Frida Kahlo is my idol. She has been my artistic role model since the age I began to recognize paintings. After a trolley accident when she was fifteen up until she died at age forty-seven in 1954, her life was filled with constant physical and emotional pain and disappointment. The accident injured her pelvis and spine, stripping her of her ability to have children and forcing her to wear various types of plaster corsets and metal braces for the rest of her life. She suffered miscarriages and had to undergo almost thirty-five surgeries on her back and spine. She was an individual, decorating her self every day like a little Mexican doll. She was an intelligent girl who managed to get kicked out of school for pulling pranks. She was bisexual and was rumored to have cheated on her husband with men and women to “get even”, Lenin Trotsky among them. She drank hard liquor and smoked cigars. For all these reasons and more, Frida is unlike any other female artist I have ever heard about.
It may be slightly humorous, or maybe pathetic, to note the great lengths I have undergone to form some sort of connection with the great Frida Kahlo. I’ve tried to replicate her painting style to gain some Mexican influences to no avail; drawn myself a poster sized tribute of Calaveras, or Mexican sugar skulls, and flowers in time to remember the anniversary of her death, and even traveled all the way to Mexico to visit her home. La Casa Azul, or the Blue House, is located in the small town of Coyoacan in Mexico City. The town is filled with sidewalk restaurants, colorful houses, and blocks filled with costume shops for tourists. Frida grew up in the Blue House, built by her German father Guillermo Kahlo, and moved back during the final years of her life. It was converted into a museum only a few years after, but most her work was moved to other museums around Mexico. Even though I was not able to see her works there, or even take photographs inside the house, I felt a strong bond with Frida the moment I stepped into her garden, right in the center of the house. Walking around and in and out of her rooms, I could almost see her painting, crying, sleeping, smoking, or writhing in pain. My eyes were constantly moving and resting on different areas, her abandoned brushes and canvases, a painted corset, and the red Communist sickle and hammer adorning several walls around the house.
Some of Frida’s works remind me of car crashes, or finding a dead animal–there’s a grotesque and graphic quality and yet the viewer continues to look, analyze, and attempt to commit every detail to memory. One of the most graphic is My Birth, which portrays…well…her birth. Her mother lies on her back, legs spread wide open, and naturally delivering a newborn Frida. In A Few Small Snips Frida twistedly paints the domestic attack of a young woman by her husband. She found the story in a newspaper article where a woman was viciously murdered in an act of jealousy. The woman’s husband told the judge, “But it was just a few small nips!” Her mental state was severely unstable after discovering her sister Cristina sleeping with her husband and channeled her pain into this piece.
Of her collection of almost two hundred paintings, my absolute favorites are her first Self Portrait from 1926, the Two Fridas, and The Broken Column. The self-portrait looks so different from the dozens of others she came to paint, reflecting the style of the Italian Renaissance. She sits up straight, body lengthened and slimmed, hair pulled back, and clothed in a red velvet dress. The warm colors are very romantic, which is understandable considering she painted this as a gift to win back her boyfriend. The Two Fridas was painted after she divorced from Diego and reflects her two personalities, the Frida in a Victorian wedding dress that Diego abandoned and the Frida in full Tehuana costume that Diego loved. She paints a stormy, cloudy background, expressing her storm of inner emotion and heartbreak. Both Fridas “wear their hearts on their sleeve”; the Frida in Victorian dress is missing part of her heart and trying to stop the blood flow while the others is perfectly intact. Either way, they grasp hands desperately; she was her only true friend. The Broken Column is one of her more tragic paintings, clearly depicting her intense physical pain. She stands all alone in a desert, breasts exposed and making her vulnerable to the audience (originally, she was entirely nude but she thought it took away from the emotional distress), and she is crying. The reference in the title comes from the fact that Frida’s Ionic column was broken and she was forced to wear a steel corset that tightly gripped her body and kept her strained. She has nails all over her body, representative of physical pain; the largest one piercing her heart is from Diego. Overall, her works utilized styles of Art Noveau, the European Still Life popular in the 20s, characteristics of Mexican folk art, and Surrealist concepts.
