(Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo; Coyoacán, Mexico, 1907 - id., 1954) Although she moved in the environment of the great Mexican muralists of her time and shared their ideals, Frida Kahlo created an absolutely personal painting, naive and deeply metaphorical at the same time, derived from her exalted sensitivity and several events that marked her life.

At the age of eighteen Frida Kahlo suffered a serious accident that forced her to a long convalescence, during which she learned to paint, and which probably influenced the formation of the complex psychological world that is reflected in her works. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera; three years later she suffered an abortion that deeply affected her delicate sensibility and inspired two of her most valued works: Henry Ford Hospital and Frida and the Abortion, whose complex symbolism is known through the explanations of the painter herself.

Her self-portraits, also of complex interpretation, are also highly appreciated: Self-Portrait with Monkeys or The Two Fridas. When André Breton became acquainted with Frida Kahlo's work, he said that the Mexican was a spontaneous surrealist and invited her to exhibit in New York and Paris, the latter city where she was not very well received. Frida never felt close to surrealism, and at the end of her days she openly rejected that her artistic creation was framed in that trend.

In her search for Mexico's aesthetic roots, a trait she shared with Diego Rivera and the muralists (David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco), Frida Kahlo produced splendid portraits of children and works inspired by pre-Conquest Mexican iconography, but it is the canvases that focus on herself and her eventful life that have made her a leading figure in 20th century Mexican painting.

The work of Frida Kahlo

The production of the Mexican artist is an example of that type of art that serves as a powerful instrument with which to exorcise the anguish of a hostile reality. The tragic sign of her existence, marked by the struggle against illness, had begun when, at the age of six, she contracted polio, which left her with serious after-effects. In 1925 she suffered a serious traffic accident that fractured her spine and pelvis. In addition to making it impossible for her to have children, the accident was the cause of numerous future operations and her health was always precarious.

Through painting, which she began to practice during the long months of immobility after the accident, Frida Kahlo would superbly reflect the collision between her longing for happiness and the insistent threat of its destruction, while conjuring the irreducible duality between dreams (of love, of children) and reality (pain and impotence).

During her convalescence from the accident, unable even to sit up, she began to paint, taking herself as her main model. A mirror was placed under the canopy of her bed and a carpenter made her a kind of easel that allowed her to paint while lying down. This was the beginning of a long series of self-portraits, a theme that occupies the bulk of her production, fundamentally autobiographical in nature. On one occasion she stated, "I portray myself because I spend a lot of time alone and because I am the subject I know best." In a short time Frida developed a symbolic vocabulary of her own; with it she accompanied her portraits to metaphorically represent her experiences and her thoughts.

Influenced by the ideas of identity vindication propagated by revolutionary nationalism, Frida dressed in long Mexican skirts, bows braided with colorful ribbons and pre-Columbian necklaces and earrings. Thus we find her in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943, Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City), represented as an "authentic" Mexican and accentuating her mestizo features (she had Spanish, Indian and German blood). The backgrounds of some of her works are a product of this same nationalist ideology, such as Self-Portrait with Monkeys (1943, Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City), in which her figure appears cut out on jungle plants and surrounded by animals, or those in which she takes up images of pre-Columbian culture, such as My Nanny and I (1937, Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City).

At other times, as in Autorretrato - El Marco (1938, National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris), he draws his inspiration from popular imagery and very specifically from the retablos charged with that naïve and colorful baroque style so specifically Mexican that vividly combines the spectacular with the scatological.

One of the most common forms of Mexican folk art are the votive offerings. Frida links her narrative paintings to this tradition by synthetically representing the most significant and expressive elements. The small size of the paintings and the technique (oil on metal plate) also come from them.

This fusion between personal themes and the forms of popular imagery is emblematically expressed in the work Henry Ford Hospital (1932, Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City). Despite the accident, Frida hoped that her second pregnancy would come to term, but her fractured pelvis could not accommodate the development of a child. The traumatic experience of a new miscarriage was the origin of the painting.

The adoption of the narrative forms of votive offerings is best exemplified in a singular piece entitled Retablo (1943, private collection). Frida had found an ex-voto depicting the collision between a train and a bus; an injured girl lay on the tracks and the image of the Virgen de los Dolores floated above the scene. Adding his own eyebrows to the girl and some lettering to the train and bus, he turned it into a representation of his own accident. At the bottom he wrote: "Husband and wife Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde C. de Kahlo give thanks to the Virgen de los Dolores for saving their little girl Frida from the accident that occurred in 1925 at the corner of Cuahutemozin and Calzada de Tlalpan."

After overcoming some serious health crises, and in the same way as believers do with the saints of their devotion, Frida showed her gratitude to the doctors by means of paintings that rigorously follow the conventions of the votive offering. Examples of this are the works dedicated to Dr. Eloesser and Dr. Farill.

But it was not only illness that was the cause of her disorders and the metaphor for her paintings; the setbacks of her emotional life were also thematized in paintings that constitute refined symbolic syntheses. In The Heart (1937, Michel Petitjean Collection, Paris), the absence of hands expresses his impotence and despair in the face of the love affair between Diego Rivera and his sister Cristina. Her heart, literally ripped out, lies at her feet and has an inordinate size that reflects the intensity of her pain. Next to her, a feminine dress, alluding to her sister, hangs by a thread, while a single linking arm emerges from her sleeves and a stick pierces the hole left by her own heart.

Frida and surrealism

The dreamlike appearance of her images favored the relation of her symbolism with surrealism, something that Frida Kahlo would flatly deny: "I was taken for a surrealist. This is not correct, I have never painted dreams, what I have represented was my reality".

But Frida not only rejected the surrealist character of her painting, she professed a deep aversion towards the representatives of the movement. She had met Breton in Mexico in 1938 and the following year, on the eve of World War II, she spent several months in Paris, where she had the opportunity to come into contact with the other surrealists.

In contrast to the oneiric representations or the psychic automatism of the surrealists, the numerous symbols that Frida Kahlo introduces in her paintings have precise meanings and are the product of conscious activity. Her work originates and proceeds from a continuous inquiry into herself, and manifests moods in a precise and deliberate way, materializing the oscillations between suffering and hope. The symbolic character of her painting gives way to the vehement expression of a passionate personality for whom art is a challenge and a combat, a violent struggle against illness, but also a self-absorbed retreat into her inner self and a trace of the painful recognition of her battered identity.

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