Borëd Artist Spotlight | Frida Kahlo
- Bored B.B
- Nov 17, 2021
- 3 min read
Frida Kahlo was a Cancer- born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. Filled with a radiant and explosive fury, her paintings showed a symbolic realism and spoke to contemporary and feminist issues: the pain of love and feminine identity.
Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida contracted polio at the age of six and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestling. As a kid, she was a tomboy and a prankster.
Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of 1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time when she was 15. Frida often watched him paint and told a friend she would marry him someday.
In her early teens, she was preparing for a career in medicine, until she suffered a serious auto accident at 16 in Mexico City, on 17 September 1925. A bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. Frida was pierced by the trolley's metal handrail which entered her lower body on the left side and exited through her vagina. Her spinal column and pelvis were each broken in three places; her collarbone and two ribs broken as well. Her right leg, the one deformed by polio, was shattered, fractured in 11 places and her right foot was dislocated and crushed.
She was injured so badly and had to stay in the hospital for nearly a month. She had to wear a full-body cast for three months after. To kill the time and alleviate the pain, she started painting and finished her first self-portrait the following year. Frida Kahlo once said, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best". Her parents encouraged her to paint and made a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed.
Frida Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. Despite her mother's objections, 20 years older than she, his immense weight, and calling him a "fat and ungodly communist," Frida and Diego Rivera got married in the next year. During their earlier years as a married couple, Frida had to move a lot based on Diego's work.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's marriage is not a usual one. They had been keeping separate homes and studios for all those years. Diego and Frida both had many affairs with men and women. It was a lifetime marriage despite periods of melancholy illness, separations, divorce and remarriage. She has longed for children but she can not bear one due to the bus accident. She was heartbroken.
In the year of 1944, Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous portraits, The Broken Column. In this painting, she depicted herself naked and split down the middle. Her spine is shattered like a column. During that time, she had a few surgeries and had to wear special corsets to protect her spine. She not only had racking pain in her spine but infected kidneys, an atrophic ulcer on her right foot, from where gangrenous toes had been amputated in 1934, and recurrent fungus infections on her right hand. She sought many types of medical treatment for her chronic pain but nothing really worked.
Following the amputation of her leg in 1953, Frida became deeply depressed, her death was presumed a suicide by overdose at age 47. Just eight days before she died, Frida painted her last painting “Viva la Vida, Watermelons” which translates as "Long live life. The last words in her diary are a list of people she thanked, and the lines "I hope the leaving is joyful - and I hope never to return."
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