Mexican painter. She began to paint while recovering in bed from a bus accident in 1925 that left her seriously disabled. Although she made a partial recovery, she was never able to bear a child, and she underwent some 32 operations before her death in 1954. Her life’s work of c. 200 paintings, mostly self-portraits, deals directly with her battle to survive. They are a kind of exorcism by which she projected her anguish on to another Frida, in order to separate herself from pain and at the same time confirm her hold on reality. Her international reputation dates from the 1970s; her work has a particular following among Latin Americans living in the USA.
In addition to the continual pain of her body's failing, her marriage to Rivera was punctuated with many infidelities--including his affair with her younger sister Cristina--many breakups, one divorce, and countless reconciliations. Often reproduced, for example, is her self-portrait The Wounded Deer (1946). Like Saint Sebastian, the deer with Kahlo's face and the horns of a cuckold keeps going in spite of the many arrows sticking in its sides. There is much blood. A theme which inspired a number of her paintings was her inability to bear children and the agony of miscarriage and loss. The instruments of a hospital stay, in these and in other works depicting medical treatment, become, like the instruments of the passion, symbolic of the tragedy of human suffering as well as the futility of its attempted cure.
As in the traditional art of Mexico and its customs, blood and death are acknowledged, met with, become companions in Kahlo's art. Injury and death are shown without sentiment and with a constant irony. Her use of the Mexican ex voto style, in which little messages appear in painted garlands, is ironic in that it makes use of the Catholic faith which inspires the images but holds out none of the naive hope which gave them birth.
Her deliberately chosen, seemingly primitive style was a part of this Mexican identity, though it is anything but primitive at base. It provided a distancing from the pain in the paintings, which increased the psychological impact as well as emphasizing her devotion to the Mexicanidad, which to her was deeply significant.
"Frida Kahlo." Contemporary Women Artists. St. James Press, 1999.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center
