Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognized artists not only in Latin America, but throughout the world.
Her brutally personal work repeatedly portrayed her face, her Mexico and her fascinating life. “I paint my own reality,” Kahlo said.
In the 47 years she lived (1907-1954), Frida went through everything from a terrible traffic accident that destroyed her body and left her bedridden for months to the worldwide fame she achieved alongside the love of her life, the muralist Diego Rivera, which led her to surround herself with figures such as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the French artist Marcel Duchamp and members of the millionaire American Rockefeller family.
“Everyone knew who Frida and Diego were.; he was the greatest artist in the world; she, the sometimes rebellious priestess of his temple,” Hayden Herrera described in her book “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo.”
In the 70 years since her death, Frida has continued to garner a worldwide audience.
Her face has been printed millions of times on souvenirs, her works have travelled around the world and she has even become a feminist icon for having challenged the stereotypes and beauty standards imposed by the society of her time.
These are 7 things you may not have known about his life.
1. His German ancestry
There is no doubt that Frida Kahlo embraced her Mexican identity and made it one of the central themes of her work.
However, his father, Wilhelm Kahlobetter known as Guillermo Kahlo, was German (according to Frida, of Jewish and Hungarian descent). He was an amateur photographer and painter.
“He was a man of few words, whose silences had a powerful resonance, and there was an aura of bitterness about him. He never really felt at home in Mexico, and although he was eager to be accepted as a Mexican, he never lost his strong German accent,” says Guillermo Hayden Herrera in his biography of Frida.
Frida described him in the portrait she painted of him in 1952, just 3 years before his death, as a man “brave because he seemed to have epilepsy for sixty years” who “fought against Hitler, with adoration.”
Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderonwas from Oaxaca, of Spanish and indigenous descent.
2. He changed his name
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo and Calderón was her full name.
Until the late 1930s, it was written in the German form, Frieda, derived from Frieden, peace in German.
With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Frida he stopped using the e in the middle of his name.
In her personal archive, Frida sometimes signs as Frida Kahlo, sometimes as Frida Kahlo de Rivera, sometimes as Frida Rivera, and even as Carmen Rivera (the surname Rivera, of course, taken from Diego).
3. Your (false) date of birth
Something that has puzzled scholars of Frida’s life is that there are two versions about her birth date.
Frida He said he was born on July 7, 1910.the same year that the Mexican Revolution broke out. It is the date indicated on the plaque on his famous blue house in Coyoacán.
“Frida said she was born with the Mexican Revolution. She had a habit of taking three years off her age,” explains art historian Julia Buenaventura. It was her way of saying she was born with modern Mexico, she explains.
According to his birth record, he was actually born on July 6, 1907.
4. She was married twice to Diego Rivera
Frida was married not once but twice to the famous muralist Diego Rivera.
They met in 1928when Frida was 20 and was beginning to return to a more or less normal life after two years of fighting against the ravages to her health caused by the accident. Diego was 41 and married to another woman.
They married in 1929 in Coyoacán surrounded by a few friends.
“It is the marriage between an elephant and a dove”Frida wrote that her mother had told her when she found out.
They had a passionate and stormy marriage, in which both had relationships with third parties, in Frida’s case, several of them homosexual.
At the end of 1939, Frida and Diego decided to divorce.
In the following months, Frida’s health deteriorated rapidly, Diego returned to San Francisco to paint a mural, and the murder of Trotsky occurred, who had been very close to the couple, who was even suspected of the crime.
“That whole situation for me, physically and mentally, was something I cannot describe,” Frida wrote in a letter.
Frida decided to go to San Francisco to seek a second medical opinion and, of course, Diego.
“I saw Diego, and that helped me more than anything else.“I will marry him again,” the artist wrote in the same letter. “He wants me to do it because he says he loves me more than any other girl. I am very happy,” she concluded.
In order to remarry, Frida stipulated that they share household expenses and not have sexual relations.
They married for the second time in December 1940, a year after their divorce.
5. He lived in the United States
Both being communistsDiego and Frida traveled to the United States in 1930.
“First they go to San Francisco, then to Detroit and then to New York,” art historian Julia Buenaventura tells BBC Mundo. “These are the places where Diego has been commissioned to paint murals,” she adds.
By the 1930s, Rivera had become one of the most famous and admired artists in the world. Frida painted, but recognition for her work would come later. Her first exhibition was in 1938 in New York.
The period in which they lived in the United States coincided with the time when “Frida began trying to get pregnant, and then came the successive miscarriages. She was in the hospital practically all the time,” Buenaventura recounts.
Due to the damage caused by her accident, Frida was unable to conceive children.
During his time in the USA, he was influenced by Frida’s work. an interest in that country and its relationship with his native Mexico.
In addition to “Self-Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States,” in which he contrasts American industrial development with pre-Hispanic Mexican symbols, in “What the Water Gave Me,” from 1938, he depicts the Empire State Building (inaugurated a few years earlier) emerging from the Popocatépetl volcano.
Frida and Diego returned to Mexico at the end of 1933.
6. She didn’t always wear Mexican dresses
For many, Frida’s image is associated with her Tehuana costumes made of colorful fabrics, traditional from the Oaxaca region.
But the artist did not always dress like this.
Historian Julia Buenaventura says that, as seen in one of her self-portraits from 1926, in which she is wearing a red velvet dress, the young Frida dressed in the French style, like the women of her time and class. There are also several photos that show her dressed in men’s clothes during her youth.
Even Guadalupe Rivera, who was Diego’s wife when Frida met him, described her as a flapperas modern women of the 1920s were called, who often wore short dresses and girdles.
“The Tehuana dress became fashionable after the Revolution. “It is a symbol of Mexican identity,” explains Buenaventura.
“Wearing Tehuana costumes was part of Frida’s self-creation as a legendary personality,” wrote Hayden Herrera in his biography of the artist.
One of Kahlo’s paintings, “My Dress Hangs There,” depicts one of her Tehuana costumes, surrounded by a chaotic Manhattan.
Perhaps her most famous work, “The Two Fridas,” also uses the Tehuana dress to represent the exaggeratedly Mexican Frida she became in contrast to the Frida with European roots from before she met Diego.
7. Their unusual pets
Throughout her life, Frida had two spider monkeys, called Fulang-Chang and Caimito de Guayabal, a parrot called Bonito, a fawn called Granizo, an eagle called Gertrudis Caca Blanca, a hairless dog called Xoloti and several other animals.
American artist Marjorie Eaton described her visit to Diego and Frida in Mexico in 1934: “I came to lunch, and suddenly a spider monkey sat on my head and took the banana out of my hand.”
He included several of his animals in his works.usually as companions in her self-portraits. Also, in “The Wounded Deer,” Frida painted herself as a deer to represent the pain and suffering she was going through due to her health problems.
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