Kahlo, Frida (1907–1954)

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Kahlo, Frida (1907–1954)

Mexican painter whose singular self-images, unconventional in style and startling in content, distinguished her from her peers. Name variations: Frida Rivera. Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Coyoacan, Mexico, on July 6, 1907; died in Coyoacan on July 13, 1954; daughter of Guillermo Kahlo (a photographer) and Matilde Calderón; married Diego Rivera, in 1929 (divorced 1939, remarried 1940).

Injured in a bus accident (1925); painted first self-portrait (1926); held first solo exhibition, New York (1938); selected as a member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana (1942); held first Mexican solo exhibition (1953).

While many art historians believe that a painting, like any manufactured product, can be examined with scant attention to its creator, there remain artists whose work is so reliant upon personal experience that an understanding of their lives becomes essential. Frida Kahlo is such an artist.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on July 6, 1907, the third of four daughters of Guillermo Kahlo (born Wilhelm Kahl), a successful photographer of German-Jewish origins, and his second wife, Matilde Calderón . This frail quiet man, prone to epileptic seizures, was closer to Frida than was her mother, a woman who had placed two children from Guillermo's first marriage in an orphanage. In later life, Frida recalled, "My childhood was marvelous because although my father was a sick man (he had vertigos every month and a half) he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter) and above all, of understanding for all my problems."

Polio at the age of six marked the beginning of a life of physical suffering for Frida and left her with an atrophied and shortened right leg. Early photographs of the family reveal Kahlo's attempts at concealing her difference, posing with her withered leg behind the healthy one. Losing a year of schooling to illness had no effect on her intellectual abilities, however, and in 1922 she was admitted to the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, one of just 35 girls in the best school in the country. There Kahlo embarked upon a five-year program leading to medical school. On entering the "Prepa," she immediately established the eccentricity of dress which was to become her trademark: she set off to school in her navy pleated dress, white shirt, black boots and stockings, looking for all the world like a German schoolgirl—although the school had no uniform. (Family photographs some years later show Kahlo with cropped hair, wearing a man's suit.) Frida, as a member of the elite gang of Cachuchas (named for the red hats they wore to distinguish themselves from other students) and girlfriend of its leader, Alejandro Gomez Ariaz, became part of the school intelligentsia and major pranksters. When an act of mischief led to her expulsion, the young girl took her case straight to the top—to the minister of education, José Vasconcelos. He berated the principal, saying, "If you can't manage a little girl like that, you are not fit to be a director of such an institution," and Kahlo was reinstated.

Vasconcelos' influence stretched far beyond his involvement with the preparatory school. As a key philosophical influence in the creation of a new Mexico following the revolution of 1910 against the dictator, Porfirio Díaz, he had initiated a movement of programs based, he said, upon "our blood, our language and our people." Rejecting the European influences of the previous decades, Mexicans had begun to look with new national pride at their native culture. Harnessing this wave of "Mexicanization," the minister of education launched a massive literacy campaign; promoted education for the masses; and contracted with the great Mexican artists of the day to create inspirational murals extolling Mexican culture.

As part of this initiative, Diego Rivera, one of the most famous Mexican painters of the time, returned from Paris in 1922 to work upon a mural at Kahlo's school. In spite of his obesity and froglike features, Frida was entranced by him, spending long hours watching him work on the scaffold, oblivious to the glares of his current lover. She later confessed, to the disgust of a friend, that her ambition was to have a child by Rivera—an ambition which would never be realized.

In 1925, an accident befell the 18-year-old Kahlo which would alter her life forever. The bus upon which she was traveling home from school was crushed by a runaway trolley car, leaving Frida impaled upon a handrail. Ariaz described a surreal scene: "Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, 'La bailarina, la bailarina!' With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer."

The injuries were horrific: a broken pelvis, shattered right leg and foot, dislocated shoulder, broken collarbone, broken ribs, and a spinal column broken in three places. The steel rod had exited her body through her vagina, in the process destroying, as Kahlo later noted, her virginity.

Throughout her recuperation, Kahlo read avidly, focusing her attention on anything related to art. Although her only artistic experience had been in helping her father to touch up photographs in his studio, she demonstrated natural drawing skills. Just one year after the accident, she produced her first serious painting, a self-portrait, the first of over 55 works she would make representing her own image.

By 1927, Kahlo had almost recovered and soon became involved in the circle of revolutionaries, artists, and intellectuals which included Diego Rivera. Determined to win his attention, she presented him with three of her paintings, asking for his comments. Diego was intrigued by this forthright young woman, agreed to visit her home to view her other works, and their romance began. In 1929, they were married in a civil ceremony, Kahlo, petite and strikingly attractive, dressed in a traditional Mexican costume borrowed from a maid, contrasting sharply with her fat, 42-year-old husband in his European-style suit.

Frida's early paintings are distinguished by a naiveté and primitivism most likely adopted to mask her lack of formal training. But her use of color, redolent of the Mexican landscape, set her apart from her European-influenced contemporaries. The confinement of her illness had led her to select subjects close to home—friends, family, animals, and, naturally, herself.

I never painted dreams. … I painted my reality.
—Frida Kahlo

Kahlo was devoted to her new groom, visiting him as he worked obsessively on his murals, bringing his lunch in a little basket decorated with flowers, as peasant women would have done. But their early married years were anything but rosy: Diego was an unreconstructed philanderer who continued his affairs, while Frida, in 1930, underwent an abortion due to fetal difficulties.

Both were committed communists, and, although they left the Mexican Communist Party in 1929 following factional disagreements, they retained a lifelong commitment to socialism. The late 1920s marked the beginning of a period of political repression and anti-communism in Mexico, forcing the couple to leave for the United States where Diego had received a commission to paint a mural in a most unlikely setting—given his political affiliations—the San Francisco Stock Exchange.

While Diego worked, Kahlo explored "Gringolandia," as she called it in letters to her friends. In San Francisco, she met the famous photographer, Edward Weston, who described her: "a little doll alongside Diego, but a doll in size only, for she is strong and quite beautiful, shows very little of her father's German blood. Dressed in native costume even to huaraches (sandals), she causes much excitement in the streets of San Francisco. People stop in their tracks to look in wonder." It was here that, in 1931, she painted a portrait of Luther Burbank, a California horticulturalist, in a style marking the advent of a more fantastical Frida Kahlo: in the painting, Burbank becomes a man-tree, his legs ending in roots in the earth into which he is planted.

After a brief visit to Mexico, Frida returned to the United States with Diego where a highly acclaimed show of his works was held in the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1932. A further mural commission led them to Detroit where Kahlo suffered the miscarriage which effected another stylistic change in her painting, evidenced in her work Henry Ford Hospital (1932), "the first of the series of bloody and terrifying self-portraits that were to make Frida Kahlo one of the most original painters of her time." In this work, she is lying, dishevelled and naked, on a hospital bed which appears to float above the ground. She is hemorrhaging and holds the ties to six symbols, then representative of herself and her emotions. Kahlo's grief in her inability to produce a much longed-for child displayed itself in many other paintings and drawings. It was also manifested in the way in which she collected and mended dolls, and lavished affection on other peoples' children and on her menage of animals.

Kahlo and Diego returned to Mexico in 1933 and moved into their newly built houses. Connected only by a bridge, the separate homes allowed each party the freedom to work in their own way: Kahlo, in quiet solitude; Diego, surrounded constantly by a noisy group of friends. Although she had been desperate to go back to her homeland, Frida's initial thrill at being there was marred when her husband began an affair with her sister, Cristina Kahlo . This dual betrayal affected Kahlo much more than had Diego's previous alliances, leading to the first of many separations, though the couple continued to see each other frequently. Frida's emotional anguish was compounded by physical suffering; in 1934, she underwent an operation on her injured foot, had her appendix removed, and suffered another abortion. But from all of these trials, Kahlo gathered new strength. The realization that her husband would never change but that she would need and love him nonetheless, coupled with a drive towards greater independence, resulted in a Frida Kahlo who was no longer "Mrs. Rivera," an ornament on the arm of the great man. A reconciliation with Diego took place, his affair with Cristina ended, but from now on Kahlo was to become less reliant upon her husband. Increasingly, she had affairs with other men (incurring the wrath of Diego) and women, bisexuality causing no scandal in the bohemian art circles of the day.

In 1937, Kahlo became actively involved with politics again when she and Diego played hosts to the Bolshevik revolutionaries, Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Trotsky , who had been offered asylum in Mexico after their exile from the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky's intelligence and, no doubt, his idolization by Diego, attracted Kahlo, and they progressed from public flirtation to an illicit love affair. After she had tired of him and broken off the relationship, Frida presented him with a seductive self-portrait but remained unswayed by his continued infatuation with her.

Kahlo began to develop, in her work, the portrayal of her inner self, as well as the sense of loss at her inability to have a child. My Nurse and I (1937) depicts Frida as a child being suckled by a native Indian nurse. With references to pre-Columbian idols, the painting combines the recurrent themes of childlessness and Mexican heritage. Kahlo later described it: "I appear with the face of an adult woman and the body of a baby girl, in the arms of my nana. From her nipples falls milk as from the sky. … I came out looking like such a little girl and she so strong and so saturated with providence, that it made me long to sleep."

Championed by the famous surrealist, André Breton, Kahlo held her first one-woman show in New York in 1938, receiving favorable reviews from the critics. From there, she exhibited in Paris where the Louvre purchased one of her self-portraits and where she was embraced as a true Surrealist(e). The fear of imminent war and the disorganization of the artists in charge of the exhibition did not make Kahlo's stay in France a happy one. Nevertheless, her show brought acclaim from the major figures in the art world. Duchamp, Miró, Tanguy, Kandinsky, and Picasso (who was reputedly entranced by Frida) attended and praised her work.

By the end of the following year, Kahlo and Diego were divorced for reasons which neither ever made explicit. Now living back in her family home in Coyoacan but unwilling to accept any money from her ex-husband, she painted at a furious pace in an attempt to become financially independent but refused to compromise her style. The Two Fridas, completed in 1939, depicts the Frida her husband had loved seated alongside, and holding the hand of, the Frida he had rejected. The hearts of both women are visible. A vein carries the blood from the loved Frida to the unloved Frida, who tries to stem its flow with surgical pincers as it drips onto her white dress and forms a pool on the ground. Kahlo presents herself, despite her distress at the divorce, as necessarily self-reliant, nurturing her wounded self with the other, stronger side of her personality.

In late 1940, the couple were married again, in San Francisco, after Kahlo had set terms stipulating

financial independence and no sexual relations. They returned to live together in the house in Coyoacan, their union this time on a happier and more placid basis. Frida worked on further self-portraits, decorated her home, tended to Diego, and amassed a veritable zoo, including monkeys, parrots, dogs, and an eagle, which all lived in the grounds of the house.

Although recognized in the United States, Kahlo's art was not formally acknowledged in Mexico until the early 1940s. Her selection, in 1942, as a member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, whose aim was to promote Mexican culture, showed her growing reputation, as did a later government award of 5,000 pesos—a substantial amount at the time. Financial problems resulting from the difficulty of selling her unconventional works were slightly alleviated when Kahlo was invited to join a prominent group of artists as a teacher at La Esmeralda—an art school for working-class children. An inspiring if unstructured teacher, Frida attracted a group of students, known as los Fridos, who, when illness prevented her from traveling to the school, received their lesson in her home and often at her bedside. Beyond her specified role, Kahlo became mentor, confidant, and comrade to these students who, with her help, successfully established a group of painters with left-wing ideals to take art to the people.

By the mid-1940s, Kahlo's health had deteriorated, and she suffered increasing pain in her spine and damaged foot. Treatment to straighten her spine required her to wear surgical corsets made of steel, leather, or, most frequently, plaster. On one occasion, the plaster contracted so much as it dried that she was unable to breathe, and she was saved by a friend who sliced it open with a razor. Without the support of a corset, Frida resorted to tying herself upright against a chair-back so that she could continue her work. The paintings of this period depict her suffering: in The Little Deer, Frida is pierced by arrows; in The Broken Column, her torso is split in two to reveal a crumbling ionic column; in Without Hope, a weeping Frida vomits a funnel of gore onto her easel. An operation to fuse her spine proved unsuccessful, and in 1950 she entered a hospital for further surgery.

Kahlo was to spend a year in hospital after the incisions on her back proved resistant to healing. She decorated her room, as she had done her home, with puppets, paper doves, and candy skulls. She invited the stream of visitors to decorate her plaster corsets with feathers, photographs, and pebbles, and, when she was feeling well enough, she painted, lying on her back, on an easel suspended above her bed. She continued to adorn her hair with flowers and decorations and flirted with the hospital staff.

Returning to her home, she lived as an invalid, tended by Diego and nurses and, as a result of her physical restrictions, used the available subject matter in a series of still-life paintings. The pain she now suffered was made bearable only by massive doses of drugs which caused violent mood swings. In 1953, prompted by fears among friends that she was close to death, the first Mexican solo exhibition of her works was held in the gallery of Lola Alvarez Bravo . In an appropriately theatrical scene, a drugged and wide-eyed Frida was carried into the gallery on a stretcher to receive congratulations from her decorated bed in the center of the room. The exhibition attracted international attention, and Kahlo was revered for her heroism in attending.

Later that year, her right leg was amputated. The gangrene which had already cost her two toes had spread. Though publicly making light of the matter, Kahlo was deeply affected, writing in her diary "I am DISINTEGRATION." For the first time, she was unable to muster the reserves of strength and determination which had pulled her through previous crises: the ravaging of her body and, as she believed, of her beauty—the source of so many of her images—left her inconsolably depressed. She was increasingly dependent upon drugs and alcohol, and her relationship with Diego became even more tempestuous. For a full year, she did not paint. Her final paintings are testimony to her diminishing abilities.

In early July 1954, Kahlo made her last public appearance at a Communist rally, sitting for hours in the rain which led to her contracting pneumonia. For almost two weeks, her condition deteriorated; entries in her diary and her behavior towards friends indicate that she was aware that death was close. On July 13, 1954, Kahlo died, and, although the cause of death was cited as "pulmonary embolism," the possibility exists that she committed suicide. Her last painting, a still-life of watermelons, is inscribed vividly with the words "VIVA LA VIDA."

Even in death, drama surrounded Frida Kahlo. As she was slid into the oven for cremation, the intensity of the heat caused her body to sit up, her hair blazing around her face, and made her appear, according to an onlooker, as though she was smiling from the center of a sunflower.

The uniqueness of Frida Kahlo's work emanates from her ability to portray, in an original form, the singularity of her life, her suffering and her experience. Defying the limitations of a definable style, the inventiveness of her work places her in the vanguard of women artists of the 20th century for whom existing modes of representation were insufficient.