Frida Kahlo's paintings demonstrated her free spirit. She never let herself to be bound by conventions or techniques, notes Giridhar Khasnis
"Ipaint my own reality. The only thing that I know is that I paint because I need to…I am often alone and the person I know best is myself…" — Frida Kahlo.
In her younger days, Kahlo (birth name: Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón) dreamed of getting into medicine to cure people and relieve them of pain. She even took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Ironically, she herself became a permanent patient, undergoing more than 32 operations during her short lifetime.
When she was six, she was afflicted with polio. When she was 18, a near-fatal bus accident injured her pelvis, spine and uterus. With her left leg and right foot crushed, she was confined to bed for months. As a final blow, a year before her death, her leg was amputated, as a result of gangrene.
Interestingly, Kahlo entered the world of art when she took up painting as part of the healing process and "just to relieve my boredom more than anything else". When she was bedridden after the bus accident, a special easel was made for her so that she could paint lying down. Her mother even hung a mirror on the ceiling over her bed for Kahlo to see herself and her condition clearly.
Thus, Kahlo's work, comprising about 200 paintings, became distinctly autobiographical. It brought out with an intense honesty varied facets of her troubled life which was full of physical pain, medical trauma and emotional suffering. Her paintings expressed her own physical and psychological experiences, and came out as strongly moving, haunting, and stunningly original narratives in which elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore merged generously. Kahlo's paintings demonstrated her free spirit, for she never let herself to be bound by conventions or techniques.
Romantic by nature
Despite her physical condition and suffering, Kahlo was an incredible romantic throughout her life. Said to have been a closet lesbian/bisexual, she had many affairs with the likes of French poet André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, German art dealer Berggruen, playwright Clare Boothe Luce, photographer Nickolas Muray and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, besides famous actresses Dolores Del Rio and Paulette Goddard.
But her true love was the famous artist and muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), whom she passionately adored, married (in 1929), divorced (1939) and remarried (1940). Tiny in stature with incredibly small feet, Frida's form completely contrasted with that of Rivera who towered over 6 feet in height and weighed nearly 100 pounds. He was also 20 years elder to her.
When he met her first, she was just 16 and even then 'the unusual dignity and self-assurance, and a strange fire in her eyes' attracted him. It was Rivera who first recognised Kahlo's talent and encouraged her to pursue painting.
"I recommend her to you, not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work," Rivera reportedly told Pablo Picasso many years later. "Acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life."
Although he loved Kahlo intensely, Rivera could not stop himself from being a habitual adulterer, and his infidelity caused much pain to Kahlo. "I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a street car ran me over; the other accident is Diego," recalled Kahlo.
Her 'Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair' (oil on canvas/ 40 x 28 cm), painted in 1940 (months after she was divorced from Rivera), is a very unusual and disturbing picture. It shows her sitting on a chair in an empty room, dressed in a man's suit and holding a pair of scissors in her right hand. Bunches and strands of hair are strewn everywhere in the room. The painting also shows a quote from a Mexican love-song: "Look, when I loved you, it was for your hair; now that you are shorn, I love you no longer."
Symbol of feminism
A committed communist all her life, Kahlo is often referred to as a feminist. "I think my work too was empowered by my struggles as a human… If I was in pain, I drew it, and portrayed the emotions I was going through. And I guess that many women have difficulty sometimes expressing that sort of thing. Often, women are repressed within the family structure and I guess that my paintings resonate so strongly with women because they are representative of the struggles women face."
Her inability to bear children (due to the bus accident) also affected much of her adult life. "That must be the hardest thing a woman can face, to be unable to fulfill her motherly urges which you cannot understand unless you are a woman. It is just so strong that urge… I still ask God why I was denied that right. But maybe, maybe my work would not have been so far-reaching without my struggles."
Painted 80 years ago in the aftermath of her second miscarriage, 'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932) is among the most painful self-portraits that Kahlo ever painted. Also known as 'The Flying Bed', the disturbing work shows her lying unclothed on the back with a bulging stomach in a hospital bed whose sheets are soaked in blood. The bed and its sad inhabitant float in an abstract space; a large tear is seen falling from her left eye.
Among her other well-known paintings are 'My Birth' (1932), 'My Dress Hangs There' (1933); 'A Few Small Nips' (1935); 'My Wet Nurse and I' (1937); 'The Deceased Dimas' (1937); Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky) 'Between the Curtains' (1937); 'Self-Portrait with Monkey' (1938); 'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale' (1939); 'The Two Fridas' (1939); 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace' (1940); 'Self-Portrait as a Tehuana' (Diego on My Mind), 1943; and 'The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl' (1949).
"Kahlo made personal women's experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries," wrote Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers — men and women — be moved by them."
Although she did not receive much recognition during her lifetime, Kahlo was admired by many. In one of his letters, Picasso is said to have written to Rivera: "Neither (André) Derain, nor I, nor you, are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo."
When she died in 1954, Kahlo was still three years shy of 50. The official cause of her death was pulmonary embolism set on by pneumonia, but some accounts suggest suicide through overdose of pain killers.
"Ipaint my own reality. The only thing that I know is that I paint because I need to…I am often alone and the person I know best is myself…" — Frida Kahlo.
In her younger days, Kahlo (birth name: Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón) dreamed of getting into medicine to cure people and relieve them of pain. She even took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Ironically, she herself became a permanent patient, undergoing more than 32 operations during her short lifetime.
When she was six, she was afflicted with polio. When she was 18, a near-fatal bus accident injured her pelvis, spine and uterus. With her left leg and right foot crushed, she was confined to bed for months. As a final blow, a year before her death, her leg was amputated, as a result of gangrene.
Interestingly, Kahlo entered the world of art when she took up painting as part of the healing process and "just to relieve my boredom more than anything else". When she was bedridden after the bus accident, a special easel was made for her so that she could paint lying down. Her mother even hung a mirror on the ceiling over her bed for Kahlo to see herself and her condition clearly.
Thus, Kahlo's work, comprising about 200 paintings, became distinctly autobiographical. It brought out with an intense honesty varied facets of her troubled life which was full of physical pain, medical trauma and emotional suffering. Her paintings expressed her own physical and psychological experiences, and came out as strongly moving, haunting, and stunningly original narratives in which elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore merged generously. Kahlo's paintings demonstrated her free spirit, for she never let herself to be bound by conventions or techniques.
Romantic by nature
Despite her physical condition and suffering, Kahlo was an incredible romantic throughout her life. Said to have been a closet lesbian/bisexual, she had many affairs with the likes of French poet André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, German art dealer Berggruen, playwright Clare Boothe Luce, photographer Nickolas Muray and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, besides famous actresses Dolores Del Rio and Paulette Goddard.
But her true love was the famous artist and muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), whom she passionately adored, married (in 1929), divorced (1939) and remarried (1940). Tiny in stature with incredibly small feet, Frida's form completely contrasted with that of Rivera who towered over 6 feet in height and weighed nearly 100 pounds. He was also 20 years elder to her.
When he met her first, she was just 16 and even then 'the unusual dignity and self-assurance, and a strange fire in her eyes' attracted him. It was Rivera who first recognised Kahlo's talent and encouraged her to pursue painting.
"I recommend her to you, not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work," Rivera reportedly told Pablo Picasso many years later. "Acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly's wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life."
Although he loved Kahlo intensely, Rivera could not stop himself from being a habitual adulterer, and his infidelity caused much pain to Kahlo. "I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a street car ran me over; the other accident is Diego," recalled Kahlo.
Her 'Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair' (oil on canvas/ 40 x 28 cm), painted in 1940 (months after she was divorced from Rivera), is a very unusual and disturbing picture. It shows her sitting on a chair in an empty room, dressed in a man's suit and holding a pair of scissors in her right hand. Bunches and strands of hair are strewn everywhere in the room. The painting also shows a quote from a Mexican love-song: "Look, when I loved you, it was for your hair; now that you are shorn, I love you no longer."
Symbol of feminism
A committed communist all her life, Kahlo is often referred to as a feminist. "I think my work too was empowered by my struggles as a human… If I was in pain, I drew it, and portrayed the emotions I was going through. And I guess that many women have difficulty sometimes expressing that sort of thing. Often, women are repressed within the family structure and I guess that my paintings resonate so strongly with women because they are representative of the struggles women face."
Her inability to bear children (due to the bus accident) also affected much of her adult life. "That must be the hardest thing a woman can face, to be unable to fulfill her motherly urges which you cannot understand unless you are a woman. It is just so strong that urge… I still ask God why I was denied that right. But maybe, maybe my work would not have been so far-reaching without my struggles."
Painted 80 years ago in the aftermath of her second miscarriage, 'Henry Ford Hospital' (1932) is among the most painful self-portraits that Kahlo ever painted. Also known as 'The Flying Bed', the disturbing work shows her lying unclothed on the back with a bulging stomach in a hospital bed whose sheets are soaked in blood. The bed and its sad inhabitant float in an abstract space; a large tear is seen falling from her left eye.
Among her other well-known paintings are 'My Birth' (1932), 'My Dress Hangs There' (1933); 'A Few Small Nips' (1935); 'My Wet Nurse and I' (1937); 'The Deceased Dimas' (1937); Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Leon Trotsky) 'Between the Curtains' (1937); 'Self-Portrait with Monkey' (1938); 'The Suicide of Dorothy Hale' (1939); 'The Two Fridas' (1939); 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace' (1940); 'Self-Portrait as a Tehuana' (Diego on My Mind), 1943; and 'The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth, Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl' (1949).
"Kahlo made personal women's experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries," wrote Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers — men and women — be moved by them."
Although she did not receive much recognition during her lifetime, Kahlo was admired by many. In one of his letters, Picasso is said to have written to Rivera: "Neither (André) Derain, nor I, nor you, are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo."
When she died in 1954, Kahlo was still three years shy of 50. The official cause of her death was pulmonary embolism set on by pneumonia, but some accounts suggest suicide through overdose of pain killers.