Frida Kahlo Research Paper

Frida Kahlo: Artistic Heroine and Revolutionary Woman

Much has been written to document the life and works of Frida Kahlo, and with good reason. Born during the years of before the Mexican Revolution, Frida Kahlo was the “poster child” for personal pain and tragedy. Her life included a series of illnesses and misfortunes that led to the personality and reflection of the woman in her artwork. Her marriage to Diego Rivera, a prominent Mexican muralist, was one of the “great tragedies” of her life, but also contributed to defining herself as an independent woman who defied all the stereotypes of women as artists that existed. The other tradegy included a very serious bus accident that left her permanently scared and lame. Her paintings
Women like Kahlo were “unmoved by Surrealist theorizing on the subject of erotic desire” and were “turning to their own sexual reality as a source and subject…For Kahlo…painting became a means of sustaining a dialogue with inner reality”.[7] In her letters, she discusses her encounters with Surrealism and its affect on her. She never fully understood the concepts of surrealism and referred to Andre Breton and others as “a bunch of perfect sons of… their mother” and “big shits of surrealism”.[8] During her exhibition in Paris with members of the surrealist group, she met artists such as Marcel Duchamp, whom she thought was the “only one among the painters and artists here who has his feet on the ground and his brains in their right place”, and befriended his wife for a period of time. She received compliments from artists such as Joan Mirò, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Tanguy, and Paalen, the so called “big shits”. After receiving congratulations and praises in Paris, Kahlo felt a sense of “a capacity to convoke a whole universe out of the bits and fragments of her own self and out of the persistent traditions of her own culture”.[9] She felt a strong connection to the country she came from and the traditions and culture of Mexico are represented in many of her
Her inability to have children plagued her until her death. She often referred to Rivera as her child, and often imagined that she had a son, going so far as to write out a birth card for an unborn child, and even once received her formaldehyde fetus as a gift from her trusted doctor. Kahlo was very aware of her inabilities. “I always knew there was more death than life in my body”. But it was in this void, that she filled with her passion for painting. “I haven’t died and I have something to live for: painting,” she says. “It completed my life. I had three miscarriages. Painting substituted for the babies I never had.”[11] And it was in her painting that we see true passion for life replace the tragedy of one