Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter. She was born in 1907, close to

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter. She was born in 1907, close to the start of the Mexican Revolution.
Her love of her country and pride in its people was very important to her all her life. She is best known
for her self-portraits, made in a simple style with bold colours similar to traditional Mexican Folk Art.
Frida never intended to be a painter. As a teenager she was studying medicine. In a way, she became an
artist literally by accident. When she was eighteen, a trolley car crashed into the bus she was travelling
in. It was a terrible accident and Frida suffered horrific injuries. Her spine, pelvis, collarbone and foot
were so badly damaged that she had to have a lot of surgery and spend many months recovering. It was
while she was recuperating in bed that she started painting to pass the time. She had a specially adapted
easel so that she could paint lying down. She used herself as the model and sometimes used symbols to
represent aspects of her life, thoughts and the pain she was in. But the way she painted her face was not
the way that most ladies would want to be seen. She painted – even exaggerated - her thick, un-plucked
eyebrows and dark downy moustache. These are things that many people would have considered ugly in
a woman, unladylike and mannish. But Frida presented herself as she saw it, creating strong images of
alternative beauty. She wasn’t going to pretend or change her appearance to follow what was expected
of her: Frida was a rebel.
The clothes she wore in her paintings were also an important part of her identity. They looked odd and
old-fashioned. Most stylish women would be wearing elegant dresses and fashionable hairstyles but
Frida showed herself in heavy skirts, shawls, headpieces and ancient Aztec jewellery, a ‘costume’ to symbolise her Mexican heritage and were another symbol of her ‘otherness’ from the conventional norm.
Because much her work was symbolic rather than a literal record of what was actually there, people
started to describe it as Surrealist. Surrealism was an Art Movement that used dream-like images and
the leader of it, French writer Andre Breton, loved Frida’s work. She said ‘I never knew I was a Surrealist
until Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one. I myself don’t know what I am’.
Everything about her was hard to categorise: her work, her appearance and also her sexual orientation.
In 1929 she married the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera. He was the love of her life and their relationship was passionate and deep. But it was also very stormy and Diego was constantly unfaithful.
Throughout their marriage they both had affairs. Frida had affairs with various men, one of them was the
Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky. She was also romantically linked to several women, some of them
famous, such as the Parisian dancer Josephine Baker, Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio and painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
Her attraction to women is a theme that can be found in
some of her works. ‘Two Nudes in a Forest’ (1939) for
example shows two women, one light-skinned, one darkskinned, embracing in an imagined landscape. In another,
she questions traditional gender stereotyping: ‘Self Portrait
with Cropped Hair’ (1940) she portrays herself as a crossdressed androgynous figure in an over-sized mans suit,
sitting amongst the severed tresses of her own hair.
She was a maverick, claiming not to paint her dreams or
nightmares but her own reality. Her work articulated her
experiences, emotions and inner thoughts, communicating
the complexities of her life frankly and directly to you and
me.
In her words ‘Well, I hope that if you are out there and read
this and know that, yes, it's true— I'm here... and I'm just as
strange as you.’
Sadie Lee, artist