Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous civilisation and past feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.
Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident equally a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, cleaved foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had thirty operations.
Life experience is a mutual theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.
The devastation to her body from the bus accident is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column. Kahlo is depicted most naked, split downwardly the middle, with her spine presented as a broken decorative cavalcade. Her peel is dotted with nails. She is too fitted with a surgical brace.
I paint self-portraits because I am and then ofttimes alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo
Kahlo's first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Wearing apparel in 1926. It was painted in the style of 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who themselves were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. She besides sometimes drew from the Mexican painters in her utilize of a background of tied-back drapes. Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1929), Portrait of a Woman in White (1930) and Self-Portrait Defended to Leon Trotsky (1937) all bear this background.
In her 2nd-self portrait, "Fourth dimension Flies," Kahlo uses a folk style and vibrant colors. She wears peasant wearable, and the red, white and light-green in the painting are the colors of the Mexican flag.
During her life, self portrait is a subject field that Frida Kahlo ever returns to, as artists have ever returned to their beloved themes - Vincent van Gogh his Sunflowers, Rembrandt his Self Portrait, and Claude Monet his Water Lilies.
Frida and Diego: Love and Pain
Kahlo and Rivera had a tumultuous relationship, marked by multiple affairs on both sides. Cocky-Portrait With Cropped Pilus (1940), Kahlo is depicted in a homo's suit, holding a pair of pair of scissors, with her fallen hair effectually the chair in which she sits. This represents the times she would cutting the hair Rivera loved when he had affairs.
The 1937 painting Retentiveness, the Heart, shows Kahlo's hurting over her husband's affair with her younger sis Christina. A large broken middle at her anxiety shows the intensity of Kahlo'due south anguish. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, but reunited a year afterwards and remarried. The Two Fridas (1939) depicts Kahlo twice, presently after the divorce. One Frida wears a costume from the Tehuana region of United mexican states, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a European wearing apparel as the adult female who Diego betrayed and rejected. Afterwards, she is back in Tehuana dress in Cocky-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) and Self Portrait (1948).
Pre-Columbian artifacts were mutual both in the Kahlo/Rivera domicile (Diego collected sculptures and idols, and Frida collected Jewelry) and in Kahlo's paintings. She wore jewelry from this period in Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1926), Self-Portrait With Monkey (1938) and Cocky-Portrait With Braid (1941), among others. Other Pre-Columbian artifacts are found in The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City (1938), Girl With Expiry Mask (1938) and Self-Portrait With Small Monkeys (1945).
My painting carries with it the message of hurting." - Frida Kahlo
Surreal or Realist?
Frida Kahlo participated in the "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in 1940 at the Galeria de Arte, Mexicano. There, she exhibited her 2 largest paintings: The Two Fridas and The Wounded Tabular array (1940). Surrealist Andrew Breton considered Kahlo a surrealistic, a label Kahlo rejected, maxim she just painted her reality. Notwithstanding, In 1945, when Don Jose Domingo Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read the book Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud - whose psychoanalysis works Surrealism is based on - and paint her understanding and estimation of this book. Frida Kahlo painted Moses, and this painting was recognized as 2d prize at the annual art exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime, although she painted occasional portraits on commission. She had but one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, merely a year before her death at the historic period of 47.
Today, her works sell for very high prices. In May 2006, Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Roots, was sold for $v.62 one thousand thousand at a Sotheby's auction in New York, sets a record every bit the about expensive Latin American work ever purchased at auction, and as well makes Frida Kahlo ane of the highest-selling woman in fine art.
Widely known for her Marxist leanings, Frida, along with Marxism Revolutionary Che Guevara and a small-scale ring of contemporary figures, has become a countercultural symbol of the 20th century, and created a legacy in fine art history that continues to inspire the imagination and listen. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahlo achieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far across Mexico'south borders, although zero like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her enduring epitome recognizable everywhere.
At the Frida Kahlo Museum in United mexican states Urban center, her personal property are on display throughout the house, as if she still lived there. Kahlo was built-in and grew up in this building, whose cobalt walls gave way to the nickname of the Blue House. She lived there with her husband for some years, and she died there. The facility is the most popular museum in the Coyoacan neighborhood and among the nearly visited in Mexico City.
