Next to Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol , perhaps the most famous and recognizable 20th century Modern creative person was a diminutive , seriously disabled Mexican womanhood whose own dark , brooding phiz , top by a single , savage - looking eyebrow , was frequently the subject of her painting .
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón , known to the world as Frida Kahlo , survive just 47 twelvemonth , from 1907 to 1954 , and spent much of it in excruciating pain , both from polio and the gist of a 1925 bus accident . Her injuries necessitated XII of operations on her back , leg and foot , and forced her to spend calendar month at a time in layer , confine in a body cast . But those uttermost strong-arm problems did n’t prevent her from make art . To the contrary , Kahlo used her strong-arm and emotional torment as raw stuff for her house painting , which fused elements of the European Realist , Symbolist and Surrealist movements with the vivacious colors and alien style of autochthonal Mexican art [ source : Arizona State University ] .
Though Kahlo draw in comparatively picayune aid or plaudits during her little lifetime , in the ten since her death , she has become an iconic creative person . Her work is so esteem by museums and gatherer that her 1943 paint " Roots " fetch $ 5.6 million at Sotheby ’s in 2006 [ reference : Artknowledgenews.com ] . Her now instantly placeable face appears on liothyronine - shirts and coffee berry mug , and " Fridamaniacs , " as the critic Stephanie Mencimer has labeled them , have created more than 65,000 WWW site give to her work [ source : PBS ] . Selma Hayek portray her in a 2002 biopic that made $ 25 million at the box power and became the most successful artistry - connect pic ever made [ reservoir : Puente ] . In 2001 , she became the first Hispanic cleaning woman to be draw on a U.S. stamp .
How and why has Frida Kahlo become such an object of far-flung fascination ? In this article , we ’ll discuss the advanced style , disturbingly provocative imagination and dark , caustic remark - drenched humor that makes her work so compelling . But first , let ’s look at her animation story , which was as colorful and tempestuous as her art .
Frida Kahlo Biography
One of Frida Kahlo ’s characteristic quirks was that she claim to be birth in 1910 , the year of the Mexican Revolution . She actually was born in 1907 in Coyoacán , near Mexico City . Her father Guillermo Kahlo was a Magyar immigrant , and her female parent , Matilda Calderon , was of miscellaneous endemic and Spanish descent .
Guillermo Kahlo was a photographer , and as a tiddler , Frida get her first picture to the visual arts by accompany her beginner on assignments and to his studio [ sources : Zamora , Arizona State University ] . She was one of the first girl allowed to recruit in the esteemed Preparatory Academy of Mexico City , where she fell in with a bohemian student group , the Cachuchas , and showed an early flamboyance by decorate inmen’ssuits . She studied report and drawing , but her material ambition was to be a MD [ source : Kettenmann ] .
However at age 18 , a omnibus she was ride in clash with a tram , impaling her body and breaking her pelvis and spine . She spent months in bottom , unable to move much at all . To take her mind off the bother and boredom , she commence to paint , using a particular easel that allowed her to ferment lie down . The hospital equipped her bed with a mirror bind to a canopy , which enabled her to serve as her own theoretical account . That set off her note of self - portraits , which are the most classifiable part of her piece of work . As she later excuse , " I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the content I recognise best " [ reference : Kettenmann ] .
Kahlo ’s brush with death , and the pain and bedridden loneliness that followed , influenced her art . Another influence was her subsequentmarriageat age 22 to muralist Diego Rivera , who was 20 years her aged . She ’d met him as a student . The two strong - willed artists had a passionate but tempestuous relationship , made even more difficult by the numerous liaison each of them had . ( One such dalliance was Kahlo ’s affair with Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky . ) Theydivorcedin 1939 , only to remarry the following year . " I suffer two grave accident in my aliveness , " she once order . " One in which a trolley ping me down [ … ] the other accident is Diego " [ source : PBS ] .
The two saw the world from very unlike slant . Artist - political agent provocateur Rivera create big , bluff wall painting depicting impassioned worker and revolutionaries [ author : PBS ] . Kahlo , in contrast , explored her own tortured inner psychological landscape . We ’ll talk more about that in the next incision .
Frida Kahlo Paintings
In her lifetime , the uniqueness of Frida Kahlo ’s art was greet only by a select few – primarily she and her married man ’s artist and noetic acquaintances . notability who ranged from Josephine Baker to Edward G. Robinson pay visits to the home she kept for Rivera [ rootage : PBS ] .
But who ’s to say whether they knew what to make of the puzzling , trouble images in her paintings – such as her 1946 painting " The Wounded Deer , " in which she portrays herself as a stag running through the woodland , bleed from a volley of arrows . Another ego portrayal , " My Birth , " which was paint in 1932 , limn her bloody head emerge from her female parent ’s birth canal , and there ’s a look of repugnance on her face . Another painting from the same yr , " Self - Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States , " portrays the U.S. as a grey-haired , unnatural wasteland of stack , juxtaposed with the vivid natural landscape painting of the Mexican desert . In other paintings , her husband Diego Garcia appear as a Cyclops growing out of Kahlo ’s brow while she weep [ source : PBS ] .
Kahlo ’s fantastic , sometimes grisly ikon led the Surrealist poet Andre Breton to postulate whether she , too , was a member of the same intellectual movement , which sought to jettison rational thought and tap into the subconscious [ source : PBS ] . Diego Garcia , in dividing line , saw her as a realist –“the first fair sex in the history of artwork to deal , with infrangible and sturdy honesty , one might even say mercilessness , those general and specific themes which alone sham women " [ source : Kettenmann ]
Kahlo herself saw her work as both self - geographic expedition and comment about the world . " Since my subjects have always been my sensations , my state of judgment and the sound reaction that lifespan has been producing in me , I have oft objectified all this in figures of myself , which was the most solemn and veridical affair that I could do in society to verbalize what I felt inside and outside of myself " [ source : PBS ] .
After her demise in 1954 , Kahlo ’s work pine in obscurity for decades until it was rediscover by Mexican and Mexican - American artists and aficionado in the later seventies . Since then , she has not only become phenomenon of ok artistic production but also of soda pop cultivation . In part , it ’s because of the intensity of her visions and her ingenious mashup of advanced and endemic prowess genres , but also because people find her tragic spirit report inspiring . As Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera sees it , Kahlo admirers " get from her this musical theme that you could just keep struggling and keep work and apportion with adversity and keep on going and come up with something that makes life , a whole animation , seem worthwhile " [ generator : Herrera ] .
