Frida Kahlo has the peculiar privilege of being the only woman
artist whose story has been told in an Oscar winning movie. It also seems
possible that more has been written about her than about all the other 31 Women
put together. This fame is comparatively recent, for much of the twentieth
century she was largely unknown. Frida Kahlo participated in several important
exhibitions in her curtailed lifetime and was admired by the cognoscenti in Paris and New York,
but after her death in 1954 her work was rapidly forgotten outside her home
country of Mexico.
In the twentieth century, most tomes which purported to give
an overview of Fine Art mentioned very few women artists and Frida appeared as
an aside to her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, if she appeared her at
all. Even books on Surrealism, the movement she was closely associated with,
sometimes fail to mention her. Rivera himself admired and encouraged Kahlo’s
painting, saying more than once that she was a better painter than him, but
neither was in any doubt that Rivera’s work had the renown and brought home the
cash.
Frida Kahlo died in 1954 and her name vanished from view
outside Mexico. It wasn’t until the late 1970’s, with rising feminist interest
in re-discovering women artists, that Kahlo began to be remembered internationally.
Today she is probably the best known woman painter of her era and is regarded
as the pre-eminent exponent of an explicitly female position in the twentieth
century canon of painters. Her paintings epitomise the personal made universal
that so differentiates the work of many (though by no means all) of the
century’s women artists from their male contemporaries.
She was born in 1907 in Coyoacan, Mexico City, to a Mexican
mother and a German immigrant father. Her life story, with her terrible
accident as a teenager, her physical suffering and complex love life is well
known and so I won’t present a timeline as such here. I will just discuss some
of the factors which directly influenced her art. Her parents were the earliest
of these.
Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon was the fifth daughter
of photographer Guillermo Kahlo, a German/Hungarian Jewish refugee. He was
always supportive of Frida; when at the age of six she had an attack of polio
which damaged her right leg, he took her through a rigorous exercise routine and
played sports with her to build her strength and confidence. Significantly, Frida
was the only one of his daughters to take an interest and assist in the
darkroom with his photographic work. The darkroom environment is one of intense
creativity and whilst there was no colour involved, she would have learned pictorial
composition, the use of shadow and light and the importance of detail and
contrast in creating a good image, all lessons equally applicable to painting.
Frida’s mother was Matilde Calderon, a Mexican of mixed
native and Spanish ancestry. Matilde performed the traditional, middle-class
role of housewife, ruling her household with a degree of religious discipline
that did not make family life particularly affectionate, though when fate
afflicted Frida with severe medical problems, her mother’s care was devoted. It
was Matilde who provided Frida, when she was bedbound, with paints and paper to
begin the confrontation with her image and disability which would form a major
aspect of her art.
Frida Kahlo regarded herself as a truly Mexican artist, she
was passionate about her country and fascinated by its pre-Columbian heritage.
Mayan as well as Catholic symbols appear in her canvases from 1932 onwards, but her
later, eclectic imagery shows worldwide influences; she took ideas from ancient
Egyptian, Buddhist and Hindu art as well as the European Renaissance. In 1945
she painted Moses, where, in illustrating the biblical story, she
demonstrates all her influences, from Etruscan art and Queen Nefretiti via Italy
to Ghandi and Communism. She adopted the Mexican retablo, small devotional
pictures painted on sheet metal, as the medium for a number of her works. As
both teacher and planner/artist she was also responsible for several murals,
another important Mexican art form. Opportunities to express her pride in her
country received its major boost when she married Diego Rivera, also
passionately Mexican and already a world renowned muralist.
At first glance, some of Kahlo’s paintings can be mistaken
for charming, even primitive/naïve renditions of pretty or quirky, but
un-momentous subject matter: Frida with a monkey, Frida with a doll, Frida with
her hair elaborately braided, etc. Others can be seen as pure, dreamlike
surrealism such as her dreams floating in the bath around Frida’s feet. The
actuality lies between the primitive and the surreal, but also well beyond
them. Despite her passionate attachment to Mexican traditional and folk art, Frida
Kahlo’s painting was not primitive, neither was it naïve; Kahlo was an
educated, sophisticated and irreverent city girl, not a Mexican peasant. As a
painter she was largely self-taught; being often housebound she had plenty of
time to practice and refine her precise technique and her control of this only
began to slip very near the end of her life.
Her diary of the 1940’s and 50’s reveals an interest in
Breughel and Bosh, but early on she also studied Italian masters including
Botticelli and Bronzino. In her late teens she was already aware of modern
European art movements as well as the Renaissance masters. Her style then was
modern, with elements from cubist collage, as shown in a painting from the mid
1920’s, depicting a group of sophisticated young friends in a café, titled, If
Adelita..(the Peaked Caps). However she was defensively anti-colonialist
and took from European sources only what she really liked, she was determined to
be known as a Mexican artist.
Kahlo had first-hand contact with the non-Mexican
avant-garde from 1930, when she and Rivera lived in San Francisco and travelled
around the US for three years. She returned to the US many times and had her
first solo exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery, New York in November 1938 –
it was a great success and she sold half her pictures. Levy was something of a champion of women
artists, in 1938 alone he gave solo exhibitions to six others as well as Frida,
whilst other galleries exhibited little if any work by women.
Frida Kahlo’s highly individual personal style was a huge
success in her travels and marked her out as different. Her favoured guise, in
costumes representing the strong, matriarchal society of the Tehuantepec
region, not only gave her the aura of a strong Mexican woman, uncontaminated by
European concerns, it also helped to remove attention from her disability and
hide her lame leg under full skirts. These costumes provided her subject for
many paintings, though for Frida this was not their principal function. Her
physical appearance was as much a work of art as her paintings, though it was
no performance. Frida was immensely self-conscious, she wanted to be completely
in control of the visual impression she made on people and so also in control
of their reactions to her.
Frida’s complicated relationship with Diego Rivera was a key
element in much of her art. From the faux-naïve wedding portrait she painted in
1931 to the dramatic Self-portrait with cropped hair of 1940, which she painted
to depict their divorce, she documented their relationship, up and down. This
love-hate marriage is frequently discussed, but today the deep political
commitment, which she shared with Rivera, is either carefully downplayed or even, insultingly, dismissed as a
delusional product of the medication she became dependent on towards the end of
her life, to ease her physical suffering. It may be an uncomfortable fact for those enamoured of the Frida Kahlo myth, but for most of her adult life Kahlo was a well read and enthusiastic supporter of world Communism. She even changed the year of her birth, from 1907 to 1910 not because she wanted to seem younger, but to coincide with the Mexican Revolution of that year. She denigrated herself for being unable to express her political views in her paintings and thus use her art as a platform for the cause. In her final years she began to try to redress the balance, but her increasing infirmity made some of these late paintings rather poor examples, no doubt to her profound dismay.
The self-portrait dominates her oeuvre and though she
emphasises certain unfeminine qualities such as her heavy eyebrows and lip
hair, her portraits are exaggeratedly feminine, paying elaborate attention to
details of her hair, jewellery and clothing in a manner that reaches back to 18th
century portraiture. Her repeated depiction of herself in her pictures sprang
from her need to express those other crucial aspects of her life, over which
she had no control. Her face looks directly out of most of her paintings and at
the viewer. Today Frida Kahlo still makes bold eye contact with her public, her
story and her unique works of art are more popular than ever.
*Sources include:-
Frida Kahlo edited by Emma Dexter & Tanya Barson, published in 2005 for the exhibition at Tate Modern
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: an intimate Self Portrait published 1995 by Bloomsbury
*
You can read about each of the 31 women as their birthdays arrive, earlier ones will remain on this blog. Just click the 'Project 31 Women' label below to see the others.
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