Frida Kahlo: life and artistic legacy

Frida Kahlo: The life and work of a primitivist and an early postmodernist in the history of Mexican art and the history of female artists

Mexican artist. Primitivist. Consummate iconoclast. Lover of Diego Rivera and also a lesbian lover of women. A woman of a passionate, childish temperament who longed to have her own child but was systematically thwarted in her attempts. All of these descriptions sum up the works, loves, and lives of Frida Kahlo. ("Frida Kahlo: A Brief Biography," 2004) Yet this woman remained somewhat enigmatic to the rest of the world. As she herself noted in her brightly illustrated and copious diaries, she frequently painted self-portraits because she was so often alone and because she felt that she was the person she I knew best. (Falini, 2004, "Frida and her obsession of self-portraits.)

This obsessive isolation on the part of Kahlo, was partly self-imposed, because of what Kahlo viewed as her odd, even masculine appearance and her painful deformity, as the result of a freak bus accident and her early affliction with polio was a child. ("Frieda Kahlo: A Brief Biography," 2004) Her twisted bodily depiction of her own physical form is seen "as a sort of therapy to survive, an alienation of suffering and physical pain from herself, a kind of repression of the ravaging action inflicted by external events on her body, and also by modern medicine, as Frida was the frequent recipient of unsuccessful operations. Also, she never had the child she desired to bear for Diego Rivera / (Falini, 2004)

Still, despite her introverted temperament, Kahlo remained vitally connected to the pulsating artistic life of her time, including the political and social involvements of Diego Rivera as well as her own quest to create a new form of contemporary Mexican art that fused future and past into one. Still, she saw her art as both national and personal. "They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality," the artist stated, in other words she painted her inner reality with all of its hope, glory, and fury in a national context. One of her most stunning works can be found in the depiction of herself in "Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States" where "Frida, dressed in pink, rises as a statue in the middle of the painting between things representing the Mexican tradition on one side and the technological landscape of North-America on the other one." (Falini, 2004) Her art and her sense of self spanned the borders of nation and of time, and also of the personal and political.

This art stands as an answer to those who might say, how strange that a woman, one might say, whose work is considered to be the quintessential representation of social Mexican art, the art of an evolving people, nation, and national cultural tradition of creative production was so solitary in her own personal point-of-view of her self-identity. Frida united the personal and the political by relating it to her own tormented relationship with her own body, her at times toxic, and always frustrating relationship with her own femininity and reproductive capacity, as is evident in her work.