Frida Kahlo - Oil Painting Reproductions

1907 - 1954 • Mexican • Painter • Surreal/Folk/Feminist

"I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration." - Frida Kahlo

Kahlo associated herself with the pre-Columbian and revolutionary history of her country. Ignoring her 1907 birth certificate, she listed her birth year as 1910, the year of Mexico's rebellion against dictatorship. As a child she had polio, and was left with one weak leg. At 18 she was in a bus and trolley collision that broke, twisted, and crushed her entire body, and as a result, throughout the course of her life she endured more than 30 operations. When she died, at age 47, Kahlo left more than 200 works, mostly self-portraits in native Mexican dress in the FOLK ART tradition. Her paint is flat, she used little MODELING, her figures are forward facing (FRONTAL), without expression, and stare straight ahead. At times she adapted the small, Mexican EX VOTO painting on tin, popular since Colonial times, as her medium. One of her most powerful and puzzling works, The Two Fridas (1939), shows her dual European (Jewish) and native Mexican heritage. In this double self-portrait, she sits on a bench in almost identical poses, but one figure wears a prim white Victorian dress and the other a peasant costume the colors of earth, sky, and sun. Most unsettling and symbolic, the women's hearts are painted outside their clothing, attached by an artery that starts in a small picture of RIVERA, Kahlo's husband, held by the self in native costume, and ends in the hand of the other. The artery is stanched with surgical scissors. She and Rivera were divorcing at the time the picture was painted, though they later remarried. Their relationship was difficult and complex throughout their association, and while Rivera's fame and support of her work allowed her entree into the art world, she lived in his shadow despite her own stunning originality. European artists claimed Kahlo as a SURREALIST and showed her work in Paris. As in the quotation above, however, she protested that she painted her own reality, not dreams. Her work is rich not only with cultural nationalism but also with her personal experience and pain, both emotional and physical. In several self-portraits, an image of Rivera's face is painted on her forehead. The Broken Column (1944) refers to her injury: Body pierced by nails, her spine replaced with a multiply fractured column, her torso is strapped into a white brace. Kahlo also painted previously unexplored subjects of menstruation, abortion, miscarriage, and sexual rejection with forthright candor, long in advance of FEMINIST art. Kahlo and Rivera were political radicals inspired by Communism; she had an affair with Leon Trotsky during his stay in Mexico. Kahlo's standing and reputation began to grow in the 1970s along with the feminist movement, and her extraordinary innovations and contributions continue to build her expanding reputation.