Oil Painting Reproductions On Canvas

Painting Beyond Her Pain: The Life of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo Roots

Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico in July of 1907 to a father of Hungarian-Jewish decent, and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent. Early on in her life Frida had issues with her health, which would follow her during her lifetime.

There is some question about her date of birth. Kahlo’s official birth certificate states that her name at birth was Magdalena Carmen Frieda Calderon, and that she was born at 8:30am on July 6th, 1907.

She was quoted as saying that she was born at 1:00am on July 7th, 1910, a date that just happens to coincide with the start of the Mexican Revolution, but she just changed the date so that she would be appear at least on paper to be more youthful.

When Kahlo was six years old she contracted Polio, and the disease affected her right leg and caused it to become quite thin and stayed that way through her life. Another incident that happened to Kahlo in her teen years was a traffic accident.

The accident wound up putting her in a hospital in a body cast for three months but eventually Frida’s body healed from her injuries, but she would experience relapses of severe pain for the remainder of her life. Many people have commented on her art work by saying that they feel that the aftermath of that accident is reflected in her artwork.

Kahlo’s body of work is quite impressive considering the fact that a career in the field of art and painting had never been a part of her plans. Originally she had been a pre-med student who was enrolled in a course in Mexico City.

Her work included many self portraits of herself, and she was once quoted as saying that “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone… because I am the subject I know best.”

Frida Kahlo paintings displays strong influences of Mexican culture and also Amerindian cultural tradition. Kahlo’s body of work totaled 143 paintings, and 55 of those paintings were self portraits. Many of those self portraits featured aspects that were symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. When talking about the portraits she had said “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Her art has had many different aspects or influences associated with it including Naive art or folk art, surrealist and even Andre Breton in 1938 was quoted as describing “Kahlo’s art as a “ribbon around a bomb.”

Early in her life, Frida Kahlo had been married. Early on, she had communication with a Mexican artist that she admired named Diego Rivera. As she asked for his advice and they continued their communications, an intimate relationship developed between the two, and despite objections from her mother they married in 1929.

Unfortunately, Kahlo and Rivera both were very temperamental people, and their marriage was troubled from the beginning. They both had extramarital affairs, and Kahlo who was bisexual had affairs with both men and women. Rivera was able to tolerate the affairs with women; he had no tolerance for her affairs with men and was very jealous.

Their marriage ended in 1939, possibly after Kahlo found out that Rivera had an affair with her sister Christina who was younger than Frida. A year later they would wed again, and again it was a troubled marriage. Sometimes they would sleep in separate living quarters and sometimes they would sleep adjacent to one another.

On July 13, 1954, Frida Kahlo passed away. A few days before her end she wrote in her personal diary “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return — Frida”. A pulmonary embolism was listed has the official cause of her death. An autopsy was never performed on her body, but some suspected that she may have died of an overdose of medications that may or may not have been accidental in nature.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 2:42 pm. It is filed under VISUAL ARTS and tagged with Frida Kahlo, Kahlo paintings, Mexican artist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.