Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón on July 6, 1907 near Mexico City. She later changed her birth date to 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution. Her father was a German immigrant and photographer, her mother of indigenous and Spanish origin.

At the age of 6, Frida got sick with polio, which left one of her legs shorter and weaker. During this period, she was spending a lot of time in her father’s photography studio and learned from him. This period was likely her first close contact with art and the work of an artist. Guillermo Kahlo, Frida’s father, was very progressive for his time and encouraged his favorite daughter to exercise to strengthen her leg, mostly through soccer, wrestling and swimming. These sports are seen primarily male sports even today, so in her day, Frida was basically the only girl on the field.

At 19, she had an almost fatal accident. She broke her spine and her pelvis, which was penetrated with an iron rod. She spent months in casts and steal corsets. To distract her and make her feel better, her parents made her a contraption that allowed her to draw while laying down. She also painted on her corset. While this was not the ultimate debut of her artistic endeavor, it marked the beginning of her life as a painter.

Frida's lifestyle and art were marked by a movement called Mexicanity. This movement focused on redefining Mexican culture following the Mexican revolution and civil war of 1910-1917. Members of this movement aimed to include indigenous traditions and beliefs that had been oppressed since the colonizing period. Frida's way of dressing and painting reflect this movement. Her characteristic way of dressing was inspired by the native style of the Oaxaca in the South of Mexico, showed both her origins and identity as a Mexican woman and hid her physical disability under the long skirts traditional to this type of dress.

Frida’s life was marked by medical interventions and pain. The sickness of her childhood and her accident had profound impacts on the rest of her life. Following the impalement of her pelvis, Frida acquired Ascherman syndrome, an illness where scar tissue forms in the uterus. Due to her illness, Frida had several miscarriages and medically induced abortions. These procedures were obviously traumatizing and Frida put them on canvas. In 1935, she painted a woman having an abortion. The taboo of women’s non-sexualized bodies and women’s trauma related to child bearing are enormous even today, so it is incredibly impressive that she had the courage to show her experience like that.

Her leg caused Frida more trouble than anything else. In 1953, she finally had an amputation that enormously helped her. She was fascinated by medical drawings; her library was full of medical books, her father had even wanted her to become a doctor. After her amputation, she painted many feet and their anatomic compositions.

Frida’s self portraits are what she is popularly known for. In her portraits, she exaggerated her facial features to show her moods, like making herself seem more severe when she was feeling bad. She also painted her thoughts on her head. She was one of the first artists to do a nude self-portrait.

Frida played with dolls and toys throughout all her life. She wrote in a very playful way, playing with words and punctuation. She also lived with many animals, with particularly parrots. We can see those animals in her self portraits. In some native Mexican cultures, animals have magical or god-like powers, which she could have meant to show in her paintings. In her art, symbolism was crucial. Frida’s use of symbolism was inspired both by Indigenous and Catholic representations. She re-interpreted these styles to show her internal world. In that way, she followed the Mexican tradition of changing and renewing different styles, the way Christian images were adapted to Native cultures during the forced Christianization of the country.

Nowadays, we see Frida Kahlo’s image everywhere, especially her characteristic unibrow (not her moustache though, even though that was also a feature she really liked and painted). Her image is extremely commercialized, which is not in line with her ideology as a Communist. These commercial images also leave out who she really was and what her struggles and choices were as a bisexual, racialized, disabled woman. A Snapchat filter white washed her likeness, making the user’s face appear white and giving them a stark brow. The filter reduces her to her eyebrows and makes her appear as a white person, leaving out her Indigenous heritage and her identity as such. Isolda Kahlo, Frida’s niece, founded a company in Frida’s name to collect money for charity work (which Frida did with her sister Christina), but she died in 2007 and the company completely left the original charity idea behind. It is now lead by a Venezuelan business man, who commercializes the image. Her artistic work is protected and visible in museums, not on tote-bags and coffee mugs.

Many artists admired her talent and genius, for example Picasso, but she was soon loved by the people, who would reproduce her image in artisanal products. Frida only had one exposition in Mexico while alive, in 1953. Her friend organized it after realizing that her health had declined. She went to the gallery in bed, and died a year later.