CRITIQUE ESSAY

Frida and her obsession for self portraits

Frida Kahlo is one of the most famous female artists in Mexico. She did not always aspire to be an artist, many of her works are self-portraits that symbolically express her own pain. Kahlo was married and influenced by the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and shared his Communist views.

Lots of people have defined Frida Kahlo for her self-portraits (she painted about 1/3 of her works) as a type of therapy to survive an isolation of suffering and physical pain, a kind of repression of the ravaging action inflicted by external events on her body (bus accident, abortions, surgery operations and "weird" medical treatments of her age).

The body definitely was for Frida the centre of any kind of idea, she painted about herself -her body, injured, pierced, distorted by bus and by the medical treatments-and she painted about her external environment such as cultural, political and social aspects of her time and she painted using vibrant colors that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences that include Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Nevertheless she thought "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't'', she said."I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.''

Anyway this representation must not be interpreted as an idolatry of the self. In spite of Frida's love of religious Mexican idols, often represented in her paintings in particular the picture known as “retablos”, which shows Mexican churches, Frida does not idolize her self: she does not show herself as a divine image, there is no trace of mystical tension in her works, neither as exaltation of her personality.

We can formulate the hypothesis that Frida was moved to represent herself and her body by a profoundly perseverant attitude, throughout this interpretation it is possible to understand that Kahlo's thought by the external world and by the disease, Frida has always held a great energy, a surprising dynamism. Maybe this attitude was possible thanks to her internal force.

Nowadays she has long been recognized as an important painter, public awareness of her work has become more widespread since the 1970's. Her "Blue" house in Coyoacán, Mexico City is a popular museum, donated by Diego Rivera after her death in 1954.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kalho
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/K/kahlo.html
http://www.eyeconart.net/history/frida-y-diego.htm

Biography Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907, she was the daughter of a Mexican-Indian mother and a German father. Her life was to be a long series of physical traumas, and the first of these came early. At age 6 she was stricken with polio, which caused her right leg to shrivel.

When she was 18, she was involved in a serious bus accident which left her with damaged very severely. A metal rod had made a very deep abdominal wound, and her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae were fractured. Frida was forced to stay in bed, while Frida was confined to her bed, her mother brought her a small lap easel, and Frida started to paint. She had studied art before, at the National Preparatory School, where she had met Diego Rivera when he was painting the Creation mural, but Frida had never worked on paintings before. Over her bed, Frida had a mirror so she could see herself, and this was the beginning of her focus on self portraits.

Frida was friend of Tina Modotti, who modelled for Diego Rivera, and through her Frida and Diego met again, and fell in love. They married on August 21st, 1929.

In the fall of 1930 Frida traveled with Diego to San Francisco, where Diego worked on murals at the Pacific Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and in the summer of 1931 they went to New York where Diego had a major exhibition of his work. Then, in the spring of 1932, they moved to Detroit, where Diego worked on a series of murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. At this time Frida had become pregnant, however, after the bus accident in 1925 she could not have children, and complications arose. Frida's trauma in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit is illustrated in her paintings.

In 1939 Diego and Frida divorced, and Frida felt very sad and distraught by this. She produced many fine paintings in this period, but being devastated by the divorce, she consumed a lot of liquor, and her health deteriorated rapidly. She had circulatory and other problems associated with the incidents she had had before.

In 1940, Kahlo, threatened by gangrene, had her right leg amputated below the knee. It was a tremendous blow to someone who had invested so much in the elaboration of her own self image. She learned to walk again with an artificial limb, and even (briefly and with the help of pain-killing drugs) danced at celebrations with friends. But the end was close.

In July 1954, she made her last public appearance, when she participated in a Communist demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterwards, she died in her sleep, apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her last diary entry read: "I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to come back" - Frida