Frida Kahlo
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (July 6, 1907 - July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by Mexican nature and artifacts. She used a naive folk art style inspired by Mexican popular culture to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings frequently had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to being a member of the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is well-known for painting about her chronic pain experience. Now she is regarded as one of the most important historical figures in Mexico.
Kahlo spent the majority of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán, which is now open to the public as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Despite having polio as a child, Kahlo was a promising student on her way to medical school until she was injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her rehabilitation, she revisited her childhood interest in art, with the goal of becoming an artist.
Kahlo's political and artistic interests led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, where she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929 and traveled together in Mexico and the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing inspiration primarily from Mexican folk culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that incorporated elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs. Her paintings piqued the interest of Surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1938; the exhibition was a success, and it was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting by Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be included in their collection. She was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana and taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado ("La Esmeralda"). In the same decade, Kahlo's always-fragile health began to deteriorate. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, just before her death at the age of 47 in 1954.
Kahlo's work as an artist was relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when art historians and political activists rediscovered it. Not only had she become a recognized figure in art history by the early 1990s, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ movement. Kahlo's work has been praised internationally as a symbol of Mexican national and indigenous traditions, as well as by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of female experience and form.
