reflejó en su óleo Henry Ford Hospital su trágico segundo aborto: se ve a Frida desnuda en una cama del hospital con la sábana blanca empapada de sangre, de su vientre salen seis venas rojas que se enlazan a seis objetos que son símbolos de su sexualidad y del embarazo fracasado.​

La pintura ha llenado mi vida. He perdido tres hijos y otra serie de cosas que hubiesen podido llenar mi horrible vida. La pintura lo ha sustituido todo. Creo que no hay nada mejor que el trabajo.

Frida Kahlo​

En sus pinturas, Frida se representó en escenarios amplios, áridos paisajes o en frías habitaciones vacías que remarcaban su soledad. Los retratos más intimistas de cabeza o de busto se complementaban con objetos de significado simbólico. En cuanto a los retratos de cuerpo entero, se integraban en representaciones escénicas y enmarcaban su propia biografía: la relación con su esposo, cómo sentía su cuerpo, sus enfermedades consecuencia de su accidente juvenil, la incapacidad de engendrar hijos, su filosofía de la naturaleza y del mundo. Expresó sus fantasías y sentimientos por medio de un vocabulario propio con símbolos que precisan ser descifrados para entender su obra. Estas representaciones rompieron tabús, especialmente sobre el cuerpo y la sexualidad femenina.​

En el retrato de Alicia Galant (1927), se observa la inconformidad por parte de Frida. La composición cromática difiere sustancialmente de la que utilizará en sus obras posteriores. En este cuadro destacan los colores oscuros y un trazo que es al mismo tiempo prolijo y torpe. Los elementos que a ella más le agradan, y que se repetirán en sus siguientes obras, no están presentes aquí, como si su esencia estuviese ausente de este cuadro.​

Aunque llegó a conocer el éxito en vida, Frida Kahlo tardó en lograr el reconocimiento como artista. La apreciación de su trabajo pictórico se produjo después de su muerte, tardando más de una década en alcanzar verdadero reconocimiento internacional:

Tras su muerte en 1954, por largo tiempo se guardó silencio sobre ella y recién a comienzos de la década de 1970 fue redescubierta en el contexto del movimiento de liberación de las mujeres. Desde entonces se han realizado numerosas exposiciones de sus obras y variados homenajes a la mujer y a la artista Frida Kahlo y su fama se ha incrementado permanentemente. En cuanto a su impacto, hace tiempo que ya superó con creces a Diego Rivera.​

Cuatro años después de su muerte la Casa Azul se convirtió en el Museo Frida Kahlo. Importantes museos y galerías de arte internacionales le han dedicado retrospectivas: el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de Ciudad de México (1977), el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chicago (1980), la Whitechapel de Londres (1982), la Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (1993), la Tate Modern de Londres (2007),​ el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (2007) y el Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2009).

Museos

Véase también: Museo Frida Kahlo

Fachada exterior del Museo Frida Kahlo, fotografiado en 2011.

El Museo Frida Kahlo, también conocido como Casa Azul, se encuentra ubicado en Coyoacán, en la esquina de Londres y Allende, Ciudad de México. En este lugar, que como su nombre alterno lo indica era una casa, fue el sitio donde nació, creció, pasó gran parte de su vida y realizó la mayoría de sus trabajos pictóricos.​

En 1997, la Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa inauguró en una antigua y espaciosa casa de la ciudad de Culiacán la «Galería de arte Frida Kahlo».​​​​

Mito y leyenda

Posando para una fotografía de la revista Vogue, en 1937.

La importancia de su obra pictórica, la complejidad de su vida y su influencia en la cultura mexicana de la posrevolución, donde se gestó el movimiento muralista encabezado por su esposo, han sido muy estudiadas desde múltiples perspectivas y hay publicados muchos estudios críticos sobre ello. Su personalidad se forjó en una trayectoria vital plagada de enfermedades que le producían un continuo dolor, así como en unas relaciones personales con otras personalidades culturales de primer orden. Su obra refleja esa trayectoria vital, su propia fantasía y la tradición popular mexicana, incluida la de los exvotos y la prehispánica. Para Araceli Rico, Kahlo es «el enfermo creador (que) experimenta el drama de su existencia en el rechazo a los demás, esforzándose por mantener una situación favorable a la realización de su trabajo creativo». Kahlo admiraba la pintura revolucionaria y la consideraba necesaria en su tiempo, pero era consciente de que su pintura no lo era, así escribió: «Mis cuadros están bien pintados, no con ligereza, sino con paciencia. Mi pintura lleva el mensaje del dolor. Creo que cuando menos a unas pocas gentes les interesa. No es revolucionaria, para qué me sigo haciendo ilusiones de que es combativa; no puedo». Por tanto, su obra no puede asociarse al nacionalismo revolucionario que practicaba su esposo Diego Rivera; más bien se trata de una obra arraigada en el arte popular. Según Araceli Rico «observamos en Frida Kahlo una preocupación por la búsqueda de sus orígenes como individuo que pertenece y se empeña en descubrir la tradición cultural. Es así que en sus composiciones está evocando todo un mundo de costumbres, de creencias, de objetos, en fin, de maneras de ser y de sentir». Un aspecto inquietante de su obra es la frecuente disociación de ella misma en varios de sus autorretratos, esta dualidad puede nacer tanto de su propia historia como de la fantasía del pueblo mexicano.​

Para Raúl Mejía, Frida Kahlo forjó su propio mito y leyenda con la creación de su propio personaje que aparece en la mayoría de su obra. Fuertemente transgresora en muchas de las normas y convenciones de su tiempo, decidió también ser la protagonista de sus pinturas. En lugar de realizar un dulce trabajo, como podía esperarse de una mujer de su época, construyó una obra llena de singularidad con un fuerte contenido dramático tanto en los temas como en las representaciones de sí misma.​

Kahlo se mostró en sus pinturas coexistiendo tanto con la vida como con la muerte, especialmente en sus frecuentes operaciones quirúrgicas, siendo constante la presencia de su dolor. En La columna rota su cuerpo aparece cubierto de clavos. También se muestra como productora de vida y energía, o como fuente de amor y de sentimientos. El tema de las relaciones y el afecto aparece frecuentemente en su obra, especialmente su gran amor Diego. Pero, sobre todo, es el personaje que creó de ella misma el motivo principal y protagonista de sus cuadros. Su mensaje con el paso del tiempo sigue manteniendo toda su vigencia como un grito de denuncia contra la opresión.​

En su diario que escribió a partir de los 35 años, relató sus vivencias tanto de su última década como de sus primeros años. Escribió sobre sus pensamientos, su sexualidad, la fertilidad, sus sufrimientos físicos y psíquicos.​

Personificaciones

Frida Kahlo ha sido interpretada en las siguientes películas:

Año	Título	Intérprete
1984	Frida, naturaleza viva	Ofelia Medina
2002	Frida	Salma Hayek
2015	Eisenstein en Guanajuato	Cristina Velasco Lozano
2017	Coco	Natalia Cordova-Buckley (voz en inglés) Ofelia Medina (voz en Latinoamérica)

Literatura

En 1983, la historiadora y biógrafa estadounidense Hayden Herrera, publicó Frida: una biografía de Frida Kahlo, un libro biográfico sobre la vida y carrera de Kahlo.​

En 2000, la escritora mexicana Elena Poniatowska en su obra Las siete cabritas, incluye un cuento en el que intenta ponerse en el lugar de Frida, narrando sus pesares en primera persona.​

Existe una amplia serie de novelas inspiradas en la vida de Frida Kahlo, así como también en la pareja Frida y Diego y variadas biografías noveladas en varios idiomas, como por ejemplo Diego ist der Name der Liebe : das Schicksal der Frida Kahlo (Diego es el nombre del amor: el destino de Frida Kahlo) (2000), de Bárbara Krause.​ Rauda Jamis (2000), Bárbara Mujica (2003), J. M. G. Le Clezio (2002).

Juguetes

El 8 de marzo de 2018, en el marco del Día Internacional de la Mujer, la compañía de juguetes estadounidense Mattel anunció el lanzamiento de una línea de muñecas Barbie llamada «Sheroes» (en español, heroínas), en la que se incluyó una en honor a Kahlo. Sin embargo, la familia de esta última rechazó la comercialización de la muñeca, alegando que Mattel no tenía permiso legal para reproducir la figura de la artista.​

Música

Anthony Kiedis, vocalista de la banda estadounidense Red Hot Chili Peppers, le dedicó la canción «Scar Tissue».​

La cantante estadounidense Madonna ha reafirmado su gusto y admiración por Frida Kahlo, tal es el caso de su vídeo de 1994 Bedtime Story en el cual varias escenas están inspiradas en las famosas pinturas de la artista.​ En 2015 se inspira en una fotografía tomada a Frida para la portada de su álbum Rebel Heart.​ En ese mismo álbum es mencionada en la canción «Graffiti Heart».

Véase también

• Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo

Bibliografía

• Genschow, Karen (2007). «Wirkung». Frida Kahlo - Leben, Werk, Wirkung [Frida Kahlo - Vida, obra, impacto] (en alemán) (1ª edición). Fráncfort del Meno: Suuhrkamp. p. 120. ISBN 3-518-18222-6. 
• Herrera, Hayden (1984). Frida: una biografía de Frida Kahlo. México: Diana. ISBN 978-968-131-684-6. Consultado el 22 de octubre de 2011. 
• Herrera, Hayden (2010) [1983]. Frida a Biography of Frida Kahlo [Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches leben] (en alemán) (4ª edición). Fráncfort del Meno: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 978-3-59618037-0. 
• Kahlo, Isolda P. (2004). Frida íntima. Ediciones Dipon y Ediciones Gato Azul. 
• Kettenmann, Andrea (1999). Frida Kahlo. Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-6548-6. Archivado desde el original el 28 de agosto de 2017. Consultado el 23 de julio de 2012. 
• Martín Lozano, Luis (2007). Frida Kahlo, El círculo de los afectos. Cangrejo Editores. 
• Mejía Moreno, Raúl (2006). El simbolismo en la obra de Frida Kahlo "Frida el ser doble o rebis la piedra filosofal". Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal. Universidad Autónoma de México. 
• Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida (1993). «Presentación». En Rico, Araceli, ed. Frida Kahlo. Fantasía de un cuerpo herido. 1993 Plaza y Valdés. ISBN 968-856-116-9. 
• Smith Edward, Lucie (1999). Vidas de los grandes artistas del siglo XX. Frida Kahlo. Ediciones Polígrafa. ISBN 84-343-0882-7. 
• VV.AA. (2007). Frida (Segunda edición conmemoración de los 100 años del nacimiento de Frida Kahlo edición). México: Océano. ISBN 978-970-777-341-7. 
• VV.AA. (2010). Frida Kahlo. Sus fotos. Editorial RM. ISBN 978-84-92480-74-6. 
• Franger, Gaby; Huhle, Rainer (2005). Fridas Vater. Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo [El padre de Frida. El fotógrafo Guillermo Kahlo] (en alemán). Incluye textos de Juan Coronel Rivera, Cristina Kahlo Alcalá, Helga Prignitz-Poda y Raquel Tribol (1ª edición). Múnich: Schirmer-Mosel. ISBN 3-8296-0197-2. 
• Del Conde, Teresa (1976). «Lo popular en la pintura de Frida Kahlo». Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: 195-203. Consultado el 1 de octubre de 2023. 

Enlaces externos

• Sitio web oficial de los derechos, licencias y familiares de Frida Kahlo
• Kahlo por Andrea Kettenmann. Editorial Taschen
• Cronología ilustrada de Frida Kahlo
• Obra pictórica completa de Frida Kahlo
• Fotografías de Frida Kahlo realizadas por Nickolas Muray
• Artículo en Henciclopedia
• Galería de pinturas de Frida Kahlo
• Kahlo. Análisis crítico
• Recorrido virtual del Museo Frida Kahlo. La Casa Azul en Coyoacán
• Siguiendo los pasos de Frida Kahlo en Ciudad de México
• Galería de dibujos y bocetos de Frida Kahlo

• Datos: Q5588
• Multimedia: Frida Kahlo / Q5588
• Citas célebres: Frida Kahlo

english

"Kahlo" redirects here. For the surname, see Kahlo (surname).

Frida Kahlo
Kahlo in 1932
Born	Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-07-06)6 July 1907 Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico
Died	13 July 1954(1954-07-13) (aged 47) Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico
Other names	Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, Frieda Kahlo
Occupation	Painter
Works	List
Movement	Surrealism Magic realism Naïve
Spouses	Diego Rivera ​ ​ (m. 1929; div. 1939)​ ​ ​ (m. 1940)​
Father	Guillermo Kahlo
Relatives	Cristina Kahlo (sister)
Signature

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈfɾiða ˈkalo]; 6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

Born to a German father and a mestiza mother (of Purépecha descent), Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán – now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until being injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929 and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling in Mexico and the United States together. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings raised the interest of surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado ("La Esmeralda") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo's always-fragile health began to decline in the same decade. While she had had solo exhibitions elsewhere, she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community. Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

Artistic career

Early career

Kahlo on 15 June 1919, aged 11

Kahlo enjoyed art from an early age, receiving drawing instruction from printmaker Fernando Fernández (who was her father's friend) and filling notebooks with sketches. In 1925, she began to work outside of school to help her family. After briefly working as a stenographer, she became a paid engraving apprentice for Fernández. He was impressed by her talent, although she did not consider art as a career at this time.

A severe bus accident at the age of 18 left Kahlo in lifelong pain. Confined to bed for three months following the accident, Kahlo began to paint. She started to consider a career as a medical illustrator, as well, which would combine her interests in science and art. Her mother provided her with a specially-made easel, which enabled her to paint in bed, and her father lent her some of his oil paints. She had a mirror placed above the easel, so that she could see herself. Painting became a way for Kahlo to explore questions of identity and existence. She explained, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." She later stated that the accident and the isolating recovery period made her desire "to begin again, painting things just as [she] saw them with [her] own eyes and nothing more."

Most of the paintings Kahlo made during this time were portraits of herself, her sisters, and her schoolfriends. Her early paintings and correspondence show that she drew inspiration especially from European artists, in particular Renaissance masters such as Sandro Botticelli and Bronzino and from avant-garde movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Cubism.

On moving to Morelos in 1929 with her husband Diego Rivera, Kahlo was inspired by the city of Cuernavaca where they lived. She changed her artistic style and increasingly drew inspiration from Mexican folk art. Art historian Andrea Kettenmann states that she may have been influenced by Adolfo Best Maugard's treatise on the subject, for she incorporated many of the characteristics that he outlined – for example, the lack of perspective and the combining of elements from pre-Columbian and colonial periods of Mexican art. Her identification with La Raza, the people of Mexico, and her profound interest in its culture remained important facets of her art throughout the rest of her life.

Work in the United States

Kahlo in 1926

When Kahlo and Rivera moved to San Francisco in 1930, Kahlo was introduced to American artists such as Edward Weston, Ralph Stackpole, Timothy L. Pflueger, and Nickolas Muray. The six months spent in San Francisco were a productive period for Kahlo, who further developed the folk art style she had adopted in Cuernavaca. In addition to painting portraits of several new acquaintances, she made Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931), a double portrait based on their wedding photograph, and The Portrait of Luther Burbank (1931), which depicted the eponymous horticulturist as a hybrid between a human and a plant. Although she still publicly presented herself as simply Rivera's spouse rather than as an artist, she participated for the first time in an exhibition, when Frieda and Diego Rivera was included in the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists in the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

On moving to Detroit with Rivera, Kahlo experienced numerous health problems related to a failed pregnancy. Despite these health problems, as well as her dislike for the capitalist culture of the United States, Kahlo's time in the city was beneficial for her artistic expression. She experimented with different techniques, such as etching and frescos, and her paintings began to show a stronger narrative style. She also began placing emphasis on the themes of "terror, suffering, wounds, and pain". Despite the popularity of the mural in Mexican art at the time, she adopted a diametrically opposed medium, votive images or retablos, religious paintings made on small metal sheets by amateur artists to thank saints for their blessings during a calamity. Amongst the works she made in the retablo manner in Detroit are Henry Ford Hospital (1932), My Birth (1932), and Self-Portrait on the Border of Mexico and the United States (1932). While none of Kahlo's works were featured in exhibitions in Detroit, she gave an interview to the Detroit News on her art; the article was condescendingly titled "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art".

Return to Mexico City and international recognition

Upon returning to Mexico City in 1934 Kahlo made no new paintings, and only two in the following year, due to health complications. In 1937 and 1938, however, Kahlo's artistic career was extremely productive, following her divorce and then reconciliation with Rivera. She painted more "than she had done in all her eight previous years of marriage", creating such works as My Nurse and I (1937), Memory, the Heart (1937), Four Inhabitants of Mexico (1938), and What the Water Gave Me (1938). Although she was still unsure about her work, the National Autonomous University of Mexico exhibited some of her paintings in early 1938. She made her first significant sale in the summer of 1938 when film star and art collector Edward G. Robinson purchased four paintings at $200 each. Even greater recognition followed when French Surrealist André Breton visited Rivera in April 1938. He was impressed by Kahlo, immediately claiming her as a surrealist and describing her work as "a ribbon around a bomb". He not only promised to arrange for her paintings to be exhibited in Paris but also wrote to his friend and art dealer, Julien Levy, who invited her to hold her first solo exhibition at his gallery on the East 57th Street in Manhattan.

Rivera, Kahlo, and Anson Goodyear

In October, Kahlo traveled alone to New York, where her colorful Mexican dress "caused a sensation" and made her seen as "the height of exotica". The exhibition opening in November was attended by famous figures such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Clare Boothe Luce and received much positive attention in the press, although many critics adopted a condescending tone in their reviews. For example, Time wrote that "Little Frida's pictures ... had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds, and yellows of Mexican tradition and the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child". Despite the Great Depression, Kahlo sold half of the 25 paintings presented in the exhibition. She also received commissions from A. Conger Goodyear, then the president of the MoMA, and Clare Boothe Luce, for whom she painted a portrait of Luce's friend, socialite Dorothy Hale, who had committed suicide by jumping from her apartment building. During the three months she spent in New York, Kahlo painted very little, instead focusing on enjoying the city to the extent that her fragile health allowed. She also had several affairs, continuing the one with Nickolas Muray and engaging in ones with Levy and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

In January 1939, Kahlo sailed to Paris to follow up on André Breton's invitation to stage an exhibition of her work. When she arrived, she found that he had not cleared her paintings from the customs and no longer even owned a gallery. With the aid of Marcel Duchamp, she was able to arrange for an exhibition at the Renou et Colle Gallery. Further problems arose when the gallery refused to show all but two of Kahlo's paintings, considering them too shocking for audiences, and Breton insisted that they be shown alongside photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, pre-Columbian sculptures, 18th- and 19th-century Mexican portraits, and what she considered "junk": sugar skulls, toys, and other items he had bought from Mexican markets.

The exhibition opened in March, but received much less attention than she had received in the United States, partly due to the looming Second World War, and made a loss financially, which led Kahlo to cancel a planned exhibition in London. Regardless, the Louvre purchased The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. She was also warmly received by other Parisian artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the fashion world, with designer Elsa Schiaparelli designing a dress inspired by her and Vogue Paris featuring her on its pages. However, her overall opinion of Paris and the Surrealists remained negative; in a letter to Muray, she called them "this bunch of coocoo lunatics and very stupid surrealists" who "are so crazy 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't even stand them anymore".

In the United States, Kahlo's paintings continued to raise interest. In 1941, her works were featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and, in the following year, she participated in two high-profile exhibitions in New York, the Twentieth-Century Portraits exhibition at the MoMA and the Surrealists' First Papers of Surrealism exhibition. In 1943, she was included in the Mexican Art Today exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century gallery in New York.

A portrait of Kahlo by Magda Pach, wife of Walter Pach, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (1933)

Kahlo gained more appreciation for her art in Mexico as well. She became a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of twenty-five artists commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education in 1942 to spread public knowledge of Mexican culture. As a member, she took part in planning exhibitions and attended a conference on art. In Mexico City, her paintings were featured in two exhibitions on Mexican art that were staged at the English-language Benjamin Franklin Library in 1943 and 1944. She was invited to participate in "Salon de la Flor", an exhibition presented at the annual flower exposition. An article by Rivera on Kahlo's art was also published in the journal published by the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana.

In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the recently reformed, nationalistic Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda". She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art and to derive their subjects from the street. When her health problems made it difficult for her to commute to the school in Mexico City, she began to hold her lessons at La Casa Azul. Four of her students – Fanny Rabel, Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, and Arturo Estrada – became devotees, and were referred to as "Los Fridos" for their enthusiasm. Kahlo secured three mural commissions for herself and her students.

Kahlo struggled to make a living from her art until the mid to late 1940s, as she refused to adapt her style to suit her clients' wishes. She received two commissions from the Mexican government in the early 1940s. She did not complete the first one, possibly due to her dislike of the subject, and the second commission was rejected by the commissioning body. Nevertheless, she had regular private clients, such as engineer Eduardo Morillo Safa, who ordered more than thirty portraits of family members over the decade. Her financial situation improved when she received a 5000-peso national prize for her painting Moses (1945) in 1946 and when The Two Fridas was purchased by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. According to art historian Andrea Kettenmann, by the mid-1940s, her paintings were "featured in the majority of group exhibitions in Mexico". Further, Martha Zamora wrote that she could "sell whatever she was currently painting; sometimes incomplete pictures were purchased right off the easel".

Later years

External images
The Broken Column (1944)
Moses (1945)
Without Hope (1945)
Tree of Hope, Stand Fast (1946)

Even as Kahlo was gaining recognition in Mexico, her health was declining rapidly, and an attempted surgery to support her spine failed. Her paintings from this period include Broken Column (1944), Without Hope (1945), Tree of Hope, Stand Fast (1946), and The Wounded Deer (1946), reflecting her poor physical state. During her last years, Kahlo was mostly confined to the Casa Azul. She painted mostly still lifes, portraying fruit and flowers with political symbols such as flags or doves. She was concerned about being able to portray her political convictions, stating that "I have a great restlessness about my paintings. Mainly because I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement... until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self ... I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live." She also altered her painting style: her brushstrokes, previously delicate and careful, were now hastier, her use of color more brash, and the overall style more intense and feverish.

Photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo understood that Kahlo did not have much longer to live, and thus staged her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Arte Contemporaneo in April 1953. Though Kahlo was initially not due to attend the opening, as her doctors had prescribed bed rest for her, she ordered her four-poster bed to be moved from her home to the gallery. To the surprise of the guests, she arrived in an ambulance and was carried on a stretcher to the bed, where she stayed for the duration of the party. The exhibition was a notable cultural event in Mexico and also received attention in mainstream press around the world. The same year, the Tate Gallery's exhibition on Mexican art in London featured five of her paintings.

In 1954, Kahlo was again hospitalized in April and May. That spring, she resumed painting after a one-year interval. Her last paintings include the political Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (c. 1954) and Frida and Stalin (c. 1954) and the still-life Viva La Vida (1954).

Self-portraits

• Self-portraiture
• Self-portrait on the Border of Mexico and the United States (1932)
• Henry Ford Hospital (1932)
• Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937)
• The Two Fridas (1939)
• Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)
• Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

Style and influences

Self-portrait in a Velvet Dress, 1926

See also: List of paintings by Frida Kahlo

Estimates vary on how many paintings Kahlo made during her life, with figures ranging from fewer than 150 to around 200. Her earliest paintings, which she made in the mid-1920s, show influence from Renaissance masters and European avant-garde artists such as Amedeo Modigliani. Towards the end of the decade, Kahlo derived more inspiration from Mexican folk art, drawn to its elements of "fantasy, naivety, and fascination with violence and death". The style she developed mixed reality with surrealistic elements and often depicted pain and death.

One of Kahlo's earliest champions was Surrealist artist André Breton, who claimed her as part of the movement as an artist who had supposedly developed her style "in total ignorance of the ideas that motivated the activities of my friends and myself". This was echoed by Bertram D. Wolfe, who wrote that Kahlo's was a "sort of 'naïve' Surrealism, which she invented for herself". Although Breton regarded her as mostly a feminine force within the Surrealist movement, Kahlo brought postcolonial questions and themes to the forefront of her brand of Surrealism. Breton also described Kahlo's work as "wonderfully situated at the point of intersection between the political (philosophical) line and the artistic line". While she subsequently participated in Surrealist exhibitions, she stated that she "detest[ed] Surrealism", which to her was "bourgeois art" and not "true art that the people hope from the artist". Some art historians have disagreed whether her work should be classified as belonging to the movement at all. According to Andrea Kettenmann, Kahlo was a symbolist concerned more in portraying her inner experiences. Emma Dexter has argued that, as Kahlo derived her mix of fantasy and reality mainly from Aztec mythology and Mexican culture instead of Surrealism, it is more appropriate to consider her paintings as having more in common with magical realism, also known as New Objectivity. It combined reality and fantasy and employed similar style to Kahlo's, such as flattened perspective, clearly outlined characters and bright colours.

Mexicanidad

Similarly to many other contemporary Mexican artists, Kahlo was heavily influenced by Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that had developed in the aftermath of the revolution. The Mexicanidad movement claimed to resist the "mindset of cultural inferiority" created by colonialism, and placed special importance on Indigenous cultures. Before the revolution, Mexican folk culture – a mixture of Indigenous and European elements – was disparaged by the elite, who claimed to have purely European ancestry and regarded Europe as the definition of civilization which Mexico should imitate. Kahlo's artistic ambition was to paint for the Mexican people, and she stated that she wished "to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me". To enforce this image, she preferred to conceal the education she had received in art from her father and Ferdinand Fernandez and at the preparatory school. Instead, she cultivated an image of herself as a "self-taught and naive artist".

When Kahlo began her career as an artist in the 1920s, muralists dominated the Mexican art scene. They created large public pieces in the vein of Renaissance masters and Russian socialist realists: they usually depicted masses of people, and their political messages were easy to decipher. Although she was close to muralists such as Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siquieros and shared their commitment to socialism and Mexican nationalism, the majority of Kahlo's paintings were self-portraits of relatively small size. Particularly in the 1930s, her style was especially indebted to votive paintings or retablos, which were postcard-sized religious images made by amateur artists. Their purpose was to thank saints for their protection during a calamity, and they normally depicted an event, such as an illness or an accident, from which its commissioner had been saved. The focus was on the figures depicted, and they seldom featured a realistic perspective or detailed background, thus distilling the event to its essentials. Kahlo had an extensive collection of approximately 2,000 retablos, which she displayed on the walls of La Casa Azul. According to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, the retablo format enabled Kahlo to "develop the limits of the purely iconic and allowed her to use narrative and allegory".

Many of Kahlo's self-portraits mimic the classic bust-length portraits that were fashionable during the colonial era, but they subverted the format by depicting their subject as less attractive than in reality. She concentrated more frequently on this format towards the end of the 1930s, thus reflecting changes in Mexican society. Increasingly disillusioned by the legacy of the revolution and struggling to cope with the effects of the Great Depression, Mexicans were abandoning the ethos of socialism for individualism. This was reflected by the "personality cults", which developed around Mexican film stars such as Dolores del Río. According to Schaefer, Kahlo's "mask-like self-portraits echo the contemporaneous fascination with the cinematic close-up of feminine beauty, as well as the mystique of female otherness expressed in film noir." By always repeating the same facial features, Kahlo drew from the depiction of goddesses and saints in Indigenous and Catholic cultures.

Out of specific Mexican folk artists, Kahlo was especially influenced by Hermenegildo Bustos, whose works portrayed Mexican culture and peasant life, and José Guadalupe Posada, who depicted accidents and crime in satiric manner. She also derived inspiration from the works of Hieronymus Bosch, whom she called a "man of genius", and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose focus on peasant life was similar to her own interest in the Mexican people. Another influence was the poet Rosario Castellanos, whose poems often chronicle a woman's lot in the patriarchal Mexican society, a concern with the female body, and tell stories of immense physical and emotional pain.

Symbolism and iconography

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940), Harry Ransom Center

Kahlo's paintings often feature root imagery, with roots growing out of her body to tie her to the ground. This reflects in a positive sense the theme of personal growth; in a negative sense of being trapped in a particular place, time and situation; and in an ambiguous sense of how memories of the past influence the present for good and/or ill. In My Grandparents and I, Kahlo painted herself as a ten-year old, holding a ribbon that grows from an ancient tree that bears the portraits of her grandparents and other ancestors while her left foot is a tree trunk growing out of the ground, reflecting Kahlo's view of humanity's unity with the earth and her own sense of unity with Mexico. In Kahlo's paintings, trees serve as symbols of hope, of strength and of a continuity that transcends generations. Additionally, hair features as a symbol of growth and of the feminine in Kahlo's paintings and in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo painted herself wearing a man's suit and shorn of her long hair, which she had just cut off. Kahlo holds the scissors with one hand menacingly close to her genitals, which can be interpreted as a threat to Rivera – whose frequent unfaithfulness infuriated her – and/or a threat to harm her own body like she has attacked her own hair, a sign of the way that women often project their fury against others onto themselves. Moreover, the picture reflects Kahlo's frustration not only with Rivera, but also her unease with the patriarchal values of Mexico as the scissors symbolize a malevolent sense of masculinity that threatens to "cut up" women, both metaphorically and literally. In Mexico, the traditional Spanish values of machismo were widely embraced, but Kahlo was always uncomfortable with machismo.

As she suffered for the rest of her life from the bus accident in her youth, Kahlo spent much of her life in hospitals and undergoing surgery, much of it performed by quacks who Kahlo believed could restore her back to where she had been before the accident. Many of Kahlo's paintings are concerned with medical imagery, which is presented in terms of pain and hurt, featuring Kahlo bleeding and displaying her open wounds. Many of Kahlo's medical paintings, especially dealing with childbirth and miscarriage, have a strong sense of guilt, of a sense of living one's life at the expense of another who has died so one might live.

Although Kahlo featured herself and events from her life in her paintings, they were often ambiguous in meaning. She did not use them only to show her subjective experience but to raise questions about Mexican society and the construction of identity within it, particularly gender, race, and social class. Historian Liza Bakewell has stated that Kahlo "recognized the conflicts brought on by revolutionary ideology":

What was it to be a Mexican? – modern, yet pre-Columbian; young, yet old; anti-Catholic yet Catholic; Western, yet New World; developing, yet underdeveloped; independent, yet colonized; mestizo, yet not Spanish nor Indian.

To explore these questions through her art, Kahlo developed a complex iconography, extensively employing pre-Columbian and Christian symbols and mythology in her paintings. In most of her self-portraits, she depicts her face as mask-like, but surrounded by visual cues which allow the viewer to decipher deeper meanings for it. Aztec mythology features heavily in Kahlo's paintings in symbols including monkeys, skeletons, skulls, blood, and hearts; often, these symbols referred to the myths of Coatlicue, Quetzalcoatl, and Xolotl. Other central elements that Kahlo derived from Aztec mythology were hybridity and dualism. Many of her paintings depict opposites: life and death, pre-modernity and modernity, Mexican and European, male and female.

In addition to Aztec legends, Kahlo frequently depicted two central female figures from Mexican folklore in her paintings: La Llorona and La Malinche as interlinked to the hard situations, the suffering, misfortune or judgement, as being calamitous, wretched or being "de la chingada". For example, when she painted herself following her miscarriage in Detroit in Henry Ford Hospital (1932), she shows herself as weeping, with dishevelled hair and an exposed heart, which are all considered part of the appearance of La Llorona, a woman who murdered her children. The painting was traditionally interpreted as simply a depiction of Kahlo's grief and pain over her failed pregnancies. But with the interpretation of the symbols in the painting and the information of Kahlo's actual views towards motherhood from her correspondence, the painting has been seen as depicting the unconventional and taboo choice of a woman remaining childless in Mexican society.

Kahlo often featured her own body in her paintings, presenting it in varying states and disguises: as wounded, broken, as a child, or clothed in different outfits, such as the Tehuana costume, a man's suit, or a European dress. She used her body as a metaphor to explore questions on societal roles. Her paintings often depicted the female body in an unconventional manner, such as during miscarriages, and childbirth or cross-dressing. In depicting the female body in graphic manner, Kahlo positioned the viewer in the role of the voyeur, "making it virtually impossible for a viewer not to assume a consciously held position in response".

According to Nancy Cooey, Kahlo made herself through her paintings into "the main character of her own mythology, as a woman, as a Mexican, and as a suffering person ... She knew how to convert each into a symbol or sign capable of expressing the enormous spiritual resistance of humanity and its splendid sexuality". Similarly, Nancy Deffebach has stated that Kahlo "created herself as a subject who was female, Mexican, modern, and powerful", and who diverged from the usual dichotomy of roles of mother/whore allowed to women in Mexican society. Due to her gender and divergence from the muralist tradition, Kahlo's paintings were treated as less political and more naïve and subjective than those of her male counterparts up until the late 1980s. According to art historian Joan Borsa,

the critical reception of her exploration of subjectivity and personal history has all too frequently denied or de-emphasized the politics involved in examining one's own location, inheritances and social conditions ... Critical responses continue to gloss over Kahlo's reworking of the personal, ignoring or minimizing her interrogation of sexuality, sexual difference, marginality, cultural identity, female subjectivity, politics and power.

Personal life

1907–1924: Family and childhood

Kahlo (on the right) and her sisters Cristina, Matilde, and Adriana, photographed by their father, 1916

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City. Kahlo stated that she was born at the family home, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), but according to the official birth registry, the birth took place at the nearby home of her maternal grandmother. Kahlo's parents were photographer Guillermo Kahlo (1871–1941) and Matilde Calderón y González (1876–1932), and they were thirty-six and thirty, respectively, when they had her. Originally from Germany, Guillermo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891, after epilepsy caused by an accident ended his university studies. Although Kahlo said her father was Jewish and her paternal grandparents were Jews from the city of Arad, this claim was challenged in 2006 by a pair of German genealogists who found he was instead a Lutheran. Matilde was born in Oaxaca to an Indigenous father and a mother of Spanish descent. In addition to Kahlo, the marriage produced daughters Matilde (c. 1898–1951), Adriana (c. 1902–1968), and Cristina (c. 1908–1964). She had two half-sisters from Guillermo's first marriage, María Luisa and Margarita, but they were raised in a convent.

Kahlo later described the atmosphere in her childhood home as often "very, very sad". Both parents were often sick, and their marriage was devoid of love. Her relationship with her mother, Matilde, was extremely tense. Kahlo described her mother as "kind, active and intelligent, but also calculating, cruel and fanatically religious". Her father Guillermo's photography business suffered greatly during the Mexican Revolution, as the overthrown government had commissioned works from him, and the long civil war limited the number of private clients.

When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which eventually made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than the left. The illness forced her to be isolated from her peers for months, and she was bullied. While the experience made her reclusive, it made her Guillermo's favorite due to their shared experience of living with disability. Kahlo credited him for making her childhood "marvelous ... he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems." He taught her about literature, nature, and philosophy, and encouraged her to play sports to regain her strength, despite the fact that most physical exercise was seen as unsuitable for girls. He also taught her photography, and she began to help him retouch, develop, and color photographs.

Due to polio, Kahlo began school later than her peers. Along with her younger sister Cristina, she attended the local kindergarten and primary school in Coyoacán and was homeschooled for the fifth and sixth grades. While Cristina followed their sisters into a convent school, Kahlo was enrolled in a German school due to their father's wishes. She was soon expelled for disobedience and was sent to a vocational teachers school. Her stay at the school was brief, as she was sexually abused by a female teacher.

In 1922, Kahlo was accepted to the elite National Preparatory School, where she focused on natural sciences with the aim of becoming a physician. The institution had only recently begun admitting women, with only 35 girls out of 2,000 students. She performed well academically, was a voracious reader, and became "deeply immersed and seriously committed to Mexican culture, political activism and issues of social justice". The school promoted indigenismo, a new sense of Mexican identity that took pride in the country's Indigenous heritage and sought to rid itself of the colonial mindset of Europe as superior to Mexico. Particularly influential to Kahlo at this time were nine of her schoolmates, with whom she formed an informal group called the "Cachuchas" – many of them would become leading figures of the Mexican intellectual elite. They were rebellious and against everything conservative and pulled pranks, staged plays, and debated philosophy and Russian classics. To mask the fact that she was older and to declare herself a "daughter of the revolution", she began saying that she had been born on 7 July 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, which she continued throughout her life. She fell in love with Alejandro Gomez Arias, the leader of the group and her first love. Her parents did not approve of the relationship. Arias and Kahlo were often separated from each other, due to the political instability and violence of the period, so they exchanged passionate love letters.

1925–1930: Bus accident and marriage to Diego Rivera

Kahlo photographed by her father in 1926

On 17 September 1925, Kahlo and her boyfriend, Arias, were on their way home from school. They boarded one bus, but they got off the bus to look for an umbrella that Kahlo had left behind. They then boarded a second bus, which was crowded, and they sat in the back. The driver attempted to pass an oncoming electric streetcar. The streetcar crashed into the side of the wooden bus, dragging it a few feet. Several passengers were killed in the accident. While Arias suffered minor injuries, Frida was impaled with an iron handrail that went through her pelvis. She later described the injury as "the way a sword pierces a bull". The handrail was removed by Arias and others, which was incredibly painful for Kahlo.

Kahlo suffered many injuries: her pelvic bone had been fractured, her abdomen and uterus had been punctured by the rail, her spine was broken in three places, her right leg was broken in eleven places, her right foot was crushed and dislocated, her collarbone was broken, and her shoulder was dislocated. She spent a month in hospital and two months recovering at home before being able to return to work. As she continued to experience fatigue and back pain, her doctors ordered X-rays, which revealed that the accident had also displaced three vertebrae. As treatment she had to wear a plaster corset which confined her to bed rest for the better part of three months.

The accident ended Kahlo's dreams of becoming a physician and caused her pain and illness for the rest of her life; her friend Andrés Henestrosa stated that Kahlo "lived dying". Kahlo's bed rest was over by late 1927, and she began socializing with her old schoolfriends, who were now at university and involved in student politics. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and was introduced to a circle of political activists and artists, including the exiled Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella and the Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti.

At one of Modotti's parties in June 1928, Kahlo was introduced to Diego Rivera. They had met briefly in 1922 when he was painting a mural at her school. Shortly after their introduction in 1928, Kahlo asked him to judge whether her paintings showed enough talent for her to pursue a career as an artist. Rivera recalled being impressed by her works, stating that they showed "an unusual energy of expression, precise delineation of character, and true severity ... They had a fundamental plastic honesty, and an artistic personality of their own ... It was obvious to me that this girl was an authentic artist".

Kahlo with husband Diego Rivera in 1932

Kahlo soon began a relationship with Rivera, who was 21 years her senior and had two common-law wives. Kahlo and Rivera were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall of Coyoacán on 21 August 1929. Her mother opposed the marriage, and both parents referred to it as a "marriage between an elephant and a dove", referring to the couple's differences in size; Rivera was tall and overweight while Kahlo was petite and fragile. Regardless, her father approved of Rivera, who was wealthy and therefore able to support Kahlo, who could not work and had to receive expensive medical treatment. The wedding was reported by the Mexican and international press, and the marriage was subject to constant media attention in Mexico in the following years, with articles referring to the couple as simply "Diego and Frida".

Soon after the marriage, in late 1929, Kahlo and Rivera moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos, where he had been commissioned to paint murals for the Palace of Cortés. Around the same time, she resigned her membership of the PCM in support of Rivera, who had been expelled shortly before the marriage for his support of the leftist opposition movement within the Third International.

During the civil war Morelos had seen some of the heaviest fighting, and life in the Spanish-style city of Cuernavaca sharpened Kahlo's sense of a Mexican identity and history. Similar to many other Mexican women artists and intellectuals at the time, Kahlo began wearing traditional Indigenous Mexican peasant clothing to emphasize her mestiza ancestry: long and colorful skirts, huipils and rebozos, elaborate headdresses and masses of jewelry. She especially favored the dress of women from the allegedly matriarchal society of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, who had come to represent "an authentic and indigenous Mexican cultural heritage" in post-revolutionary Mexico. The Tehuana outfit allowed Kahlo to express her feminist and anti-colonialist ideals.

1931–1933: Travels in the United States

Frida photographed in 1932 by her father, Guillermo

After Rivera had completed the commission in Cuernavaca in late 1930, he and Kahlo moved to San Francisco, where he painted murals for the Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. The couple was "feted, lionized, [and] spoiled" by influential collectors and clients during their stay in the city. Her long love affair with Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray most likely began around this time.

Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico for the summer of 1931, and in the fall traveled to New York City for the opening of Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In April 1932, they headed to Detroit, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. By this time, Kahlo had become bolder in her interactions with the press, impressing journalists with her fluency in English and stating on her arrival to the city that she was the greater artist of the two of them.

"Of course he [Rivera] does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist"

— Frida Kahlo in interview with the Detroit News, 2 February 1933.

The year spent in Detroit was a difficult time for Kahlo. Although she had enjoyed visiting San Francisco and New York City, she disliked aspects of American society, which she regarded as colonialist, as well as most Americans, whom she found "boring". She disliked having to socialize with capitalists such as Henry and Edsel Ford, and was angered that many of the hotels in Detroit refused to accept Jewish guests. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that "although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States", she felt "a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger." Kahlo's time in Detroit was also complicated by a pregnancy. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion, but the medication used was ineffective. Kahlo was deeply ambivalent about having a child and had already undergone an abortion earlier in her marriage to Rivera. Following the failed abortion, she reluctantly agreed to continue with the pregnancy, but miscarried in July, which caused a serious hemorrhage that required her being hospitalized for two weeks. Less than three months later, her mother died from complications of surgery in Mexico.

External images
Henry Ford Hospital (1932)
Self-portrait on the Border of Mexico and the United States (1932)
My Dress Hangs There (1933)
My Birth (1932)

Kahlo and Rivera returned to New York in March 1933, for he had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Rockefeller Center. During this time, she only worked on one painting, My Dress Hangs There (1933). She also gave further interviews to the American press. In May, Rivera was fired from the Rockefeller Center project and was instead hired to paint a mural for the New Workers School. Although Rivera wished to continue their stay in the United States, Kahlo was homesick, and they returned to Mexico soon after the mural's unveiling in December 1933.

1934–1949: La Casa Azul and declining health

Kahlo and Rivera's houses in San Ángel. They lived there from 1934 until their divorce in 1939, after which it became his studio.

Back in Mexico City, Kahlo and Rivera moved into a new house in the wealthy neighborhood of San Ángel. Commissioned from Le Corbusier's student Juan O'Gorman, it consisted of two sections joined by a bridge; Kahlo's was painted blue and Rivera's pink and white. The bohemian residence became an important meeting place for artists and political activists from Mexico and abroad.

Kahlo once again experienced health problems – undergoing an appendectomy, two abortions, and the amputation of gangrenous toes – and her marriage to Rivera had become strained. He was not happy to be back in Mexico and blamed Kahlo for their return. While he had been unfaithful to her before, he now embarked on an affair with her younger sister Cristina, which deeply hurt Kahlo's feelings. After discovering the affair in early 1935, she moved to an apartment in central Mexico City and considered divorcing him. She also had an affair of her own with American artist Isamu Noguchi.

Kahlo was reconciled with Rivera and Cristina later in 1935 and moved back to San Ángel. She became a loving aunt to Cristina's children, Isolda and Antonio. Despite the reconciliation, both Rivera and Kahlo continued their infidelities. She also resumed her political activities in 1936, joining the Fourth International and becoming a founding member of a solidarity committee to provide aid to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. She and Rivera successfully petitioned the Mexican government to grant asylum to former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky and offered La Casa Azul for him and his wife Natalia Sedova as a residence. The couple lived there from January 1937 until April 1939, with Kahlo and Trotsky not only becoming good friends but also having a brief affair. Kahlo painted Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky in 1937 during their time together in Mexico City, including a written inscription to Trotsky in the painting on a letter that Kahlo's figure holds.

External images
A Few Small Nips (1935)
My Nurse and I (1937)
Four Inhabitants of Mexico (1938)

1937 photograph by Toni Frissell, from a fashion shoot for Vogue

After opening an exhibition in Paris, Kahlo sailed back to New York. She was eager to be reunited with Muray, but he decided to end their affair, as he had met another woman whom he was planning to marry. Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City, where Rivera requested a divorce from her. The exact reasons for his decision are unknown, but he stated publicly that it was merely a "matter of legal convenience in the style of modern times ... there are no sentimental, artistic, or economic reasons". According to their friends, the divorce was mainly caused by their mutual infidelities. He and Kahlo were granted a divorce in November 1939, but remained friendly; she continued to manage his finances and correspondence.

La Casa Azul, Kahlo's childhood home and residence from 1939 until her death in 1954

The garden at La Casa Azul

Following her separation from Rivera, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul and, determined to earn her own living, began another productive period as an artist, inspired by her experiences abroad. Encouraged by the recognition she was gaining, she moved from using the small and more intimate tin sheets she had used since 1932 to large canvases, as they were easier to exhibit. She also adopted a more sophisticated technique, limited the graphic details, and began to produce more quarter-length portraits, which were easier to sell. She painted several of her most famous pieces during this period, such as The Two Fridas (1939), Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), The Wounded Table (1940), and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940). Three exhibitions featured her works in 1940: the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art in MoMA in New York.

On 21 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacán, where he had continued to live after leaving La Casa Azul. Kahlo was briefly suspected of being involved, as she knew the murderer, and was arrested and held for two days with her sister Cristina. The following month, Kahlo traveled to San Francisco for medical treatment for back pain and a fungal infection on her hand. Her continuously fragile health had increasingly declined since her divorce and was exacerbated by her heavy consumption of alcohol.

Rivera was also in San Francisco after he fled Mexico City following Trotsky's murder and accepted a commission. Although Kahlo had a relationship with art dealer Heinz Berggruen during her visit to San Francisco, she and Rivera were reconciled. They remarried in a simple civil ceremony on 8 December 1940. Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico soon after their wedding. The union was less turbulent than before for its first five years. Both were more independent, and while La Casa Azul was their primary residence, Rivera retained the San Ángel house for use as his studio and second apartment. Both continued having extramarital affairs; Kahlo, being bisexual, had affairs with both men and women, with evidence suggesting her male lovers were more important to Kahlo than her female lovers.

Kahlo (centre), Nayantara Sahgal (right) and Rita Dar at Casa Azul in 1947

Despite the medical treatment she had received in San Francisco, Kahlo's health problems continued throughout the 1940s. Due to her spinal problems, she wore twenty-eight separate supportive corsets, varying from steel and leather to plaster, between 1940 and 1954. She experienced pain in her legs, the infection on her hand had become chronic, and she was also treated for syphilis. The death of her father in April 1941 plunged her into a depression. Her ill health made her increasingly confined to La Casa Azul, which became the center of her world. She enjoyed taking care of the house and its garden, and was kept company by friends, servants, and various pets, including spider monkeys, Xoloitzcuintlis, and parrots.

While Kahlo was gaining recognition in her home country, her health continued to decline. By the mid-1940s, her back had worsened to the point that she could no longer sit or stand continuously. In June 1945, she traveled to New York for an operation which fused a bone graft and a steel support to her spine to straighten it. The difficult operation was a failure. According to biographer Hayden Herrera, Kahlo also sabotaged her recovery by not resting as required and by once physically re-opening her wounds in a fit of anger. Her paintings from this period, such as The Broken Column (1944), Without Hope (1945), Tree of Hope, Stand Fast (1946), and The Wounded Deer (1946), reflect her declining health.

1950–1954: Last years and death

Kahlo's wheelchair and adjustable easel in La Casa Azul, with one of her still lifes from her final years

In 1950, Kahlo spent most of the year in Hospital ABC in Mexico City, where she underwent a new bone graft surgery on her spine. It caused a difficult infection and necessitated several follow-up surgeries. After being discharged, she was mostly confined to La Casa Azul, using a wheelchair and crutches to be ambulatory. During these final years of her life, Kahlo dedicated her time to political causes to the extent that her health allowed. She had rejoined the Mexican Communist Party in 1948 and campaigned for peace, for example, by collecting signatures for the Stockholm Appeal.

Kahlo's right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene in August 1953. She became severely depressed and anxious, and her dependence on painkillers escalated. When Rivera began yet another affair, she attempted suicide by overdose. She wrote in her diary in February 1954, "They amputated my leg six months ago, they have given me centuries of torture and at moments I almost lost my reason. I keep on wanting to kill myself. Diego is what keeps me from it, through my vain idea that he would miss me. ... But never in my life have I suffered more. I will wait a while..."

Kahlo's death mask on her bed in La Casa Azul

In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden with bronchopneumonia, though she made a public appearance on 2 July 1954, participating with Rivera in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. She seemed to anticipate her death, as she spoke about it to visitors and drew skeletons and angels in her diary. The last drawing was a black angel, which biographer Hayden Herrera interprets as the Angel of Death. It was accompanied by the last words she wrote, "I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return – Frida" ("Espero Alegre la Salida – y Espero no Volver jamás").

The demonstration worsened her illness, and on the night of 12 July 1954, Kahlo had a high fever and was in extreme pain. At approximately 6 a.m. on 13 July 1954, her nurse found her dead in her bed. Kahlo was 47 years old. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism, although no autopsy was performed. Herrera has argued that Kahlo, in fact, committed suicide. The nurse, who counted Kahlo's painkillers to monitor her drug use, stated that Kahlo had taken an overdose the night she died. She had been prescribed a maximum dose of seven pills but had taken eleven. She had also given Rivera a wedding anniversary present that evening, over a month in advance.

On the evening of 13 July, Kahlo's body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where it lay in state under a Communist flag. The following day, it was carried to the Panteón Civil de Dolores, where friends and family attended an informal funeral ceremony. Hundreds of admirers stood outside. In accordance with her wishes, Kahlo was cremated. Rivera, who stated that her death was "the most tragic day of my life", died three years later, in 1957. Kahlo's ashes are displayed in a pre-Columbian urn at La Casa Azul, which opened as a museum in 1958.

Posthumous recognition and "Fridamania"

"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."

 – Art historian Oriana Baddeley on Kahlo

The Tate Modern considers Kahlo "one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century". Art historian Elizabeth Bakewell, has stated that Kahlo is "one of Mexico's most important twentieth-century figures". Kahlo's reputation as an artist developed late in her life and grew even further posthumously, as during her lifetime she was primarily known as the wife of Diego Rivera and as an eccentric personality among the international cultural elite. She gradually gained more recognition in the late 1970s when feminist scholars began to question the exclusion of female and non-Western artists from the art historical canon and the Chicano Movement lifted her as one of their icons. The first two books about Kahlo were published in Mexico by Teresa del Conde and Raquel Tibol in 1976 and 1977, respectively, and, in 1977, The Tree of Hope Stands Firm (1944) became the first Kahlo painting to be sold in an auction, netting $19,000 at Sotheby's. These milestones were followed by the first two retrospectives staged on Kahlo's oeuvre in 1978, one at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and another at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Two events were instrumental in raising interest in her life and art for the general public outside Mexico. The first was a joint retrospective of her paintings and Tina Modotti's photographs at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which was curated and organized by Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey. It opened in May 1982, and later traveled to Sweden, Germany, the United States, and Mexico. The second was the publication of art historian Hayden Herrera's international bestseller Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo in 1983.

By 1984, Kahlo's reputation as an artist had grown to such extent that Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage, prohibiting their export from the country. As a result, her paintings seldom appear in international auctions, and comprehensive retrospectives are rare. Regardless, her paintings have still broken records for Latin American art in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1990, she became the first Latin American artist to break the one-million-dollar threshold when Diego and I was auctioned by Sotheby's for $1,430,000. In 2006, Roots (1943) reached US$5.6 million, and in 2016, Two Nudes in a Forest (1939) sold for $8 million.

Kahlo has attracted popular interest to the extent that the term "Fridamania" has been coined to describe the phenomenon. She is considered "one of the most instantly recognizable artists", whose face has been "used with the same regularity, and often with a shared symbolism, as images of Che Guevara or Bob Marley". Her life and art have inspired a variety of merchandise, and her distinctive look has been appropriated by the fashion world. A Hollywood biopic, Julie Taymor's Frida, was released in 2002. Based on Herrera's biography and starring Salma Hayek (who co-produced the film) as Kahlo, it grossed US$56 million worldwide and earned six Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Makeup and Best Original Score. The 2017 Disney-Pixar animation Coco also features a fictionalized Kahlo as a supporting character, voiced by Natalia Cordova-Buckley.

Effigy of Kahlo for Day of the Dead at the Museo Frida Kahlo

Kahlo's popular appeal is seen to stem first and foremost from a fascination with her life story, especially its painful and tragic aspects. She has become an icon for several minority groups and political movements, such as feminists, the LGBTQ community, and Chicanos. Oriana Baddeley has written that Kahlo has become a signifier of non-conformity and "the archetype of a cultural minority", who is regarded simultaneously as "a victim, crippled and abused" and as "a survivor who fights back". Edward Sullivan stated that Kahlo is hailed as a hero by so many because she is "someone to validate their own struggle to find their own voice and their own public personalities". According to John Berger, Kahlo's popularity is partly due to the fact that "the sharing of pain is one of the essential preconditions for a refinding of dignity and hope" in twenty-first century society. Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of MoMA, has stated that Kahlo's posthumous success is linked to the way in which "she clicks with today's sensibilities – her psycho-obsessive concern with herself, her creation of a personal alternative world carries a voltage. Her constant remaking of her identity, her construction of a theater of the self are exactly what preoccupy such contemporary artists as Cindy Sherman or Kiki Smith and, on a more popular level, Madonna... She fits well with the odd, androgynous hormonal chemistry of our particular epoch."

Kahlo's posthumous popularity and the commercialization of her image have drawn criticism from many scholars and cultural commenters, who think that, not only have many facets of her life been mythologized, but the dramatic aspects of her biography have also overshadowed her art, producing a simplistic reading of her works in which they are reduced to literal descriptions of events in her life. According to journalist Stephanie Mencimer, Kahlo "has been embraced as a poster child for every possible politically correct cause" and

like a game of telephone, the more Kahlo's story has been told, the more it has been distorted, omitting uncomfortable details that show her to be a far more complex and flawed figure than the movies and cookbooks suggest. This elevation of the artist over the art diminishes the public understanding of Kahlo's place in history and overshadows the deeper and more disturbing truths in her work. Even more troubling, though, is that by airbrushing her biography, Kahlo's promoters have set her up for the inevitable fall so typical of women artists, that time when the contrarians will band together and take sport in shooting down her inflated image, and with it, her art."

Baddeley has compared the interest in Kahlo's life to the interest in the troubled life of Vincent van Gogh but has also stated that a crucial difference between the two is that most people associate Van Gogh with his paintings, whereas Kahlo is usually signified by an image of herself – an intriguing commentary on the way male and female artists are regarded. Similarly, Peter Wollen has compared Kahlo's cult-like following to that of Sylvia Plath, whose "unusually complex and contradictory art" has been overshadowed by simplified focus on her life.

Commemorations and characterizations

La Casa Azul, which has been open to the public since 1958 as a museum dedicated to Frida Kahlo

Kahlo's legacy has been commemorated in several ways. La Casa Azul, her home in Coyoacán, was opened as a museum in 1958, and has become one of the most popular museums in Mexico City, with approximately 25,000 visitors monthly. The city dedicated a park, Parque Frida Kahlo, to her in Coyoacán in 1985. The park features a bronze statue of Kahlo. In the United States, she became the first Hispanic woman to be honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 2001, and was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display in Chicago that celebrates LGBT history and people, in 2012.

Kahlo received several commemorations on the centenary of her birth in 2007, and some on the centenary of the birthyear she attested to, 2010. These included the Bank of Mexico releasing a new MXN$ 500-peso note, featuring Kahlo's painting titled Love's Embrace of the Universe, Earth, (Mexico), I, Diego, and Mr. Xólotl (1949) on the reverse of the note and Diego Rivera on the front. The largest retrospective of her works at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes attracted approximately 75,000 visitors.

In addition to other tributes, Kahlo's life and art have inspired artists in various fields. In 1984, Paul Leduc released a biopic titled Frida, naturaleza viva, starring Ofelia Medina as Kahlo. She is the protagonist of three fictional novels, Barbara Mujica's Frida (2001), Slavenka Drakulic's Frida's Bed (2008), and Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna (2009). In 1994, American jazz flautist and composer James Newton released an album titled Suite for Frida Kahlo. Scottish singer/songwriter, Michael Marra, wrote a song in homage to Kahlo entitled Frida Kahlo's Visit to the Taybridge Bar. In 2017, author Monica Brown and illustrator John Parra published a children's book on Kahlo, Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos, which focuses primarily on the animals and pets in Kahlo's life and art. In the visual arts, Kahlo's influence has reached wide and far: In 1996, and again in 2005, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC coordinated an "Homage to Frida Kahlo" exhibition which showcased Kahlo-related artwork by artists from all over the world in Washington's Fraser Gallery. Additionally, notable artists such as Marina Abramovic, Alana Archer, Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, Yasumasa Morimura, Cris Melo, Rupert Garcia, and others have used or appropriated Kahlo's imagery into their own works.

Kahlo has also been the subject of several stage performances. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa choreographed a one-act ballet titled Broken Wings for the English National Ballet, which debuted in 2016, Tamara Rojo originated Kahlo in the ballet. Dutch National Ballet then commissioned Lopez Ochoa to create a full-length version of the ballet, Frida, which premiered in 2020, with Maia Makhateli as Kahlo. She also inspired three operas: Robert Xavier Rodriguez's Frida, which premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia in 1991; Kalevi Aho's Frida y Diego, which premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in Helsinki, Finland in 2014; and Gabriela Lena Frank's El último sueño de Frida y Diego, which premiered at the San Diego Opera in 2022.

Kahlo was the main character in several plays, including Dolores C. Sendler's Goodbye, My Friduchita (1999), Robert Lepage and Sophie Faucher's La Casa Azul (2002), Humberto Robles' Frida Kahlo: Viva la vida! (2009), and Rita Ortez Provost's Tree of Hope (2014).

In 2018, Mattel unveiled seventeen new Barbie dolls in celebration of International Women's Day, including one of Kahlo. Critics objected to the doll's slim waist and noticeably missing unibrow.

In 2014 Kahlo was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".

In 2018, San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to rename Phelan Avenue to Frida Kahlo Way. Frida Kahlo Way is the home of City College of San Francisco and Archbishop Riordan High School.

In 2019, Frida was featured on a mural painted by Rafael Blanco in downtown Reno, Nevada.

In 2019, Frida's “Fantasmones Siniestros” (“Sinister Ghosts”) was burned to ashes, publicizing an Ethereum NFT.

In 2022, as part of a collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Swatch released a watch based on The Frame.

Solo exhibitions

• 4 January 2022–present: Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney. Audio visual exhibition created by the Frida Kahlo Corporation.
• 8 February–12 May 2019: Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the Brooklyn Museum. This was the largest U.S. exhibition in a decade devoted solely to the painter and the only U.S. show to feature her Tehuana clothing, hand-painted corsets and other never-before-seen items that had been locked away after the artist's death and rediscovered in 2004.
• 16 June–18 November 2018: Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The basis for the later Brooklyn Museum exhibit.
• 3 February–30 April 2016: Frida Kahlo: Paintings and Graphic Art From Mexican Collections at the Faberge Museum, St. Petersburg. Russia's first retrospective of Kahlo's work.
• 27 October 2007–20 January 2008: Frida Kahlo an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 20 February–18 May 2008; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 16 June–28 September 2008.
• 1–15 November 1938: Frida's first solo exhibit and New York debut at the Museum of Modern Art. Georgia O'Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi, and other prominent American artists attended the opening; approximately half of the paintings were sold.

Gallery

• 
  Charola de amapolas, 1924, the first painting from Frida Kahlo
• 
  Portrait of Adriana, 1924
• 
  Naturaleza muerta, 1925
• 
  Paisaje urbano, 1925
• 
  Portrait of Alicia Galant, 1927
• 
  La Adelita, Pancho Villa, and Frida, 1927
• 
  Retrato de Miguel N. Lira, 1927
• 
  Si Adelita o Los Cachuchas, 1927
• 
  Portrait of Agustín Olmedo, 1927 or 1928
• 
  Retrato de Alejandro Gómez Arias, 1928
• 
  Dos mujeres, 1928
• 
  Retrato de Cristina, mi hermana, 1928
• 
  Niña con pato, 1928
• 
  Hucha y caballo negro, 1928
• 
  Niña con collar, 1929
• 
  Retrato de una niña, 1929
• 
  Retrato de una niña con lazo en la cintura, 1929
• 
  Retrato de Lupe Marín, 1929
• 
  Retrato de Miriam Penansky, 1929
• 
  La niña Virginia, 1929
• 
  Retrato de Isolda Pinedo, 1929
• 
  El tiempo vuela, 1929
• 
  The bus, 1929

See also

• Anahuacalli Museum
• List of paintings by Frida Kahlo

References

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Albers, Patricia (1999). Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23514-4.
• Anderson, Corrine (Fall 2009). "Remembrance of an Open Wound: Frida Kahlo and Post-revolutionary Mexican Identity" (PDF). South Atlantic Review. 74 (4): 119–130. JSTOR 41337719. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2019.
• Ankori, Gannit (2002). Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-31565-7.
• Ankori, Gannit (2005). "Frida Kahlo: The Fabric of Her Art". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Ankori, Gannit (2013). Frida Kahlo. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-78023-198-3.
• Baddeley, Oriana (1991). "'Her Dress Hangs Here': De-Frocking the Kahlo Cult" (PDF). Oxford Art Journal. 14. Oxford University Press: 10–17. doi:10.1093/oxartj/14.1.10. ISSN 0142-6540. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 August 2017.
• Baddeley, Oriana (2005). "Reflecting on Kahlo: Mirrors, Masquerade and the Politics of Identification". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Bakewell, Elizabeth (1993). "Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading" (PDF). Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. XIII (3): 165–189, illustrations, 139–151. doi:10.2307/3346753. JSTOR 3346753. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 August 2017.
• Bakewell, Elizabeth (2001). "Frida Kahlo". In Werner, Michael S. (ed.). The Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico. Routledge. pp. 315–318. ISBN 978-1-57958-337-8.
• Barson, Tanya (2005). "'All Art is At Once Surface and Symbol': A Frida Kahlo Glossary". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Berger, John (2001). The Shape of a Pocket. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7475-5810-1.
• Beck, Evelyn Torton (Spring 2006). "Kahlo's World Split Open" (PDF). Feminist Studies. 32 (1): 54–81. doi:10.2307/20459065. JSTOR 20459065. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 August 2018.
• Bilek, Suzanne (2012). Great female artists of Detroit. Charleston. ISBN 978-1-60949-671-5. OCLC 806018780.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Block, Rebecca; Hoffman-Jeep, Lynda (1998–1999). "Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in "Gringolandia"" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 19 (2): 8–12. doi:10.2307/1358399. JSTOR 1358399. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 May 2016.
• Budrys, Valmantas (February 2006). "Neurological Deficits in the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo". European Neurology. 55 (1): 4–10. doi:10.1159/000091136. ISSN 0014-3022. PMID 16432301.
• Burns, Janet M.C. (February 2006). "Looking as Women: The Paintings of Suzanne Valadon, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Frida Kahlo". Atlantis. 18 (1–2): 25–46. Archived from the original on 27 February 2021. Retrieved 12 July 2018.
• Burrus, Christina (2005). "The Life of Frida Kahlo". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Burrus, Christina (2008). Frida Kahlo: 'I Paint my Reality'. 'New Horizons' series. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-30123-4.
• Castro-Sethness, María A. (2004–2005). "Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-Voto Paintings on Her Art" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 25 (2): 21–24. doi:10.2307/3566513. JSTOR 3566513. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019.
• Cooey, Paula M. (1994). Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis. Oxford University Press.
• Deffebach, Nancy (2006). "Frida Kahlo: Heroism of Private Life". In Brunk, Samuel; Fallow, Ben (eds.). Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-71481-6.
• Deffebach, Nancy (2015). María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo: Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-77242-7.
• Dexter, Emma (2005). "The Universal Dialectics of Frida Kahlo". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Friis, Ronald (March 2004). ""The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins": Frida Kahlo and Rosario Castellanos" (PDF). Hispania. 87 (1): 53–61. doi:10.2307/20062973. JSTOR 20062973. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019.
• Helland, Janice (1990–1991). "Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo's Paintings: Indigenity and Political Commitment" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 11 (5): 8–13. JSTOR 3690692. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019.
• Herrera, Hayden (2002). Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780060085896.
• Kettenmann, Andrea (2003). Kahlo. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-5983-4.
• Lindauer, Margaret A. (1999). Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. University Press of New England.
• Mahon, Alyce (2011). "The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and The Surrealist Imaginary" (PDF). Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. 5 (1–2): 33–54. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 April 2018.
• Marnham, Patrick (1998). Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22408-7.
• Pankl, Lis; Blake, Kevin (2012). "Made in Her Image: Frida Kahlo as Material Culture". Material Culture. 44 (2): 1–20. S2CID 34207297.
• Panzer, Mary (2004). "The Essential Tact of Nickolas Muray". In Heinzelman, Kurt (ed.). The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray's Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-70588-3.
• Theran, Susan (1999). Leonard's Price Index of Latin American Art at Auction. Auction Index, Inc. ISBN 978-1-349-15086-1.
• Tibol, Raquel (2005). "Pain – Love – Liberation: Frida Kahlo's Words". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.
• Udall, Sharyn (Autumn 2003). "Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 24 (2): 10–14. doi:10.2307/1358781. JSTOR 1358781. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019.
• Wollen, Peter (2004). Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art. Verso.
• Zamora, Martha (1990). Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0-87701-746-2.
• Kahlo, Frida (1995). The diary of Frida Kahlo: an intimate self-portrait. New York and Mexico: H.N. Abrams; La Vaca Independiente S.A. de C.V. pp. 295. ISBN 978-0-8109-3221-0.

External links

• Official website
• Frida Kahlo in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art
• Frida Kahlo. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: ICAA.
• "Frida Kahlo" (mp3). In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. 9 July 2015.
• Kahlo at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
• Kahlo's paintings at the Art History Archive
• Kahlo's painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• This could be Kahlo's voice according to the Department of Culture in Mexico
• The Frida Kahlo papers at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

fr

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo en 1932.

Biographie

Naissance	6 juillet 1907 Coyoacán (Mexique)
Décès	13 juillet 1954 (à 47 ans) Coyoacán (Mexique)
Sépulture	Coyoacán
Nom de naissance	Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo
Nationalité	mexicaine
Activité	Peintre
Père	Guillermo Kahlo
Fratrie	Cristina Kahlo y Calderón (en) (sœur cadette)
Conjoints	Diego Rivera (de 1929 à 1939) Diego Rivera (de 1940 à 1954)

Autres informations

Propriétaire de	Autoportrait avec un singe
Parti politique	Parti communiste mexicain (1927-1951)
Mouvements	Surréalisme, réalisme magique
Représentée par	Artists Rights Society
Genres artistiques	Peinture de portrait, autoportrait, portrait

Œuvres principales

Still Life: Pitahayas (d), Les Deux Fridas

Signature

Plaque commémorative

Frida Kahlo est une artiste peintre mexicaine née le 6 juillet 1907 à Coyoacán (Mexico) et morte au même endroit le 13 juillet 1954.

Tout au long de sa vie, elle garde une santé fragile, souffrant de poliomyélite depuis l'âge de six ans puis victime d'un grave accident de bus. Elle devra subir de nombreuses interventions chirurgicales. Après son accident, elle se forme elle-même à la peinture.

En 1922, elle falsifie sa date de naissance en 7 juillet 1910, année du début de la révolution mexicaine, associant sa naissance à la fin du régime porfiriste.

Biographie

Famille

Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo naît le 6 juillet 1907 à Coyoacán (Mexico). La mère de Frida Kahlo, Matilde Calderón y González (1876-1932), est née à Mexico. Elle est la troisième fille d’Isabel González y González, issue d'une famille de généraux d'origine espagnole, et du photographe Antonio Calderón, originaire de la ville de Morelia. Illettrée, dévote, peu argentée, elle sombre dans la dépression après avoir perdu son fils à la naissance de Frida Kahlo.

Son père, Guillermo Kahlo (1871-1941), né Carl Wilhelm Kahlo à Pforzheim, dans le grand-duché de Bade, en Allemagne, n'est pas, comme le voudrait une légende répandue^{[réf. nécessaire]}, juif d'origine germano-austro-hongroise, mais un Allemand de confession luthérienne, fils du bijoutier et orfèvre Jakob Kahlo et de Henriette Kaufmann, issus de la bourgeoisie badoise. C'est à son arrivée au Mexique en 1891, à l'âge de 19 ans, qu'il modifie son prénom. Il est d'abord le photographe officiel au temps de Porfirio Díaz. Ruiné par la Révolution, il termine sa carrière comme simple photographe à Mexico.

Frida Kahlo peint en 1936 Mes Grands-Parents, mes Parents et Moi où elle raconte l’histoire de ses origines, tel un arbre généalogique. Elle a symbolisé ses grands-parents maternels mexicains par la terre, et ses grands-parents paternels allemands au moyen de l’océan. Elle est la petite fille du jardin de la « Maison bleue » où elle est née et décédée. Au-dessus figurent ses parents dans la pose de leur photo de mariage, puis ses grands-parents paternels et maternels.

C’est la troisième des quatre filles de Matilde et Guillermo Kahlo.

Enfance

La « Maison bleue ».

Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo naît dans la « Maison bleue » (la « Casa azul ») construite par ses parents en 1904, actuel musée Frida-Kahlo, au milieu d’un quartier où habite la petite bourgeoisie, dans la démarcation territoriale de l'actuelle entité fédérative de Mexico, Coyoacán, au sud de Mexico.

À l'âge de six ans, Frida Kahlo est victime d'une poliomyélite. La conséquence est que sa jambe droite s’atrophie et son pied ne grandit plus. Elle n'atteindra jamais la taille qu'elle devrait avoir. C'est ce qui lui vaudra le surnom de « Frida la coja » (Frida la boiteuse) par ses camarades de classe. Il a été supposé qu'elle souffrait de spina bifida, une malformation congénitale de la colonne vertébrale, qui pourrait également avoir affecté le développement de la jambe.

En 1922, alors âgée de 15 ans, elle quitte le cours supérieur du Colegio Alemán à Mexico et intègre la Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, considérée comme le meilleur établissement scolaire du Mexique. Frida est l'une des trente-cinq premières filles admises sur un total de 2 000 élèves. Elle s'intéresse beaucoup aux sciences naturelles et souhaite alors devenir médecin. Malgré l’intérêt qu’elle porte aux beaux-arts, qu'elle doit à son père, excellent photographe et accessoirement peintre d'aquarelles, elle n’envisage pas de se lancer dans une carrière artistique.

Le 17 septembre 1925, elle prend le bus pour rentrer après ses cours. Soudain, l’autobus sort de la route et percute un tramway. Plusieurs personnes trouvent la mort lors de l’accident ; elle est grièvement blessée. Son abdomen et sa cavité pelvienne sont transpercés par une barre de métal : ce traumatisme est responsable d'un syndrome d'Asherman et sera la cause de ses fausses couches. Cela explique également le thème de nombre de ses œuvres. Sa jambe droite est fracturée en de nombreux endroits, onze au total. Son pied droit est cassé. Le bassin, les côtes et la colonne vertébrale sont eux aussi brisés. L'épaule n'est que démise.

Elle reste alitée pendant trois mois, dont un mois à l’hôpital. Environ un an après l’accident, elle doit retourner à l’hôpital, car on remarque qu’une de ses vertèbres lombaires est fracturée. Elle est contrainte de porter durant neuf longs mois des corsets en plâtre. C’est alors qu’elle commence à peindre, déclarant :

« Je ne suis pas morte et j’ai une raison de vivre. Cette raison, c’est la peinture. »

Pour l'aider, sa mère lui offre une boîte de couleurs, lui fait fabriquer un chevalet spécial et fait installer un baldaquin au-dessus de son lit avec un miroir pour ciel. Elle peut ainsi se servir de son reflet comme modèle, ce qui est probablement l'élément déclencheur de la longue série d'autoportraits qu'elle réalisera. En effet sur 143 tableaux, 55 relèvent de ce genre. Elle doit encore subir de nombreuses interventions chirurgicales qui l'obligent à rester couchée sur un lit d'hôpital.

Vie et carrière artistique

Frida Kahlo et Diego Rivera en 1932.

En 1928, son amie la photographe Tina Modotti l'incite à s’inscrire au Parti communiste mexicain. Elle s’intéresse particulièrement à l’émancipation des femmes dans la société mexicaine, encore très patriarcale. Elle décide ainsi dès son jeune âge qu'elle ne veut pas suivre le même parcours que la plupart des femmes mexicaines. Elle a un désir de voyages, d'études. Elle veut la liberté et le plaisir.

Diego Rivera

Cette même année, Frida Kahlo rencontre pour la première fois Diego Rivera (1886-1957) dans l'auditorium de son école (celui-ci y faisait une peinture murale).

Elle admire beaucoup Rivera et lui demande son avis au sujet de ses propres tableaux. Le muraliste est impressionné par les réalisations de la jeune femme :

« Les toiles révélaient une extraordinaire force d’expression, une description précise des caractères et un réel sérieux. Elles possédaient une sincérité plastique fondamentale et une personnalité artistique propre. Elles véhiculaient une sensualité vitale encore enrichie par une faculté d’observation impitoyable, quoique sensible. Pour moi, il était manifeste que cette jeune fille était une véritable artiste^{[réf. nécessaire]}. »

Frida Kahlo épouse Diego Rivera, de 21 ans son aîné, le 21 août 1929. Ils s’installent à Mexico dans un atelier, mais Diego ne tarde pas à la tromper. Elle-même s'engage dans de nombreuses relations extraconjugales ; bisexuelle, elle séduit de nombreux hommes et femmes. Bien que compliquée, leur relation est véritablement passionnée.

Vie aux États-Unis

En novembre 1930, ils emménagent à San Francisco car Rivera a été chargé de réaliser des peintures murales pour le San Francisco Stock Exchange et pour la California School of Fine Art, l’actuel San Francisco Art Institute. Kahlo y fait la connaissance d’artistes, de commanditaires et de mécènes, dont Albert Bender (en). Celui-ci est parvenu à obtenir une autorisation d’entrée aux États-Unis pour Diego Rivera. En remerciement, Frida Kahlo réalise en 1931 le portrait double Frida et Diego Rivera, inspiré de leur photo de mariage.

En 1930, elle subit sa première fausse couche. Après l'accident, on lui avait pourtant dit qu'elle ne pourrait jamais avoir d’enfant à cause de son bassin, fracturé à trois endroits, qui empêcherait une position normale pour le fœtus et un accouchement sans problème. Lors de leur séjour à Détroit, elle est de nouveau enceinte. Au début de cette deuxième grossesse, Frida Kahlo voit un médecin à l'hôpital Henry-Ford qui lui conseille de garder l'enfant au lieu d'interrompre sa grossesse. Elle pourrait accoucher par césarienne. Malgré le pronostic du docteur, elle fait une autre fausse couche le 4 juillet 1932. Elle reflète ses sentiments, son impression de solitude et d’abandon après la perte de l’enfant dans le tableau L'Hôpital Henry Ford ou Le Lit volant, dans lequel elle peint un fœtus masculin surdimensionné en position embryonnaire, l’enfant perdu lors de la fausse couche, le « petit Diego » qu’elle avait tant espéré porter jusqu’à terme.

Après ce pénible épisode, Frida Kahlo peint des tableaux qui traduisent sa lassitude et son dégoût des États-Unis et des Américains alors que son mari, lui, reste fasciné par ce pays et ne veut pas le quitter. Elle exprime son point de vue sur le pays des « gringos » dans Autoportrait à la frontière du Mexique et des États-Unis et dans Ma robe est suspendue là-bas. Malgré son admiration pour le progrès industriel des États-Unis, la nationaliste mexicaine se sent mal à l’aise de l'autre côté du Río Bravo. Entre-temps, sa mère meurt le 15 septembre 1932.

Dans les années 1930, après l'arrivée au pouvoir des nazis en Allemagne, elle écrit son prénom « Frieda », de Frieden, la paix en allemand.

Retour au Mexique

En décembre 1933, Diego Rivera consent à rentrer au Mexique. Ils s’installent dans une maison à San Ángel, construite par un ami architecte et peintre, Juan O’Gorman. Des difficultés de santé obligent Frida Kahlo à retourner à l’hôpital où elle doit subir un nouveau curetage.

En 1935, elle ne réalise que deux tableaux dont Quelques petites piqûres, qui évoque un meurtre par jalousie perpétré sur une femme par un homme. Frida découvre que son mari a une liaison avec sa sœur, Cristina Kahlo. Profondément blessée, elle quitte le foyer pour un appartement au centre de Mexico. Pendant cette période, elle a plusieurs relations extraconjugales, notamment avec des femmes. Au milieu de 1935, elle part avec deux amies pour New York. Elle ne revient au Mexique qu'après la fin de la liaison entre sa sœur et son mari, à la fin de l'année.

Léon Trotski

Le 9 janvier 1937, le président Lázaro Cárdenas del Río accorde, conformément à ses pouvoirs constitutionnels, l'asile politique à Léon Trotski. Sa femme et lui sont accueillis par Frida et Diego, à la Casa azul (la « Maison bleue »). Une brève liaison que l'on dit passionnée se développe entre Trotski et Frida Kahlo. À la fin de cette aventure, l'artiste lui offre « affectueusement » pour son anniversaire, le 7 novembre 1937, Autoportrait dédié à Léon Trotski ou Entre les rideaux où elle se montre sous son meilleur jour avec une dédicace :

« Pour Léon Trotski, je dédicace cette peinture avec tout mon amour… »

André Breton

En septembre 1938, André Breton est envoyé à Mexico par le ministère des Affaires étrangères français pour y prononcer une série de conférences sur l'état de la poésie et de la peinture en Europe. Avec sa femme Jacqueline Lamba, Breton est accueilli à Mexico par le couple Kahlo-Rivera.

Breton, subjugué par Frida Kahlo et admiratif de sa peinture, écrit : « L'art de Frida Kahlo de Rivera est un ruban autour d'une bombe. »

Alors que Breton l'exaspère, Kahlo noue une véritable et profonde amitié avec sa femme, Jacqueline Lamba :

« Le bateau et le quai et le départ qui peu à peu te rendaient minuscule à mes yeux, prisonniers de ce hublot rond, que tu regardais pour me garder dans ton cœur. Tout cela est intact. Après, sont venus les jours vierges de toi. Aujourd'hui, j'aimerais que mon soleil te touche. Je te dis que ta petite fille est ma petite fille, les personnages marionnettes rangés dans leur grande chambre vitrée sont à nous deux… »

Frida Kahlo se défend d'être surréaliste :

« On me prenait pour une surréaliste. Ce n’est pas juste. Je n’ai jamais peint de rêves. Ce que j’ai représenté était ma réalité. »

Au début du mois de novembre 1938, elle présente ses œuvres dans la galerie de Julien Levy à New York. La moitié des vingt-cinq œuvres présentées y sont vendues. Pendant son séjour, elle a une liaison avec le photographe Nickolas Muray.

Exposition à Paris

En 1939, Kahlo se rend à Paris à la grande exposition sur le Mexique organisée par le gouvernement Lázaro Cárdenas à la galerie Renou et Pierre Colle. Elle loge chez André Breton et rencontre les peintres Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso et Vassily Kandinsky.

Elle n'aime pas Paris, qu'elle trouve sale, et la nourriture ne lui convient pas ; elle attrape une colibacillose. L'exposition lui déplaît : son avis est qu'elle « est envahie par cette bande de fils de putes lunatiques que sont les surréalistes », elle trouve superflue « toute cette saloperie » exposée autour du Mexique. Par-dessus le marché, l'associé de Pierre Colle refuse d'exposer toutes les œuvres de Frida Kahlo dans sa galerie, il n'en retient que 6 sur 27, choqué par la crudité des tableaux. Elle n'apprécie guère plus le regard que Breton (« prétentieux ») porte sur son art, qu'elle perçoit comme teinté de mépris et d'incompréhension. Elle s'en console auprès de Jacqueline, avec qui elle a une liaison.

Dans une lettre à Nickolas Muray, elle fait part de son profond dégoût pour les intellectuels parisiens :

« Ils ont tellement de foutus intellectuels pourris que je ne peux plus les supporter. Ils sont vraiment trop pour moi.
J'aimerais mieux m'asseoir par terre dans le marché de Toluca pour vendre des tortillas que d'avoir quoi que ce soit à voir avec ces connards artistiques de Paris… Je n'ai jamais vu Diego ni toi perdre votre temps à ces bavardages stupides et à ces discussions intellectuelles. C'est pour ça que vous êtes de vrais hommes et non des artistes minables — Bon sang ! ça valait la peine de venir jusqu'ici juste pour comprendre pourquoi l'Europe est en train de pourrir, pourquoi tous ces incapables sont la cause de tous les Hitler et les Mussolini. »

Divorce et remariage

En décembre 1938, Kahlo et Diego divorcent. Elle ressent de grandes douleurs dans la colonne vertébrale et contracte une mycose aiguë à la main droite. En septembre 1940, elle se rend à San Francisco pour être soignée par le docteur Eloesser. Pour le remercier de ses soins, elle peint pour lui Autoportrait dédié au D^r Eloesser. Le tableau porte en dédicace :

« J’ai peint mon portrait en 1940 pour le Dr. Eloesser, mon médecin et meilleur ami. Avec toute mon affection, Frida Kahlo. »

Diego Rivera est également à San Francisco à la même époque, et propose à Frida Kahlo de l’épouser de nouveau. Elle accepte, et le second mariage a lieu à San Francisco le 8 décembre 1940, jour de l’anniversaire de Diego. Ils s’installent dans la Casa azul à Coyoacán après la mort du père de Frida Kahlo.

Reconnaissance nationale

En 1942, l’artiste commence son journal où elle commente son enfance, sa jeunesse et sa vie. La même année, elle est élue membre du Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, organisation créée par le ministre des Affaires culturelles et composée de vingt-cinq artistes et intellectuels. Elle a pour mission d'encourager la diffusion de la culture mexicaine en organisant des expositions, des conférences et la publication d'ouvrages.

En 1943, elle dirige une classe de peinture à l’académie des beaux-arts. Mais sa mauvaise santé l'oblige à enseigner chez elle. Des douleurs permanentes dans le pied droit et dans le dos l’empêchent de marcher correctement. Elle doit porter un corset de fer (que l’on retrouve dans La Colonne brisée). En juin 1946, elle subit une opération de la colonne vertébrale qui lui laisse deux immenses cicatrices dans le bas du dos.

À la fin des années 1940, son état de santé s'aggrave et, en 1950, elle doit entrer à l’hôpital ABC de Mexico. Elle y reste neuf mois. Sa nouvelle opération de la colonne vertébrale se complique d'une inflammation qui impose une troisième opération. Ce n'est qu'au bout de la sixième intervention (sur un total de sept) qu’elle peut se remettre à peindre, tout en restant couchée.

« Je me suis aperçue que la mort de Frida était très proche. Je pense qu’on doit honorer les gens de leur vivant, quand ils peuvent encore en profiter, et pas quand ils sont morts. »

Lola Álvarez Bravo

Au printemps 1953, la photographe Lola Álvarez Bravo organise la première exposition monographique de Frida Kahlo au Mexique, qui rédige elle-même des invitations pour l’occasion. Ses médecins lui interdisent cependant de se déplacer. Son lit à baldaquin est alors transporté et installé à la galerie et c'est en ambulance qu'elle arrive pour participer au vernissage, couchée sur un brancard et portée jusqu’à son lit. L’événement est un succès pour l’artiste dont la présence est autant saluée que la qualité de ses tableaux. José Moreno Villa écrit « Il est impossible de séparer la vie et l’œuvre de cette singulière personne. Ses peintures constituent sa biographie. » Time rapporte aussi l’événement dans un article intitulé « Mexican autobiography » : « Après avoir vu son exposition la semaine dernière, le Mexique a pu appréhender la dure réalité de Frida Kahlo. Elle est de plus en plus dure. […] "Je ne suis pas malade, affirme-t-elle, je suis brisée. Mais je suis heureuse de vivre tant que je peux peindre". »

En 1954, elle peint l'un de ses derniers tableaux : Autorretrato con Stalin (« Autoportrait avec Staline »).

Fin difficile

En août 1953, on l'ampute de la jambe droite jusqu’au genou à cause d'une gangrène. Cette opération apaise ses souffrances, mais la plonge dans une profonde dépression :

« On m’a amputé la jambe il y a six mois qui me paraissent une torture séculaire et quelques fois, j’ai presque perdu la tête. J’ai toujours envie de me suicider. Seul Diego m’en empêche, car je m’imagine que je pourrais lui manquer. Il me l’a dit, et je le crois. Mais jamais de toute ma vie je n’ai souffert davantage. J’attendrai encore un peu… »

— Journal, février 1954

Affaiblie par une grave pneumonie, Frida Kahlo meurt dans la nuit du 13 juillet 1954, sept jours après son quarante-septième anniversaire, officiellement d'une embolie pulmonaire. Cependant, selon Hayden Herrera, les derniers mots de son journal (« J'espère que la sortie sera joyeuse… et j’espère bien ne jamais revenir — Frida ») et son dernier dessin suggèrent qu'elle se serait suicidée ; elle affirme d'ailleurs que certains de ses amis ont cru que sa mort était due à une surdose de médicaments, qui n'était peut-être pas accidentelle. Toutefois, au cœur même de son dernier tableau, peint juste avant de mourir, elle a écrit : « Viva la Vida » (« Vive la Vie »).

Elle est incinérée le 14 juillet, comme elle le désirait : elle avait expliqué qu'elle ne souhaitait pas être enterrée couchée, ayant trop souffert dans cette position au cours de ses nombreux séjours à l'hôpital. Ses cendres reposent dans la Casa Azul à Coyoacán, sur son lit, dans une urne qui a la forme de son visage.

Œuvres

Son œuvre comporte 143 tableaux, très souvent de petit format, un certain nombre ayant été peints alors qu'elle était alitée, dont 55 autoportraits, témoignant souvent de sa souffrance physique et morale (L'Hôpital Henry Ford, 1932 ; Sans espoir, 1945), seule ou en compagnie d'animaux (Autoportrait au collier d'épines et colibri, 1940 ; Moi et mes perroquets, 1941…), parfois des portraits de famille.

Ses toiles sont empreintes de culture mexicaine : tenue traditionnelle, bijoux locaux, portraits d'indigènes.

Date	Titre
1925	Nature morte (roses)
1926	Autoportrait à la robe de velours
1927	Si Adelita… ou les chapeaux pointus Portrait d'Adriana La Adelita, Pancho Villa et Frida Portrait d'Alicia Galant Portrait de Miquel N. Lira
1928	Portrait de Christina, ma sœur Portrait d'Alejandro Gómez Arias
1929	Autoportrait – Le temps s'envole Portrait de Virginia (petite fille) Deux femmes Le bus Portrait de Lupe Marín Portrait de Isolda Pinedo Kahlo
1930	Autoportrait Portrait d'une femme en blanc
1931	Portrait d'Eva Frederick Frieda et Diego Rivera Display Window in a Street in Detroit Portrait du Dr. Leo Eloesser Portrait de Luther Burbank Portrait de Mademoiselle Jean Wight
1932	Autoportrait à la frontière du Mexique et des États-Unis L'Hôpital Henry Ford My Birth
1933	Ma robe s'accroche là Autoportrait avec collier
1934	Autoportrait aux cheveux bouclés
1935	Quelques petites piqûres
1936	Mes grands-parents, mes parents et moi
1937	Portrait de Diego Rivera Moi et ma poupée Mémoire Le défunt Dimas Rosas a trois ans Autoportrait dédié à Léon Trotski Fulang-Chang et moi Ma nounou et moi
1938	Autoportrait avec le chien Itzcuintli Autoportrait avec deux oiseaux Autoportrait avec un singe Autoportrait - L'armature Ce que l'eau me donne Fille au masque de mort Les Fruits de la Terre Ils ont demandé des avions mais ont obtenu des ailes de paille Pitahayas Quand je t'ai, la Vie, combien je t'aime Quatre habitants de Mexico Souvenir d'une blessure ouverte Le Suicide de Dorothy Hale
1939	Deux nus dans la foret (La Terre même) Les deux Fridas
1940	Autoportrait au collier d'épines et colibri Autoportrait au singe Autoportrait dédicacé au Docteur Eloesser Le tableau blessé Retablo Le rève (le lit) Autoportrait aux cheveux rasés Autoportrait dédicacé à Sigmund Firestone
1941	Moi et mes perroquets Autoportrait avec tresse Autoportrait avec Bonito Panier de fleurs
1942	Nature morte (rond) Autoportrait avec singe et perroquet
1943	Racines Penser à la mort La jeune mariée effrayée d'avoir la vie devant-elle Autoportrait avec des singes Diego dans mes pensées Portrait de Natasha Gelman Fleur de la vie
1944	La Colonne brisée, huile sur isorel Diego et Frida 1929-1944 Portrait d'Alicia et Eduardo Safa Portait de Doña Rosita Morillo Portrait de l'ingénieur Eduardo Morillo Safa Portrait de Lupita Morillo Safa Portrait de Mariana Morillo Safa Portrait de Marte R. Gómez
1945	Autoportrait avec singe Moses Sans espoir Le masque Autoportrait avec un petit singe
1946	L'arbre de l'espoir, rester fort Paysage Le cerf blessé
1947	Autoportrait aux cheveux lâchés Le soleil et la vie
1948	Autoportrait
1949	Diego et moi L'Étreinte de l'univers, de la terre, du Mexique, de Diego, de moi et de Señor Xolotl
1950	Portrait de la famille de Frida
1951	Nature morte avec perroquet et drapeau Portrait de mon père Nature morte avec perroquet et fruit Noix de coco pleurantes Noix de coco Autoportrait avec le portrait du Docteur Farill
1952	Nature morte dédicacée à Samuel Fastlicht Nature vivante
1953	Fruit de la vie
1954	Autoportrait avec Staline Viva la Vida, pastèques Fours de brique Nature morte avec drapeau Le marxisme donnera la santé aux malades Autoportrait avec un portrait de Diego sur le sein et de Maria entre les sourcils

Postérité

Exploitation de l'image de Frida Kahlo

Symbole nationaliste

Frida Kahlo est devenue, de son vivant, un symbole du Mexique à l’étranger, car son originalité artistique, basée sur des éléments spécifiques et clairement identifiables de la culture mexicaine, correspondait à l'affirmation de l'identité mexicaine par le nationalisme qui s'est développé après la révolution de 1910.

Une icône du féminisme

Dès son plus jeune âge, Frida Kahlo s'insurge contre les inégalités hommes/femmes dans la société mexicaine, défend l'émancipation des femmes et défie les stéréotypes de genre et les normes de beauté. Artiste accomplie, en rupture avec les conventions sociales, ouvertement bisexuelle, Frida Kahlo affirme vouloir défendre « cette masse silencieuse et soumise ». De plus, elle représente la femme forte, indépendante, battante et courageuse face aux terribles obstacles d'une vie semée d’embûches.

Elle s'impose aujourd'hui comme une figure du féminisme. A ce titre, l'une des deux fondatrices du groupe des Guerrilla Girls, attaché depuis sa fondation en 1985 à dénoncer l'invisibilisation criante des artistes féminines peintres et sculptrices dans les musées américains des années Reagan (1981-1988), a pris le pseudonyme de Frida Kahlo. Ce groupe fortement politisé lutte contre le sexisme et le racisme dans le monde l'art, tant à New-York, sa base, qu'aux Etats-Unis et à l'échelle internationale et a contribué à populariser le débat à ce sujet.

Une référence internationale dans la mode

Le style vestimentaire de Frida Kahlo reflète son attachement à la culture de son pays, son goût pour la couleur et son art de la parure. Son vestiaire est principalement composé de pièces traditionnelles : robes de Tehuana (es), coiffes... Le style de l’artiste a ensuite évolué, mêlant vêtements traditionnels et pièces étrangères. Cette apparence vestimentaire est, pour Frida Kahlo, un moyen de s'exprimer et d'étendre son art. Elle refuse également de masquer ses traits "masculins" et choisit de s'habiller en costume, comme un homme, sur les portraits de famille contrairement aux autres femmes. Mais elle aime se parer de bijoux et se farder. De nombreux créateurs de mode s'en sont inspirés. En 1998, Jean Paul Gaultier lui consacre une collection entière. Alessandro Michele, directeur de la création chez Gucci, s'en inspire lors de la nouvelle campagne de la marque. Riccardo Tisci lui rend hommage dans la collection haute couture de Givenchy en 2010. En 2018, Dolce & Gabbana présente un défilé haute couture à Mexico aux couleurs de Frida Kahlo. Lors du défilé de prêt-à-porter de 2012, Moschino se réfère clairement à la panoplie de Frida Kahlo. De nombreux autres défilés se sont inspirés du style, de l'art et des robes colorées de Frida Kahlo.

Dans Frida Kahlo: Fashion as the Art of Being, Susana Martínez Vidal, journaliste et ex-rédactrice en chef du Elle espagnol explique l'importance de l'influence de Frida Kahlo sur le monde de la mode.

Exploitation commerciale

La fille, la petite-fille et l'arrière-petite-fille de Cristina Kahlo, la sœur de Frida Kahlo, ont fondé en 2007 la compagnie Frida Kahlo Corporation qui gère les droits d'auteur hérités de Frida Kahlo et la promotion de l'image de l'artiste. Son nom, sa signature et son image sont déposés par sa famille. Cette entreprise délivre des licences d'exploitation commerciale de la marque déposée Frida Kahlo au tarif de 2 à 5 pour cent du prix de vente.

Une image surexploitée

Frida Kahlo suscite un véritable engouement commercial. Des milliers d'objets estampillés « Frida Kahlo » sont proposés sur des sites marchands. En 2018, la commercialisation d'une barbie à l'effigie de Frida Kahlo donne lieu à un procès entre la société californienne Mattel et la famille de Frida Kahlo. Cette « Fridamania » est un sujet de controverse. L'image de Frida Kahlo est parfois contradictoire avec les valeurs et la vie de l'artiste déclare la journaliste Léa Lejeune dans son ouvrage Féminisme Washing.

Hommages

• Un billet de 500 pesos mexicains (série F) à son effigie et à celle de Diego Rivera a été mis en circulation le 30 août 2010. Ce billet a été remplacé le 27 août 2018 par un billet (série G) à l'effigie de Benito Juárez.
• Le groupe de rock cuivré La jambe de Frida opta pour ce nom en son hommage. Leur premier album, sorti en 2013, s'appelle Magdalena.
• La pièce de théâtre Frida Kahlo « Attention peinture fraîche » lui rend hommage tant par l'écriture que par la mise en scène et l'interprétation (prix du public 2013^[Quoi ?]).
• Le 7 octobre 2016, le conseil municipal de Nantes attribue son nom à l'une des allées qui dessert la future École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, sur l'île de Nantes.
• Une rue porte son nom dans le quartier des Docks à Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine.
• Le groupe britannique Coldplay a intitulé son quatrième album « Viva la Vida » (2008) en référence au dernier tableau de Frida Kahlo.
• Dans le film d'animation Coco (2017), elle apparaît dans le Pays des Morts, où elle vient en aide au héros Miguel Rivera.
• À Paris, le jardin Frida-Kahlo porte son nom.
• La promotion 2018 - 2023 de l’Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence porte également son nom.

Rétrospectives importantes

• Son exposition « l’art en fusion » au musée de l'Orangerie à Paris a été nommée aux Globes de Cristal en 2014 dans la catégorie Meilleure Exposition.
• « Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up » au Victoria and Albert Museum, 2018.
• Lucy Schwartz, « Faces of Frida: a digital retrospective on Google Arts & Culture », Google Art and Culture, 24-05-2018.

Annexes

Bibliographie

• Christina Burrus (dir.), Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo (exposition, fondation Pierre Gianadda), Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1998 (ISBN 2-88443-047-4, lire en ligne).
• Christina Burrus, Frida Kahlo : "je peins ma réalité", Paris, Gallimard, 2007, 143 p. (ISBN 978-2-07-034593-9, DOI 10.14375/NP.9782070345939, lire en ligne).
• Dictionnaire Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres,sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays, vol. 7, éditions Gründ, janvier 1999, 13440 p. (ISBN 2-7000-3017-6), p. 664.
• Collectif, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera : l'art en fusion (Catalogue de l'exposition au musée de l'Orangerie 8 octobre 2013 - 13 janvier 2014), Paris/Malakoff/Olmedo, Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie et Éditions Hazan, 2013, 181 p. (ISBN 978-2-7541-0718-1).
• Georgiana Colvile, Scandaleusement d'elles. Trente-quatre femmes surréalistes, Paris, Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1999, 318 p. (ISBN 2-85893-496-7), p. 139-148.
• Marco Corona, Frida Kahlo, une biographie surréelle, Rackham, 2001.
• Hayden Herrera (trad. de l'anglais par Philippe Beaudoin), Frida, biographie de Frida Kahlo, Paris, Librairie générale française, coll. « Le Livre de Poche », 2003, 730 p. (ISBN 2-253-14573-4); Frida : biographie de Frida Kahlo (trad. de l'anglais), Paris, Flammarion, 2013, 601 p. (ISBN 978-2-08-131307-1).
• Rauda Jamis, Frida Kahlo, autoportrait d'une femme, Presses de la Renaissance, 1995.
• Frida Kahlo (préf. Carlos Fuentes), Le Journal de Frida Kahlo, Éditions du Chêne, 1995, 295 p. (ISBN 2-85108-887-4).
• Frida Kahlo (trad. de l'espagnol par Christilla Vasserot), Frida Kahlo par Frida Kahlo : écrits, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 2007, 456 p. (ISBN 978-2-267-01935-3).
• Andrea Kettenmann, Kahlo, Taschen, 1992.
• J.M.G. Le Clézio, Diego et Frida, Éditions Stock, 1993.
• Helga Prignitz-Poda (trad. de l'allemand par Josie Mély et Catherine Weinzorn), Frida Kahlo, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2003, 260 p. (ISBN 2-07-011763-4).
• Patricia Mayayo, Frida Kahlo: contra el mito, Cátedra, 2008 (ISBN 978-84-376-2452-5).
• Rachel Viné-Krupa, Maud Guély, Un ruban autour d'une bombe. Une biographie textile de Frida Kahlo, Nada éditions, 2018 (ISBN 9791092457216).
• Gérard de Cortanze, Frida Kahlo, la beauté terrible, Albin Michel, 2011 ; Livre de Poche Hachette, 2013.
• Gérard de Cortanze, Frida Kahlo par Gisèle Freund, Albin Michel, 2013.
• Gérard de Cortanze, Les Amants de Coyoacan, Albin Michel, 2015 ; Le Livre de Poche Hachette, 2017.
• Gérard de Cortanze, Moi, Tina Modotti, heureuse parce que libre, Albin Michel, 2020.
• Gérard de Cortanze, Frida Kahlo, le petit cerf blessé, Libretto/Phébus, 2020 (ISBN 978-2-36914-573-8).
• Gérard de Cortanze, Un amour de Frida Kahlo (théâtre), 2020.
• Luis-Martin Lozano (dir.), Andrea Kettenmann et Marina Vázquez Ramos, Frida Kahlo. Tout l'œuvre peint, Köln/Paris, Taschen, 2021, 624 p. (ISBN 978-3-8365-8307-7).
• Susie Hodge, Petite histoire des artistes femmes : chefs-d’œuvre, grands tournants, thèmes, Flammarion, 2021 (ISBN 978-2-0802-3666-1).
• Didier Goupil, Viva Frida, éditions TriArtis, 2022 (ISBN 9782490198320).
• Benjamin Valliet, 366 dates pour célébrer les femmes, Favre, 2022 (ISBN 978-2-8289-1960-3).
• Frida Kahlo, derrière l'icône, in Le 1 Hors-série - Le Un des arts, janvier 2023 (ISSN 2272-9690).

Romans

• Francisco Haghenbeck (trad. de l'espagnol par Albert Bensoussan), Le Jour des morts (roman), Paris, L'Herne, 2012, 41 p. (ISBN 978-2-85197-724-3 et 2-85197-724-5).
• Claire Berest, Rien n'est noir (roman librement inspiré par la vie de Frida Kahlo et de Diego Rivera), Éditions Stock, 2019.

Filmographie

• Frida, nature vivante (Frida, naturaleza viva), film mexicain de Paul Leduc, avec Ofelia Medina dans le rôle de Frida Kahlo (1983).
• Frida, film biographique de Julie Taymor (2002) d'après le livre de Hayden Herrera, avec Salma Hayek dans le rôle de Frida Kahlo et Alfred Molina dans le rôle de Diego Rivera.
• Frida Kahlo entre l'extase et la douleur, documentaire d'Ana Vivas et Rodrigo Castaño, 52 min, Les Films du Village, Zarafa Films, 2003.
• Frida, c’est moi, web-série d’animation québécoise d'après Sophie Faucher, Frida, c'est moi, Edito, 2016, 32 p. (ISBN 978-2-924720-03-5 et 2-924720-03-6).
• Frida Kahlo de Dominique Mougenot (sans date d'édition), documentaire de 52 min, production DMP Incorporation et AK Vidéo, collection « Portrait d'artiste », texte anglais de Scott et Laura Lindsay, adaptation française d’Annabelle Brunet.
• Vidéo d'archives privées sur youtube : « Frida Kahlo Cancion La Bruja »

Articles connexes

• Autoportrait féminin en peinture
• Place des femmes dans l'art
• Diego Rivera

Liens externes

• Ressources relatives aux beaux-arts :
  • Artists of the World Online
  • Bénézit
  • British Museum
  • Delarge
  • Grove Art Online
  • Musée d'art Nelson-Atkins
  • Museum of Modern Art
  • MutualArt
  • RKDartists
  • Union List of Artist Names
• Ressources relatives à la musique :
  • Discogs
  • MusicBrainz
• Ressource relative à la littérature :
  • Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Ressource relative au spectacle :
  • Les Archives du spectacle
• Ressource relative à plusieurs domaines :
  • Radio France
• Ressource relative à la bande dessinée :
  • Comic Vine
• Ressource relative à l'audiovisuel :
  • IMDb
• Notices dans des dictionnaires ou encyclopédies généralistes :

  • Britannica
  • Brockhaus
  • Collective Biographies of Women
  • Den Store Danske Encyklopædi
  • Deutsche Biographie
  • Dictionnaire universel des créatrices
  • Enciclopedia delle donne
  • Enciclopedia De Agostini
  • Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana
  • Hrvatska Enciklopedija
  • Internetowa encyklopedia PWN
  • Nationalencyklopedin
  • Munzinger
  • Proleksis enciklopedija
  • Store norske leksikon
  • Treccani
  • Universalis
  • Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija
• Notices d'autorité :

  • VIAF
  • ISNI
  • BnF (données)
  • IdRef
  • LCCN
  • GND
  • Italie
  • Japon
  • CiNii
  • Espagne
  • Belgique
  • Pays-Bas
  • Pologne
  • Israël
  • NUKAT
  • Catalogne
  • Suède
  • Canada
  • WorldCat
• Site officiel de la Fondation Frida Kahlo
• Musée Frida-Kahlo
• (en) Frida Kahlo sur Artcyclopedia