“Feet? What do I need you for when I have wings to fly ?”
Frida Kahlo, born on 6 July 1907, is one of the most famous artists in art history. She was a Mexican female artist, who was disabled in a male-dominated environment in post-revolutionary Mexico. As a child, she suffered a bout of polio that left her with a slight limp, a chronic ailment she would endure throughout her life.
In 1925, on her way home from school in Mexico City, the bus she was riding collided with a street car. The accident left her with a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and 11 fractures in her right leg.
“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”
Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter and she met him in the initial years of her career as an artist. They married in 1929, when she was 22, and he was 43.
She painted Frieda and Diego Rivera two years after Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera married.
In the painting, he appears as an important artist, while Kahlo, who is petite and demure beside him, with her hand in his, conveys the role she presumed he wanted: a traditional Mexican wife.
However, their infatuation, passion, and devotion were matched by jealousy, anger, and betrayal with both of them having numerous extramarital affairs.
All her pregnancies ended in miscarriages because of that trolley accident. Diego’s affair with Frida’s sister Cristina Kahlo left her shattered. In 1939, after a painful divorce from her husband, she created her iconic self-portrait – The Two Fridas.
“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”
This painting is symbolic of the artist's emotional pain experienced during her divorce from Rivera.On the left, the artist is shown in modern European attire, and on the right, she is in Mexican attire. Although both women have their hearts exposed, the woman in the white European outfit also seems to have had her heart dissected and the artery that runs from this heart is cut and bleeding. The artery that runs from the heart of her Tehuana-costumed self remains intact because it is connected to the miniature photograph of Diego as a child. Whereas Kahlo's heart in the Mexican dress remains sustained, the European Kahlo, disconnected from her beloved Diego, bleeds profusely onto her dress.
“I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”
The couple remarried in December 1940, when Frida was battling an illness.
Personal isolation—its pain and its strength—is a recurring force across the sixty self-portraits Kahlo painted in her career and for which she became celebrated.
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone,” Kahlo once explained, “because I am the person I know best.”
Frida Kahlo is also famous for her unibrow. An enduring feminist icon, Kahlo’s unibrow has become shorthand for: “I won’t curb my self-expression to meet your expectations of how a woman should look.” That shock of dark hair on her brow is a statement rejecting stereotypes about what is and isn’t attractive.
Frida embraced her whole self, her true self - her femininity and masculinity. She never tried to hide her ‘masculine‘ features, instead, she exaggerated these features such as her mono-brow and faint mustache in self-portraits.
Even after everything she went through, contracting polio at six, the agony of spina bifida, and her near-fatal car accident, she never saw herself as the victim.
“I think that little by little I'll be able to solve my problems and survive.”
She painted raw, painful honest experiences that many women faced but never expressed.
In 1953 her leg had to be amputated because of gangrene.
“I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return”.
Her last painting was Viva la Vida, Watermelons. A vibrant conclusion to the short life of Frida Kahlo, Viva la Vida, Watermelons features rich color contrasts, curves and angles, and a final message from the artist herself.
Frida Kahlo inscribed "Viva la Vida" on the central melon wedge at the bottom of the canvas, which translates as "Long live life", just eight days before she died in 1954.
Frida Kahlo was a true fighter and although she had to face numerous challenges, she was determined to live her life on her terms.
“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
- Frida Kahlo
- Amishi Garg
Very well written !
👏🙌🙌👏