A look back on an incredible artist’s life
In 1907, Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico City. Three years later, the Mexican Revolution began. Kahlo often said she was born the year it had begun. After the Revolution, cultural nationalism was promoted in a revitalised way and the Indigenous identity of Mexico reborn. Indigenismo took root, the integration of Indigenous culture into a modern, evolving Mexico that Kahlo embraced. Using her art as a political weapon, she strategically stylised her and her country’s pain on the canvas. In her diary she wrote: “I feel uneasy about my painting… Above all I want to transform it into something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement… I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the Revolution — the only true reason to live.”
Matilde Calderón, Kahlo’s mother, was a dogmatic Catholic, and the Kahlo household, known as La Casa Azul, was strict. Frida described her as kind and intelligent, but also “calculating, cruel and fanatically religious.” Kahlo would go on to defy many of her mother’s strict controls, having romantic affairs with women whilst married, joining the Mexican Communist Party, and dressing in men’s attire. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a photographer of Jewish-German descent, educated Kahlo in photography and encouraged her to pursue art and sports despite the stigma surrounding physical activity for girls at the time.
At age six, Kahlo contracted polio and was ostracised from her peers; her father, who had epilepsy, sympathised with her. Together they retouched and developed photographs. Her passion for photography remained throughout her life. In the Kahlo-Rivera collection, more than 6,000 photographs were found in storage—some her own and signed, many annotated, and many belonging to her father.
Kahlo attended the elite National Preparatory School, where she intended to become a physician, and joined Las Cachuchas, a group of nine students who debated philosophy and politics and rejected conservative norms.
On September 17 1925, Kahlo endured catastrophic injuries in a bus accident. Doctors did not believe she would survive. Bedridden and in pain, she abandoned her plans to become a physician and began painting in bed. Her mother installed a mirror above her bed to facilitate self-portraiture. Kahlo later wrote, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
After partial recovery, she reconnected with politically active friends and joined the Mexican Communist Party. She re-encountered Diego Rivera, who praised her work and they married in August 1929. When Rivera received commissions in the United States, Kahlo reluctantly relocated with him. She described feeling rage at the sickening displays of wealth when people in Mexico were suffering.
Frida Kahlo’s art is bound to her politics, and this fact is too often overlooked due to the modern characterisation of her image. In an ironically capitalist sense, her message is being erased by a pallid replica of her stylised ‘self’ portrait now mass printed on socks, bags, shirts and totes. Her message, more than just a motif, must be remembered to do her justice.
“Frida Kahlo, by Guillermo Kahlo” by plumsaplomb is marked with Public domain mark 1.0.
