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Kahlo's work today is appreciated today for its originality, its
surreal, dreamlike, and fantastical quality, expressed in a personal
voice. She painted about her life, without sentimentality and censure.
Her life was full of adventure, violence, suffering, death, and love;
all which make for great storytelling and incredible painted images.
At
age 6, Frida was stricken with polio, which caused her right leg to appear much
thinner than the other. It was to remain that way permanently. When Frida entered
high school she was a tomboy full of mischief who became the ringleader of a
rebellious group of mainly boys that continually caused trouble in the National
Preparatory School. This group pulled many pranks , mainly on professors. It
was also in the National Preparatory School that Frida first came
in contact with her future husband, the famous Mexican muralist,
Diego Rivera. He was commissioned to paint a mural in the school's
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On September 17, 1925, at about age
18, Frida Kahlo was riding the city bus with her boyfriend, Alejandro
Gomez Arias, when the bus crashed and turned over in the road. Alejandro
escaped serious injury but Kahlo suffered a broken spinal column,
a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and 11 fractures
in her right leg. In addition her right foot was dislocated and crushed,
and her shoulder was out of joint. For a month, Frida was forced
to stay flat on her back, encased in a plaster cast and enclosed
in a boxlike structure.
Frida's enormous strength and will to live allowed her to survive
and make a remarkable recovery. Writing at the time in 1927 to
Alejandro, 'They're going to change my cast for the third time, this time to
keep me immobilized without being able to walk for two or three months,
until my
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spine knits together perfectly, and I don't know if afterwards they'll
have to operate on me'when you come back you're really going to be
in for a shock when you see how horrible I am with this apparatus.
Afterward, I'm going to be a thousand times worse, so you can just
imagine: after having been lying down for a month and another month
with two different devices, and now two months flat on my back put
in a coating of plaster, then six months again with a lighter apparatus
so I can walk'Is that enough to drive a person crazy, or not?'
Although Frida's recovery was miraculous (she regained her ability
to walk), she did have relapses of tremendous pain and fatigue all
throughout her life, which caused her to be hospitalized for long
periods of time, bedridden at times, and also caused her to undergo
numerous operations. She once joked that she held the record for
the most operations. Frida underwent about 30 in her lifetime. She
turned to alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes to ease the pain of her
physical suffering.
Once she was out and about after her accident,
a close friend introduced Frida to the artistic crowd of Mexico, which included
Tina Modotti (well known photographer, actress, and communist) and Diego Rivera.
Frida tells the story of meeting with Diego for the first time:
' I
took four little pictures to Diego who was painting up on the scaffolds at the
Ministry of Public Education. Without hesitating a moment I said to him, 'Diego,
come down,' and so, since he is so humble, so agreeable, he came down. 'Look,
I didn't come to flirt with you or anything, even though you are a womanizer,
I came to show you my painting. If it interests you, tell me so, if it doesn't
interest you, tell me that too, so I can get to work on something
else to help out my parents.' He told me, 'Look, I'm very much interested
in your painting, especially this self-portrait which is the most
original. The other seem to me to be influenced by what you've seen.
Go on home, paint a picture, and next Sunday, I'll come to see it
and tell you.'So I did, and he said, 'You have talent.' '
Frida became
to Diego, 'the most important thing in my life,' and they were married on August
21,1929. Frida's mother called the marriage a union between an elephant and a
dove, because Diego was huge and very fat, and Frida was small (a little over
5 feet) and slender. However, Frida was the last unmarried daughter of ill parents
in sad financial straits. Her decision to marry Diego had pragmatic
as well as romantic repercussions, since Diego paid off the mortgage
on her parents' home.
Diego Rivera loved Frida's work and was her
greatest admirer. Frida, in turn, was Diego's most trusted critic. Throughout
their marriage, Diego had several affairs with other women, including Frida's
sister, Christina. Frida said to a friend, 'I have suffered two serious accidents
in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me, the other accident
was Diego.'
Frida let out all of her emotions on a canvas. She painted
her anger and hurt over her stormy marriage and painful miscarriages.
In 1932,
Diego's career took him to Michigan where he was to create a series of murals
at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Frida experienced severe hemorrhaging and was
rushed to Henry Ford Hospital. In the retelling, and in a painting, Frida claimed
to have lost a baby. Her extreme isolation in a strange land, coupled with her
extreme desire to have a baby, is movingly recalled in the painting Henry
Ford Hospital. She expressed the dramatic event in this small painting
with strongly contrasting colors in a surreal style that distorts
scale and proportion. Since 1932 Frida began experimenting with techniques,
painting on tin, making lithographs, and trying fresco painting.
Her work was beginning to emphasize terror, suffering, wounds, and
pain.
Andre Breton recognized that Kahlo's work was Surrealist in
1938. 'The promises of fantasy are filled with greater splendor by reality
itself!' he exclaimed about her work. Breton organized an exhibition
in Paris to include seventeen of Kahlo's paintings in 1938. Traveling
to Paris, Kahlo met Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, and others, Dazzeling
Parisians with her style and originality, her portrait appeared on
the cover of French Vogue. She returned to Mexico feeling more sure
of herself as an artist than ever before. Her pictures were selling
and had earned the praise of many severe critics. Frida was not disturbed
by critical comments from those horrified by her shocking themes.
Frida felt uplifted by her popularity in Paris among famous artists,
political figures, and writers
Upon her return to Mexico, Diego burst
Kahlo's hopes for happiness by asking for a divorce. Her life was to continue
to be one of physical and emotional suffering. The couple remarried in 1940,
but Kahlo was never the same. She returned to the house of her childhood, Casa
Azul in Coyoacan, making her studio there instead of next to Rivera's
in San Angel. She worked and lived in Casa Azul for the rest of her
life.
Frida, despite all of the hurt in her life, was an outgoing
person whose vocabulary was filled with 4 letter words. She loved to drink
tequila and sing off color songs to guests at the crazy parties she
hosted.
Frida only had one exhibition in Mexico and it was in the
spring of 1953. Frida's health was very bad at this time and doctors told
her not to attend. Minutes after guests were allowed into the gallery,
sirens were heard outside. The crowd went crazy for outside there
was an ambulance accompanied by a motorcycle escort. Frida Kahlo
was being carried from it into her exhibition on a hospital stretcher!
The photographers and reporters were shocked. She was placed in her
bed in the middle of the gallery. The mob of people went to greet
her. Frida told jokes, entertained the crowd, sang, and drank the
whole evening. The exhibition was an amazing success.
During the same
year as her exhibition, Frida had to have her right leg amputated below the knee
due to a gangrene infection. This caused her to become deeply depressed and suicidal.
On July 13, 1954, Frida died. No official autopsy was done but suicide was rumored.
Her last words in her diary read "I hope the leaving is joyful and I
hope never to return".
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