The Legendary Frida Kahlo

"No artist movement since the nineteenth century has celebrated the idea of woman and her creativity as passionately as did Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s" (Chadwick 309). 

Surrealism deals with inner realities and how the artist makes it recognized in the public reality of other people. It has "haunting complexity and narrative quality disturbing in its ambiguity" (Chadwick 314), and allows artists for personal exploration. However, "alienated from Surrealist theorizing about women, and from the search for a female muse, women turned instead to their own reality" (Chadwick 312). Women artists began to use themselves and their own bodies as subjects in their work, which caused a lot of chaos and ridicule, but it became a major step in crossing the boundary that kept women from being seen as artists. For women, it was a "liberated understand[ing] of sexuality that surrealism pursued", and allowed women artists to discover and define themselves as women through art. Frida Kahlo is a female artist of the 20th century that followed this path.

"The world just loves women artists who are sad and dead. But I was the hero of my own life" - The Guerrilla Girls (79).

Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter born in 1907, is an artist who challenged and conquered the succession for female artists not only in her time of the 20th century, but for the times in history and the future. Her marriage to the famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera resulted in the advantage of having a place in the art society, but her paintings still proved her worth in the art world alongside her husband as he also encourages her to make art.

In her paintings, Frida turns to her inner self for inspiration and reason. After a fatal trolley accident in 1925, she was crippled for life, having sustained a broken spinal column, a broken pelvis, and countless other injuries that led to dozens of surgeries throughout the rest of her life. It also resulted in the impossibility of bearing children. This fact was the cause that led to her creation of art; taking her own personal experience of losing the "female role" in life and suffering from it in excruciating pain. Frida then turned her pain into art, using paint and canvas as her medium to express her life and her suffering through colors, her body, and her vision of what her reality is. 

The Two Fridas, 1939

Frida also touches upon other subjects in her paintings such as her relationship to her mother, her own birth, her marriage to Diego and their troubling relationship, and her own mixed heritage of having a Mexican mother and a German father. 

Her artwork is very personal. She does not hide anything about herself and is not afraid to put herself out there for the entire world to see. And this is the reason why Frida will forever be a lasting influence. She uses all of her personal experience to express and narrate her entire life story in her paintings, weaving them together into the compelling identity of Frida Kahlo. Because the experiences are real, people can easily relate to them, and Frida's paintings are easily and forever ingrained into peoples' memories, difficult to be forgotten.

The Broken Column, 1944

Works Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.

The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. <http://www.pbs.org/weta/fridakahlo/>

Paintings, biography, quotes. <http://www.fridakahlo.org/>

Frida Kahlo Fans. <http://www.fridakahlofans.com/mainmenu.html>