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Frida Kahlo Paintings
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Frida Kahlo (1907-1954),
Mexican painter, who produced mostly small, highly personal self-portraits using
elements of fantasy and a style inspired by native popular art. Kahlo was born
in Coyoacán, Mexico, near Mexico City. While a student at Mexico City's National
Preparatory School in 1925, she sustained severe injuries in a bus accident.
During her recuperation, Kahlo taught herself to paint. After three years she
took some of her first paintings to the famous Mexican muralist Diego
Rivera, who encouraged her to continue her work. Kahlo and Rivera married
in 1929.
Influenced by Rivera's work, Kahlo adopted his use of
broad, simplified color areas and a deliberately naive style in her paintings.
Like Rivera, she wanted her paintings to affirm her Mexican identity, and she
frequently used technical devices and subject matter from Mexican archaeology
and folk art. The impact of her work is enhanced by techniques such as the
inclusion of fantastic elements, a free use of space, and the juxtaposition of
incongruous objects.
Kahlo primarily depicted her personal experience. She
frequently focused on the painful aspects of her life, using graphic imagery to
convey her meaning. The turbulence of her marriage is shown in the weeping and
physically injured self-portraits she painted when she felt rejected by Rivera.
She portrayed her physical disintegration, the result of the bus accident, in
such works as The Broken Column (1944, Collection of Dolores Olmedo
Foundation, Mexico City), in which she wears a metal brace and her body is open
to reveal a broken column in place of her spine. Her sorrow over her inability
to bear children is revealed in paintings such as Henry Ford Hospital
(1932, Collection of Dolores Olmedo Foundation), in which objects that include a
baby, a pelvic bone, and a machine hover around a hospital bed where she lies
having a miscarriage.
Kahlo had three exhibitions during her lifetime. The
exhibitions in New York City in 1938 and in Paris in 1939 were organized through
her contact with the French surrealist poet and essayist André
Breton. In 1953 she had her first exhibition in Mexico, at a gallery in
Mexico City. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait was
published in 1995. Her home in Coyoacán is now the Frida Kahlo Museum. |
