FRIDA KAHLO

by Jessica McBirney
2017
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a famous Mexican painter, known for painting primarily self-portraits. Kahlo used her art to explore
a variety of themes, including gender, class, and race in Mexican society. In this informational text, Jessica McBirney discusses
the life and artistic career of Kahlo.

[1] Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, but later she told people she
was born in 1910. It’s not that she wanted to seem younger – 1910 was the year
of the Mexican Revolution, and Kahlo wanted to identify herself with Mexican
culture and pride. With that goal in mind, she painted self-portraits and other
scenes to represent different aspects of Mexican culture and women’s
experiences in that culture. She would go on to become a popular figure in
Mexico and around the world, as a person who stood against the stereotypes and
cultural expectations of her time. Kahlo was a passionate artist who loved her
country and valued being true to herself over all else. She did not behave how
women were expected to in the early twentieth century and her paintings, many
of them self-portraits, were of a style never seen before at that time because she
often experimented with the images she produced of herself. Her radical
political beliefs and exciting lifestyle also set her apart. Her unique personal
style – dramatic eyebrows, fancy flowery headdresses, and bright colors – is so
recognizable that her portraits still show up on magazine covers and as
Halloween costumes today.

EARLY LIFE "Frida Kahlo, Autoretrato (1926 – 1954)" by

Kahlo grew up at home with her parents in Coyoacán, Mexico, right outside Rael Garcia Arnes is licensed under CC BY-NC
2.0.
of Mexico City. She described her childhood as “very, very sad,” because
her parents had a bad marriage and she was often sick. When she was six years old she contracted polio, a very serious
disease affecting muscles and movement. Since the disease left one of her legs smaller and weaker than the other, her father
encouraged her to get outside and bike, swim, and play sports, all unusual activities for a little girl at the time. Later she
enrolled at National Preparatory School, one of 35 female students at a school of over 2,000 students.

Kahlo fell in love with drawing at an early age. Her father’s friend Fernando Fernandez gave her drawing lessons and even
employed her as an engraving apprentice. He thought she was an extremely talented artist, but Kahlo never considered art
as a career. However, at the age of 18 Kahlo was riding a bus when it collided with a streetcar, and she was so badly injured
in the ribs, back, and pelvis that she had to spend three months on bed-rest to recover. She spent those long hours painting,
mostly self-portraits and some portraits of her friends from school. Though she recovered, she would spend the rest of her
life in pain. Because of this, pain was a theme often featured in her work.

MEXICAN HERITAGE
After she recovered she started socializing with her friends again and joined the Mexican Communist Party. The political
activism the group practiced gave Kahlo greater appreciation for Mexican culture, especially when it came to the role women
played within it. She continued painting, and in 1928 she met Diego Rivera, a famous artist and fellow member of the
Communist Party. She asked him if her paintings were good enough to make a living on; Rivera was extremely impressed
by her unique work. Kahlo and Rivera went on to get married the next year.

[5] Over the next few years, Kahlo continued to embrace her traditional Mexican heritage. She wore traditional dress (long,
colorful dresses, fancy headdresses, and heavy jewelry) and changed her artistic style to reflect traditional Mexican folk art.
Kahlo believed that her lifestyle, fashion choices, and art all reflected her feminism and spirit of Mexican independence.

PASSION FOR LIFE AND ART

Kahlo maintained her style when she and Rivera moved to the United States in 1930. The couple lived in several cities in
just a few years, and both enjoyed success in the art world. Kahlo displayed her artwork in galleries and became popular
with the American press, who appreciated her strong English and passion for art and her home country. Sadly, Kahlo suffered
from more health problems while living in the United States, as she would for the rest of her life. She became homesick and
convinced Rivera to move back to Mexico with her.

The couple led a unique and varied life back in a rich suburb of Mexico City. They were commissioned to paint a bridge
together; Kahlo painted her half blue and Rivera painted his half pink and white, and the colors met in the middle. The bridge
became a symbol and meeting place for artists all over the city. They hosted the famous Russian political refugee Leon
Trotsky in their house for two years. Kahlo met a French art critic8 who loved her work and offered to host an art show for
her in Paris. Although the show was not as successful as she hoped, she did become the first modern-day Mexican artist
featured in the Louvre, Paris’ world-famous art museum.

Continual relationship troubles with Rivera and never-ending health issues only pushed Kahlo to paint even more. She
produced some of her most famous paintings during the early 1940s, such as The Two Fridas, Self-Portrait with Cropped
Hair, and The Wounded Table, and her art was featured in galleries from Mexico City to New York. She also adopted some
unique pets, including spider monkeys and parrots. During this same period, she began teaching at an art school in Mexico
City, where she encouraged her students to be informal with her and taught them more about traditional Mexican folk art.
Kahlo’s paintings became so popular around Mexico that she could usually sell a painting before even finishing it, and most
group art exhibitions in the country featured at least some of her work.

DEATH AND LEGACY

Unfortunately, by 1950, Kahlo’s health was so bad she was mostly confined to bed. She lobbied9 for political causes as
much as she could. Her nurses observed that a combination of medicine and increased alcohol consumption changed her
painting style to be much more rushed, colorful, and intense. Her very last drawing was a black angel, which many people
see as a foreshadowing of her death in 1954.

[10]Kahlo’s fame only grew after she died. Her family home opened as a museum in 1958, and the feminist movement in
the 1970s led to a re-examination of her paintings as feminist icons. Kahlo’s paintings are a unique mix of Mexican folk art,
realistic portraits and still-life images, as well as gory interpretations of history and emotions. She is, today, one of Mexico’s
most famous artists, and is considered to be a woman who was ahead of her time. Exhibitions of her work have been featured
all around the world, films have been made about her life, and her paintings have sold for a lot of money. Her self-portraits
are so iconic that, today, some people call her “the mother of the selfie” – so next time you snap a picture of yourself,
remember Frida Kahlo and her passionate commitment to culture and art, which she said was “the frankest expression of
myself.”

“Frida Kahlo” by Jessica McBirney. Copyright © 2017 by CommonLit, Inc.