Frida Kahlo
(1907 - 1954) |
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Self portraits Art Work
| Name: |
Frida Kahlo |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Coyoacan, Mexico |
| Nationality: |
Mexican |
| Birth: |
1907 |
| Death: |
1954 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Self portraits |
| Medium: |
Oil |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
Visitors come and go through Frida Kahlo's bedroom and studio in the Blue House' where the Mexican artist was born in 1907 and where she also died. They come to see the four-poster bed on which her painted plaster corset lies, her wheelchair in front of her easel, her diaries and traditional Mexican costumes, the hand thrown clay bowls in the kitchen and the courtyard adorned with plants. The 'Casa Azul', in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan, has been a museum devoted to Kahlo's work since her death in 1954.
There are few artists whom we think we know as well as Frida Kahlo. Her life has been the subject of several films in which we learn what she most liked to eat, what she drank, what the painful details of her history of illness were and how she sympathized with the Communists, how she had various love affairs and what highs and lows she experienced in her marriage to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a man twice her age.
The daughter of a successful German- Jewish photographer and a Mexican mother, Frida had originally planned to study medicine When she was eighteen, however, she was severely injured in a bus accident and was confined to bed for months. This is when she began to paint. Kahlo never received any professional training, however, and from the start, she used painting as a means of examining the accident, its effects on her body and her appearance. Over half her 130-odd paintings are self-portraits. She showed herself wearing different clothes, surrounded by her possessions, tropical vegetation or symbolically laden animals, or perforated with nails or in men's clothes, her hair cut short - but always with the same proud bearing and impassive expression of almost mask-like beauty.
Her painting The Two Fridas was executed in 1939 shortly after her divorce from Rivera (yet, this didn't last long, for the two remarried in 1940). A life-size double self-portrait, the painting is unparalleled in the history of art. The European' Frida is seen sitting on the left wearing a high-necked, white lacy dress. An artery has been severed and blood drips through the surgical clamp onto her skirt to merge with its embroidered flowers. Her alter ego is the Frida of the darker skin, the one wearing the traditional dress of the Tehuana, just as Rivera loved her. His childhood portrait comes in direct contact with her own lifeblood. This painting is executed simply and realistically - except for the hearts and veins that appear to have been lifted from an anatomical textbook. With such an unexpected conjunction of external reality and internal imagination, Kahlo's painting recalls Surrealist works. When Andre Breton, the chief spokesman of Surrealism in Paris, 'discovered' her in the late 1930s and introduced her there, she soon distanced herself from the movement. Her work was nourished by sources other than the intellectual art of the Surrealists, which, among other things, took its inspiration from psychoanalysis. Above all, Kahlo found her models in the Mexican popular art that she admired and collected, not least its naive votive pictures that juxtapose the unreal and miraculous with the everyday (streams of blood flow from miracle- working reliquaries, flaming hearts lie open). Unlike retable's, however, Kahlo's pictorial world is almost obsessively self-referential. Nowadays she is practically worshipped as a martyr, a proud beauty, a passionate lover and fascinating artist. Especially since the women's movement of the 1980s, she has evolved into a role model.
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Frida Kahlo
Mexican, 1907-1954
From 1926 until her death, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life. Kahlo was one of four daughters born to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacin.
She did not originally plan to become an artist. A polio survivor, at 15 Kahlo entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. However, this training ended three years later when Kahlo was gravely hurt in a bus accident. She spent over a year in bed, recovering from fractures of her back, collarbone, and ribs, as well as a shattered pelvis and shoulder and foot injuries. Despite more than 30 subsequent operations, Kahlo spent the rest of her life in constant pain, finally succumbing to related complications at age 47.
During her convalescence Kahlo had begun to paint with oils. Her pictures, mostly self-portraits and still lifes, were deliberately naive, filled with the bright colors and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she loved. At 21, Kahlo fell in love with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose approach to art and politics suited her own. Although he was 20 years her senior, they were married in 1929; this stormy, passionate relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of Rivera's career, a divorce and remarriage, and Kahlo's poor health. The couple traveled to the United States and France, where Kahlo met luminaries from the worlds of art and politics; she had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938. Kahlo enjoyed considerable success during the 1940s, but her reputation soared posthumously, beginning in the 1980s with the publication of numerous books about her work by feminist art historians and others. In the last two decades an explosion of Kahlo-inspired films, plays, calendars, and jewelry has transformed the artist into a veritable cult figure.
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Samples of Work
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