Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac” notes that today is Frida Kahlo’s birthday.
Today is the birthday of Frida Kahlo, born in Coyoacán, just outside Mexico City (1907). She was born in her parents’ home, La Casa Azul — the Blue House.
When Kahlo was 18, the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar. Her collarbone, spine, and pelvis were fractured. She was bedridden for several months, and it was during this time that she first took up painting. Her mother rigged up an easel that would fit over the bed, and, using a mirror, she painted her first of 55 self-portraits. She showed her early efforts to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who encouraged her to keep at it.
Kahlo said: “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” She first met the painter Diego Rivera in 1923, when she was 15. He had been commissioned to paint a mural at her school, and she would watch him work for hours. In 1929 they were married. Rivera was notoriously unfaithful and even had an affair with Kahlo’s sister Cristina. The couple divorced in 1939, but they remarried soon afterward and remained together until Kahlo’s death. They led largely separate lives, and both artists had affairs throughout their marriage.
Kahlo’s work was championed by surrealist André Breton and painter Marcel Duchamp, who arranged exhibitions of her paintings, which often combine brilliant colors and striking images from Mexican folk art. She said: “[Critics] thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Kahlo had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky during his exile in Mexico City; if you’re looking for summer reading, “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” is a fictionalized, account of the intersection of Trotsky and his assassin’s lives, with a background of the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet NKVD and “fellow traveler,s,” and historian say pretty accurate …
Fascinating. Thanks.
If you happen to be in the Tampa, St Petersburg area, try to visit the Dali Museum. In addition to Dali’s paintings, there are some other artists’ work on display there including some of Kahlo’s self portraits and a landscape as well.
Frieda’s reputation today is an example of the idea that fame is a function of publicity. Diego was more famous for politically provocative works. Frieda was promoted by well-known artists and critics. In the end, I like this statement: She said: “[Critics] thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” In the 2002 film of Frieda’s life, Julie Taymor transformationed incidents in her life into completed works of art, and the reverse– connecting her pictorial achievements with her “realities.”