~ Frida Kahlo ~
Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her self-portraits. Kahlo’s life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home, which is known as La Casa Azul (the Blue House). Her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.
Mexican culture and tradition are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterized as naïve art or folk art. Her work has also been described as surrealist. In 1938, André Breton, principal initiator of the surrealist movement, described Kahlo’s art as a “ribbon around a bomb.” Kahlo rejected the “surrealist” label imposed by Breton, as she argued that her work reflected more of her reality than her dreams.
Kahlo suffered lifelong health problems, many of which were caused by a traffic accident she survived at the age of 18. Recovering from her injuries isolated her from other people, and this isolation influenced her works, many of which are self-portraits. Kahlo: “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”
The Tate Modern considers Kahlo “one of the most significant artists of the 20th century” and, according to art historian Elizabeth Bakewell, she is “one of Mexico’s most important 20th century figures.” Kahlo’s reputation as an artist developed posthumously, as during her lifetime, she was primarily known as the wife of Diego Rivera and as an eccentric personality among the international cultural elite. She started to gradually gain more recognition in the late 1970s, when scholars began to question the exclusion of female and non-Western artists from the art historical canon.
Kahlo is considered “one of the most instantly recognizable artists,” whose face has been “used with the same regularity, and often with a shared symbolism, as images of Che Guevara or Bob Marley.” Kahlo’s popular appeal is seen to stem from a fascination with her life story, especially its painful and tragic aspects, and she has become an icon for several minority groups and political movements, such as feminists, the LGBTQ community and Chicanos.
Oriana Baddeley has written that Kahlo has become a signifier of non-conformity and “the archetype of a cultural minority”, who is regarded simultaneously as “a victim, crippled and abused” and as “a survivor who fights back”, while Edward Sullivan has stated that Kahlo is hailed as a hero by so many because she is “someone to validate their own struggle to find their own voice and their own public personalities.”
