Frida Kahlo Overview

Kahlo began painting at 18 while recovering from injuries she received in a trolley accident that left her scarred for life; her spine was broken in 17 places and her reproductive organs were damaged by a shaft of metal that impaled... [more]

Kahlo began painting at 18 while recovering from injuries she received in a trolley accident that left her scarred for life; her spine was broken in 17 places and her reproductive organs were damaged by a shaft of metal that impaled her pelvis. Her early paintings were academic portraits of friends and family, but in 1932, after a miscarriage, her unmistakable style was born. The event is rendered in a lithograph which depicts the weeping Kahlo suspended in midair between night and day, with a tearful moon shedding its light on her. From that moment, life events and psychological anguishes (amply provided by her injury and her tumultuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera) remained the subjects of most of her work. Her flat, brightly colored compositions use deeply symbolic and introspective imagery to depict the emotional realities of her life. The visceral immediacy of her work prompted André Breton to call it "a bomb with a ribbon around it." Breton would be instrumental in the first exhibition of her work in the United States. Although admired by Surrealists for her dreamlike imagery, she confided to a friend, "I never painted my dreams. I painted my own reality." She aligned her work with the aesthetics of Mexicanidad -- a movement described as a "romantic nationalism that focused upon traditional art and artifacts" -- and revered the Aztecs above all other pre-Spanish indigenous cultures. This influence appears in "Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird," where the hummingbird represents the soul of an Aztec warrior killed in battle or sacrifice. Kahlo also found inspiration in Catholic imagery, and many of her paintings feature inscriptions similar to those found on tin ex-voto reliefs. Criticized by some for her almost obsessive self-portraiture, Kahlo created a distinctive symbology of suffering; its haunting honesty defies sentimentality. In 1954, a year after her first major retrospective, she died following a leg amputation. The last entry in her diary reads: "I hope this exit is joyful -- and I hope never to come back -- Frida." [show less]