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Frida Kahlo’s  said “I paint my own reality” and looking at the work we can hardly disagree.  The raw material of Frida Kahlo’s life is a biographers dream; she  had a compelling personality, was unusually beautiful, well educated and intelligent, but  her life was marred by  tragic events,  due to her social circle she was to meet  (and occasionally have affairs with)  some of the main players of the time.  Trotsky  was a close neighbour and political associate, she knew Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Foucaud,  and Noguchi to name but a few.  These people all had something to say about Frida.  Andre Breton said she had an essential  Surrealist quality “la beaute du diable”  she however  never called herself a Surrealist,  viewing  the movement as a  product of  disillusioned European culture, and could see the misogyny in Surreal fantasies.

Narcissism played a big role in the content of Frida’s paintings.  She painted the reality of her damaged body, her inability to have a child, the grief surrounding her marriage, (and the joy).  She was influenced by Mexican art, its ancient  imagery  and Mexican popular art.  She was fond of  “retablos”, which were small paintings  made by amateurs which typically depict  tragic events with a holy figure of salvation.  One was made for her after her accident,  the  accident was the main event in Kahlo’s life, a tragedy  which informed all of her work.  Aged  eighteen, she  was the victim of a crash between two buses,   a bus  hand rail penetrated her body.  Her injuries made her a semi invalid and caused  her enormous pain which she suffered for the rest of her life.  Added to this, since childhood she had suffered from polio .  Her deformed foot and malformed leg her broken torso often encased in rigid corsets,  were all covered up in the most theatrical of clothing.  Frida usually  wore the native clothing of a Tehuana woman, with  elaborate jewellery and hair styles.  Her self image was part of her art.  In keeping with the Mexican mask culture, Frida dressed this way partly for camouflage but also because of empathy with native Mexicans and her political sympathies with the Mexican revolution.  Towards the end of her life, Frida dressed more and more elaborately;  just as the self portraits “confirmed her existence”  so the clothing acted as a “mask and a frame.”

The main body of Frida’s Kahlo’s work are her self portraits; these paintings convey her dramatic  image, her dark hair, her distinctive eyebrows,  but they also reveal a narcissistic obsession with her disability.  “The Broken Column”  is a  painting where “pain and eroticism are evenly balanced”.  “Without  hope” shows a bed ridden Frida spewing out horrendous matter  which has attached itself to the easel balanced above her bed.   The animal in “The Wounded Deer” has her  facial features, and its vulnerable  body is being slowly destroyed by piercing arrows. Other portraits show  the image of her husband,n Diego Rivera  on her forehead, he was the famous  Mexican  muralist  who she divorced once, and  married twice.  She painted herself being born, her miscarriage, and as a mother figure to her husband, cradling Diego like a baby.

Article and photograph by Ann Lee

Interior Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, Mexico City