Today is Frida Kahlo birthday and we are celebrating the best way we can: with a post dedicated to her and her work! In 7 days, on the 13th, it will also be the anniversary of her death, in 1954. Frida was born on July 6, 1907 in Mexico but she used to tell everyone she was born on July 7, 1910 (not to look younger, just so it would match the start of the Mexican Revolution).
When she was a teenager she suffered a bus accident (she was in a bus that collided with a trolley) that would mark her life forever making her health fragile. Frida also had polio when she 6 years old so one of her legs was skinnier than the other. After the accident she spent a year in bed, she also endured 30 surgeries (during her lifetime), it was when she was confined in bed that she started painting.
The accident left her not only broken (as she used to say) also unable to have babies after a handrail pierced her uterus. After one of her many surgeries she got gangrene and one of her legs had to be amputated at the knee in 1952.
At 22 she married the famous artist Diego Rivera in 1929 (20 years older than her), it was her second accident as she once said. Both had multiple affairs outside their marriage and a less than perfect marriage. In fact they divorced, remarried… Was a very tumultuous relationship.
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 was quite a productive painter, influenced by realism, surrealism and symbolism, she finished around 200 paintings, 55 were self-portraits mostly used as gifts to friends. Frida Kahlo only had one solo exhibition in Mexico during her lifetime. She had to get to the exhibition in an ambulance as her health was quite poor at the time, it was 1953. In July 13th, 1954, at 47, Frida died. The last thing she wrote on her diary was: “I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida“.
Frida was a very controversial woman, she didn’t shave and she was delighted with her iconic uni-brow (that she proudly darkened with the help of make-up) and mustache, she was bi-sexual and had affairs with Josephine Baker, Nickolas Muray, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paulette Goddard, Leon Trotsky… Frida was also a communist, she liked guns, nudity…
She also had her own sense of fashion and even appeared in 1939 French Vogue (the image in this post is a photograph taken by Nickolas Muray, used in a recent French Vogue, not the 30s one)! As Genesis says in her blog Frida was a bad-ass!
SOME RANDOM BITS OF FRIDA RELATED INFORMATION
- There’s a museum dedicated to her under the name Museo Frida Kahlo in La Casa Azul (The Blue House), Mexico, where she was born and died. Her ashes are there too.
- She was the first Hispanic woman to be featured on US Postage Stamps
- Some researches point to her having Munchausen syndrome, because many of her surgeries even the one that caused her to lose a leg were unnecessary. Others also point to Asherman’s syndrome as the cause for her infertility and few miscarriages.
- Many people think she died of a self-induced overdose. As there was no autopsy, that mystery remains.
- Even thought Frida is mostly famous for her paintings, her writings are beautiful and moving The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
- There’s a popular poem around the Internet called “Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell” which is advice for the heart broken but even if its attributed in half of the sites to Frida, the real author is Marty McConnell! Some off its most popular verses in social media are: “leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog” and “don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid“.
- Frida’s complete works can be found online!
- The New York Botanical Garden has a Frida exhibition until November 1, 2015, looks fantastic, so don’t miss it if you are anywhere near! They will be holding many other Frida events till then like their ¡Viva La Frida! Look-Alike Contest this week! On NY that’s why I love you.
- Look at this perfect example of a beautiful and clever children book: Viva Frida
- Internet and Salma Hayek’s 2002 Frida
- For a good documentary about Frida you should watch The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo
- The Heard Museum will open a Frida exhibition on October 31st! It will feature 240 photos from La Casa Azul archive, so if you live near Phoenix you don’t have to travel far to see them!
- You can read some interesting and surprising essays online about Frida like “Frida: a postmodern icon of the cyborg“.
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