Wearing a peasant dress so admired by the Mexican avant-garde, adorned with jewelry bearing a dead hummingbird, Kahlo's "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird/Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibri,” 1940, suggests her comparison of her suffering with that of Christ. The Mexican flora and fauna surrounding her symbolize her affinity for nature and pets that were often companions of her solitude. Nickolas Muray collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.
:Arguably today the most famous artist in the world, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was a brilliant, idiosyncratic painter who uncompromisingly recorded the painful saga of her life in numerous compelling images. An intensely creative artist, who, in spite of crippling physical restrictions, made herself into a living work of art, she captivated all who met her, including a string of famous lovers.
In contrast to the great, sweeping murals by Diego Rivera and others, for which Mexican art is best known, Kahlo's distinctive, jewel-like paintings are small and highly personal. Some 90 percent of her vividly detailed compositions draw on her personal life, in strange, often shocking self-portraits filled with symbolism and reflections on pivotal, often painful moments in her troubled life. Kahlo's unusual and frequently painful likenesses — she painted herself being born and having a miscarriage, for example — are absolutely unforgettable.
Her work allowed her both to express and to fabricate her identity. "I paint my own reality," she said. "I paint because I need to."
Known for years — if at all — as Rivera's long-suffering wife, Kahlo emerged on her own as a global celebrity in the wake of a groundbreaking 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera and a movie based on the book. (Herrera herself cites "feminism, the Chicano movement and multiculturalism" as factors in making Kahlo an "international cult figure.") It is fitting, therefore, that marking the centennial of the artist's birth, Herrera should curate (with Walker Art Center associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter) "Frida Kahlo," a comprehensive survey of her work that opened at the Walker, traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through September 16. It comprises more than 40 of the Mexican artist's self-portraits, portraits, allegorical and symbolic paintings and still lifes, drawn from collections all over the world.
Tracing the history of her ancestry, Kahlo's "My Grandparents, My Parents and I (Family Tree)/Mis abuelos, mis padres y yo (arbol genealogico),” 1936, depicts her in the courtyard of the Blue House, where she was born and died, standing in front of a portrait of her parents that is based on their wedding photograph. Her maternal, Mexican grandparents, left, are symbolized by the land, while her paternal, German Hungarian grandparents, right, are symbolized by the ocean. The Museum of Modern Art, New York ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource.
Born soon after the dawn of the Twentieth Century in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, Kahlo was the daughter of Guillermo Kahlo, a German Hungarian immigrant photographer, and Matilde Calderon, a devout Catholic of Mexican Indian and Spanish descent. Kahlo grew up in the Casa Azul (Blue House), maintained today virtually in its original state as the Museo Frida Kahlo, filled with artwork, painting utensils, books, clothing and furnishings.
A family portrait, taken when she was 18, shows Kahlo wearing her father's three-piece suit, tie and shoes — a reflection of her unconventionality and perhaps her sexual ambiguity. "Kahlo's interrogation and testing of Catholic, patriarchal and bourgeois mores was a primary motivation throughout her life, ultimately helping her define her identity as an artist and informing the art that she produced," writes Carpenter in the catalog. Eccentric and talented, Kahlo's life unfolded on a parallel course with the development of Mexico as a modern nation.
"My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)," 1936, shows Kahlo as an infant, standing in the Blue House, framed by a portrait of her parents based on a wedding photograph, with a fetus overlaying her mother's wedding dress and images of her grandparents above and to either side of the couple. It suggests her mixed European-Mexican Indian roots.
