How Frida Kahlo Worked

One of Frida Kahlo's characteristic quirks was that she claimed to be born in 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution. She actually was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, near Mexico City. Her father Guillermo Kahlo was a Hungarian immigrant, and her mother, Matilda Calderon, was of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent.

Guillermo Kahlo was a photographer, and as a child, Frida got her first exposure to the visual arts by accompanying her father on assignments and to his studio [sources: Zamora, Arizona State University]. She was one of the first girls allowed to enroll in the prestigious Preparatory Academy of Mexico City, where she fell in with a bohemian student group, the Cachuchas, and showed an early flamboyance by dressing in men's suits. She studied composition and drawing, but her real ambition was to be a doctor [source: Kettenmann].

However at age 18, a bus she was riding in collided with a streetcar, impaling her body and breaking her pelvis and spine. She spent months in bed, unable to move much at all. To take her mind off the pain and boredom, she began to paint, using a special easel that allowed her to work lying down. The hospital equipped her bed with a mirror attached to a canopy, which enabled her to serve as her own model. That sparked her line of self-portraits, which are the most distinctive part of her work. As she later explained, "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best" [source: Kettenmann].

Kahlo's brush with death, and the pain and bedridden loneliness that followed, influenced her art. Another influence was her subsequent marriage at age 22 to muralist Diego Rivera, who was 20 years her senior. She'd met him as a student. The two strong-willed artists had a passionate but tempestuous relationship, made even more difficult by the numerous affairs each of them had. (One such dalliance was Kahlo's affair with Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky.) They divorced in 1939, only to remarry the following year. "I suffered two grave accidents in my life," she once said. "One in which a streetcar knocked me down […] the other accident is Diego" [source: PBS].

The two saw the world from very different angles. Artist-political provocateur Rivera created big, bold murals depicting impassioned workers and revolutionaries [source: PBS]. Kahlo, in contrast, explored her own tortured inner psychological landscape. We'll talk more about that in the next section.

In her lifetime, the uniqueness of Frida Kahlo's art was recognized only by a select few -- primarily she and her husband's artist and intellectual acquaintances. Luminaries who ranged from Josephine Baker to Edward G. Robinson paid visits to the home she kept for Rivera [source: PBS].

But who's to say whether they knew what to make of the puzzling, disturbing images in her paintings -- such as her 1946 painting "The Wounded Deer," in which she portrays herself as a stag running through the forest, bleeding from a fusillade of arrows. Another self portrait, "My Birth," which was painted in 1932, depicts her bloody head emerging from her mother's birth canal, and there's a look of horror on her face. Another painting from the same year, "Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States," portrays the U.S. as a gray, unnatural wasteland of smokestacks, juxtaposed with the vivid natural landscape of the Mexican desert. In other paintings, her husband Diego Garcia appears as a Cyclops growing out of Kahlo's brow while she weeps [source: PBS].

Kahlo's fantastic, sometimes grisly images led the Surrealist poet Andre Breton to ask whether she, too, was a member of the same intellectual movement, which sought to jettison rational thought and tap into the subconscious [source: PBS]. Diego Garcia, in contrast, saw her as a realist --"the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honesty, one might even say cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women" [source: Kettenmann]

Kahlo herself saw her work as both self-exploration and commentary about the world. "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which was the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself" [source: PBS].

After her death in 1954, Kahlo's work languished in obscurity for decades until it was rediscovered by Mexican and Mexican-American artists and aficionados in the late 1970s. Since then, she has not only become phenomenon of fine art but also of pop culture. In part, it's because of the intensity of her visions and her ingenious mashup of modern and indigenous art genres, but also because people find her tragic life story inspiring. As Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera sees it, Kahlo admirers "get from her this idea that you can just keep struggling and keep working and deal with adversity and keep on going and come up with something that makes life, a whole life, seem worthwhile" [source: Herrera].