The Art of Frida

FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954) had been influential in modern Mexican culture and had moved many hearts, long before the Oscar-winning movie Frida arrived in Hollywood. Her paintings are hung in museums, galleries and private collections around the world.

Some critics have found her oil painting disturbing, often shocking. However her harrowing depictions represent her personal experiences, her society and her time.

About one-third of Kahlo's works are self-portraits, sometimes showing the inside of her body, even with a child growing inside her. The paintings reflect her painful experiences of miscarriage, and abortion. Kahlo broke nearly every bone in her body in a bus accident at the age of 18. Her collar bones, ribs, pelvis, shoulder and feet all suffered severe damage and never healed completely, despite more than 30 operations.

However the large body of self-portraits not only tells of her suffering, but reflects the social culture, the impact of revolution in Mexican history, and her ideas on feminism.

Kahlo loved Mexican folk art. (Her father was a Hungarian Jew and her mother was of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent.) It is not difficult to find traces of the traditional in her pictures. Yet the presentation itself does not conform to the accepted standards. The deviation is the evidence of rebellion in her time.

In 1910, the Mexican revolution broke out against the ruling president. Unfortunately, it resulted in more civil wars as rival factions fought for power.

Her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, was himself an important political figure and a revolutionary Marxist. Both Kahlo and Rivera, 20 years her senior, were friends of Leon Trotsky, the exiled rival of the then Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin. Rivera helped form the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists, which aimed to resist the Stalinist domination of the arts.