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Frida
Kahlo
Biography
Who2 Biography:Frida
Kahlo, Artist
- Born: 6 July 1907
- Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico
-
Died: 13 July 1954
- Best Known As: Mexico's most famous woman artist
Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico's most famous artists and also something
of a feminist icon, celebrated for her passionate indomitability in the
face of life's trials. She's best known for her daring self-portraits
depicting the suffering she experienced in her personal life. As a child
Kahlo had polio; at the age of 18 she broke her right leg and pelvis in
a horrific bus accident, leading to a lifetime of chronic pain.
Partially immobile after the accident, Kahlo began painting in the late
1920s. She married famed muralist Diego Rivera in 1929 and together they
travelled to the United States, staying in Detroit and New York City in
the early 1930s. In the late 1930s Kahlo had exhibitions of her
paintings in New York City and Paris and associated with some of the
most famous painters in the world. Kahlo and Rivera were both known for
their extramarital affairs (Kahlo supposedly was a lover of Leon Trotsky)
and in 1940 they divorced for a short time before remarrying. During
the '40s Kahlo gained international recognition for her colorful and
sometimes gruesome paintings (as well as for her bold public persona),
but she continued to have health problems. She died in 1954 just after
her 47th birthday. Britannica Concise
Encyclopedia:
(born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mex. — died July
13, 1954, Coyoacán) Mexican painter. The daughter of a German Jewish
photographer, she had polio as a child and at 18 suffered a serious bus
accident. She subsequently underwent some 35 operations; during her
recovery, she taught herself to paint. She is noted for her intense
self-portraits, many reflecting her physical ordeal. Like many artists
working in post-revolutionary Mexico, Kahlo was influenced by Mexican
folk art; this is apparent in her use of fantastical elements and bold
use of colour, and in her depictions of herself wearing traditional
Mexican, rather than European-style, dress. Her marriage to painter Diego
Rivera (from 1929) was tumultuous but artistically rewarding. The Surrealists
André
Breton and Marcel
Duchamp helped arrange exhibits of her work in the U.S. and Europe,
and though she denied the connection, the dreamlike quality of her work
has often led historians to identify her as a Surrealist. She died at
47. Her house in Coyoacán is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.
For more information on Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón de
Rivera, visit Britannica.com.
Biography:Frida
Kahlo
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter often
associated with the European Surrealists as well as with her husband,
Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She was noted for her intense
autobiographical paintings. Frida Kahlo, was born in
Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, in 1907, the daughter of a
German-Jewish photographer and an Indian-Spanish mother. Despite her
European background, Kahlo identified all her life with New World,
Mexican heritage, dressing in native clothing wherever she travelled.
Injured in a bus accident at the age of 15, Kahlo was disabled for life.
After numerous operations to correct her spinal and internal injuries,
she eventually became an invalid prior to her death at the age of 47.
Like her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo maintained a
life-long commitment to leftist
politics, and in the 1930s she accompanied him on several trips to the
United States where he was commissioned to do murals in New York,
Detroit, and San Francisco. The most controversial of these was a mural
for Rockefeller Center which was cancelled because it included a
portrait of Lenin that Rivera
refused to remove. Kahlo died in Mexico City in 1954. Unlike
Rivera's murals, which were grandiose
and filled with political ideology, Kahlo's work was intimate,
personal, and in the tradition of easel
painting. Usually autobiographical, she painted the events of her life
with symbolic elements and situations, creating a dreamlike
reality, frighteningly real but fantastic and magical. One painting, Broken
Column (1944), shows the artist against a bleak
desert landscape with her flesh cut away to reveal a cracked classical
column in place of her spine,
a painful record of her life-long struggle with the psychological and
physical aftermath of her accident. Another, The Wounded Deer
(1946), shows Kahlo as a deer with her own human head, shot full of
arrows in a mysteriously forlorn
forest with a body of water in the background. She painted many
self-portraits throughout her life. Kahlo incorporated elements of
Mexican folk art into her paintings. Thematic content often takes
precedence over a fidelity to realism, and the scale of things
represents symbolic relationships rather than physical ones. Reoccurring
themes of earthly
suffering and the redemptive cycle of nature reflect the mixture of
Spanish Catholicism and Indian religion prominent in Mexican culture.
Kahlo's color, while naturalistic, is flat and dramatic. The
French Surrealist poet Andre Breton, who lived for a while in Mexico,
claimed Kahlo as a Surrealist. She bristled at this association with
artists living thousands of miles away and working with psychoanalytic
theories of the subconscious.
She claimed, "Breton thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't. I never
painted dreams. I painted my own reality." She did, however, show at the
Julian Levy Gallery in New York, known for showing Surrealism, and she
travelled to Paris at Breton's urging to show her work. Early in
her life her work and reputation as an artist were overshadowed by her
relationship to Rivera, who was older and famous before they met. She
also seemed conflicted by her sense of duty to him as a wife. In the
late 1930s she asserted her independence from him, and in 1939 they were
divorced, only to be remarried a short time later. This event served as
an important theme in her work of the period. In contrast to Rivera,
who was relatively wealthy from his work, Kahlo had great difficulties
supporting herself from the sale of her paintings. Together they
led a flamboyant
life in Mexico and during their trips to the United States. They were
at the center of Mexican cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s when
Mexican artists and intellectuals were rediscovering their own heritage
and rejecting European ties. This desire for a Mexican art came in part
from an interest in leftist politics. Kahlo was a life-time member of
the Communist Party, which believed that art should serve the Mexican
masses rather than a European elite. Unlike Rivera, Kahlo was not a
muralist, but later in her life, when she was asked to teach in an
important state art school, she organized teams of students to execute
public works. During her life Frida Kahlo received more
recognition as a painter in the United States than in Mexico. She was
included in several important group exhibitions, including "Twenty
Centuries of Mexican Art" at the Museum of Modern Art and a show of
women artists at Peggy
Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in New York. Her first
one-person show in Mexico at the Galeria Arte Contemporaneo occurred
only one year before her death and in part because her death was
anticipated. After her death in 1954 her reputation grew in Mexico and
diminished in the United States, a time when communists and their
sympathizers were discredited. Diego Rivera himself is less known in the
United States now than in the 1930s. Like many prominent women
artists of her generation, such as Louise Nevelson and Georgia O'Keefe,
Frida Kahlo's art was individualistic and stood apart from mainstream
work. They were often overlooked by critics and historians because they
were women and outsiders and because their art was difficult to fit into
movements and categories. Kahlo has received increased attention since
the 1970s as objections to her politics have softened and as interest
grows about the role of women artists and intellectuals in history.
Concepts of modernism are also being expanded to encompass an uninterrupted
strain of figurative art throughout the 20th century, into which
Kahlo's painting smoothly
fits. Frida Kahlo was the subject of major retrospective exhibitions in
the United States in 1978-1979 and in 1983 and in England in 1982. Further Reading Hayden Herrera published Frida: A
Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983), an extensive work that focuses on
her life. Her painting is discussed more historically and critically in
Whitney Chadwick's Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
(1985), which focuses on women artists who worked within Surrealist
circles but were seldom recorded in its history.
Columbia Encyclopedia:Frida
Kahlo
Kahlo, Frida (frē'dä kä'lō),
1907-54, Mexican painter, b. Coyoacán. As a result of an accident at
age 15, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to painting.
Drawing on her personal experiences, her works are often shocking in
their stark portrayal of pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five
of her 143 paintings are self-portraits incorporating a personal
symbolism complete with graphic anatomical references. She was also
influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, aspects of which she portrayed
in bright colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism. Her
paintings attracted the attention of the artist Diego Rivera,
whom she later married. Although Kahlo's work is sometimes classified
as surrealist and she did exhibit several times with European
surrealists, she herself disputed the label. Her preoccupation with
female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them
made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the
20th cent. Some of her work is exhibited at the Frida Kahlo Museum,
situated in her birthplace and subsequent home in suburban Mexico City.Bibliography See The Diary of Frida Kahlo
(1995), ed. by S. M. Lowe, and The Letters of Frida Kahlo
(1995), ed. by M. Zamora; H. Herrera, Frida (1983); S. M. Lowe, Frida
Kahlo (1991); M. Zamora, Frida Kahlo (1991); H. Herrera, Frida
Kahlo: The Paintings (1991).
Who2 Biography:Frida
Kahlo, Artist
- Born: 6 July 1907
- Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico
-
Died: 13 July 1954
- Best Known As: Mexico's most famous woman artist
Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico's most famous artists and also something
of a feminist icon, celebrated for her passionate indomitability in the
face of life's trials. She's best known for her daring self-portraits
depicting the suffering she experienced in her personal life. As a child
Kahlo had polio; at the age of 18 she broke her right leg and pelvis in
a horrific bus accident, leading to a lifetime of chronic pain.
Partially immobile after the accident, Kahlo began painting in the late
1920s. She married famed muralist Diego Rivera in 1929 and together they
travelled to the United States, staying in Detroit and New York City in
the early 1930s. In the late 1930s Kahlo had exhibitions of her
paintings in New York City and Paris and associated with some of the
most famous painters in the world. Kahlo and Rivera were both known for
their extramarital affairs (Kahlo supposedly was a lover of Leon
Trotsky) and in 1940 they divorced for a short time before
remarrying. During the '40s Kahlo gained international recognition for
her colorful and sometimes gruesome paintings (as well as for her bold
public persona), but she continued to have health problems. She died in
1954 just after her 47th birthday.
Kahlo was portrayed by actress Salma
Hayek in the 2002 film Frida. She was also portrayed by
Ofelia Medina in the 1984 film Frida, Naturaleza Viva.
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Wikipedia:Frida
Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954; born Magdalena
Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón[2])
was a Mexican
painter and a communist
born in Coyoacán.[3]
She painted "pain and passion"[4]
using intense, vibrant colors. Her style "close to folk
art"[5]
(Primitivism,
Naïve
art) was influenced among others by indigenous cultures of
Mexico, European Realism,
Symbolism,
and Surrealism.
Many of her works are self-portraits.
Kahlo was married to Mexican muralist
and communist Diego
Rivera.
Childhood and
family
Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in the house of her parents,
known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacán.
At the time, it was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico
City.
Her father, Guillermo
Kahlo (1871–1941), was born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim,
Germany,
the son of Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Heinrich Kahlo. While Frida
herself maintained that her father was of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry,[6]
researchers have established that Guillermo Kahlo's parents were not
Jewish but Lutheran
Germans.[7]
Guillermo Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen and,
upon his arrival, changed his German forename, Wilhelm, to its Spanish
equivalent, 'Guillermo'.
Frida's mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of
primarily indigenous,
as well as Spanish descent.[8]
Frida's parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo's
first wife during the birth of her second child. Although their marriage
was quite unhappy, Guillermo and Matilde had four daughters, with Frida
being the third. She had two older half sisters. Frida remarked that
she grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her
life, however, Frida remained close to her father. Her family remains a
presence in the artistic world to this date; the actress, writer and
singer Dulce
María is her great grand-niece.
The Mexican
Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three. Later Kahlo claimed
that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with
the revolution. In her writings, she recalled that her mother would
usher her and her sisters inside the house as gunfire echoed in the
streets of her hometown. Occasionally, men would leap over the walls
into their backyard and sometimes her mother would prepare a meal for
the hungry revolutionaries.
Kahlo contracted polio
at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo
disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured
that she also suffered from spina
bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal
and leg development.[9]
As a girl, she participated in boxing
and other sports. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one
of Mexico's premier schools, where she was one of only thirty-five
girls. Kahlo joined a clique
at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias.
During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the
streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued.
On September 17, 1925, Kahlo was riding in a bus when the vehicle
collided with a trolley car. She suffered serious injuries in the
accident, including a broken spinal
column, a broken collarbone,
broken ribs, a broken pelvis,
eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot,
and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her
uterus,
which seriously damaged her reproductive ability.
Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her
ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses
of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and
often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a
time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the
accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.
Career as painter
After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of
medicine to begin a full-time painting career. The accident left her in
a great deal of pain while she recovered in a full body cast; she
painted to occupy her time during her temporary state of immobilization.
Her self-portraits became a dominant part of her life when she was
immobile for three months after her accident. Kahlo once said, "I paint
myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." Her
mother had a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed, and
her father lent her his box of oil paints and some brushes.[10]
Drawing on personal experiences, including her marriage, her miscarriages,
and her numerous operations, Kahlo's works often are characterized by
their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are
self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical
and psychological wounds. She insisted, "I never painted dreams. I
painted my own reality."
Kahlo was influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent
in her use of bright colors and dramatic symbolism. She frequently
included the symbolic monkey. In Mexican mythology,
monkeys are symbols of lust, but Kahlo portrayed them as tender and
protective symbols. Christian
and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work.[citation
needed]
She combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition with
surrealist renderings. Kahlo created a few drawings of "portraits," but
unlike her paintings, they were more abstract. She did one of her
husband, Diego Rivera,[11]
and of herself.[12]
At the invitation of André
Breton, she went to France
in 1939 and was featured at an exhibition of her paintings in Paris.
The Louvre
bought one of her paintings, The Frame, which was displayed at
the exhibit. This was the first work by a 20th century Mexican artist
ever purchased by the internationally renowned museum.
Marriage
As a young artist, Kahlo approached the Mexican painter, Diego
Rivera, whose work she admired, asking him for advice about
pursuing art as a career. He recognized her talent and her unique
expression as truly special and uniquely Mexican.[citation
needed] He encouraged her artistic development and began
an intimate relationship with Frida. They were married in 1929, despite
the disapproval of Frida's mother.
Their marriage was often tumultuous. Kahlo and Rivera had fiery
temperaments and had numerous extramarital affairs. The openly bisexual
Kahlo had affairs with both men and women, including Josephine
Baker;[2]
Rivera knew of and tolerated her relationships with women, but her
relationships with men made him jealous. For her part, Kahlo was furious
when she learned that Rivera had an affair with her younger sister,
Cristina. The couple eventually divorced in November 1939, but remarried
in December 1940. Their second marriage was as turbulent as the first.
Their living quarters often were separate, although sometimes adjacent.[citation
needed]
Later years
and death
Frida Kahlo. The Suicide of Dorothy
Hale. 1939. Oil on masonite. 60.4 x 48.6 cm. The Phoenix Art
Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
the legend translated:
In the city of New York on the twenty-first day of the month of
October, 1938, at six o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale
committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the
Hampshire House building. In her memory [Mrs. Clare Booth Luce
commissioned][13]
this retablo, executed by Frida Kahlo."[14]
Active communist
sympathizers, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Leon
Trotsky as he sought political sanctuary from Joseph
Stalin's regime in the Soviet
Union during the late 1930s. In 1937 initially, Trotsky lived with
Rivera and then at Kahlo's home (where he had an affair with Kahlo)[2].
Trotsky and his wife then moved to another house in Coyoacán
where, later, in 1940 he was assassinated.
A few days before Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, she wrote in her
diary: "I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to return —
Frida".[2]
The official cause of death was given as a pulmonary
embolism, although some suspected that she died from an overdose
that may or may not have been accidental.[2]
An autopsy
was never performed. She had been very ill throughout the previous year
and her right leg had been amputated at the knee, owing to gangrene.
She had a bout of bronchopneumonia
near that time, which had left her quite frail.[2]
Later, in his autobiography, Diego Rivera wrote that the day Kahlo
died was the most tragic day of his life, adding that, too late, he had
realized that the most wonderful part of his life had been his love for
her.[2]
A pre-Columbian
urn holding her ashes is on display in her former home, La Casa Azul
(The Blue House), in Coyoacán,
which since 1958 has been maintained as a museum housing a number of
her works of art and numerous relics from her personal life.[2]
Posthumous
recognition
La Casa Azul in Coyoacán
(photo taken in 2005).
Kahlo's work was not widely recognized until decades after her death.
Often she was popularly remembered only as Diego
Rivera's wife. It was not until the early 1980s, when the artistic
movement in Mexico
known as Neomexicanismo began, that she became very prominent.[15]
This movement recognized the values of contemporary Mexican culture; it
was the moment when artists such as Kahlo, Abraham
Ángel, Ángel
Zárraga, and others became household names and Helguera's classical
calendar paintings achieved fame.[15]
During the same decade other factors helped to establish her success.
The first retrospective of Frida Kahlo’s work outside Mexico (exhibited
alongside the photographs of Tina
Modotti) opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in May 1982,
organized and co-curated by Peter
Wollen and Laura
Mulvey. The exhibition was also shown in Sweden, Germany, New York
and Mexico City. The movie Frida, naturaleza viva (1983),
directed by Paul
Leduc with Ofelia
Medina as Frida and painter Juan José Gurrola as Diego, was a huge
success. For the rest of her life, Medina has remained in a sort of
perpetual Frida role.[16]
Also during the same time, Hayden Herrera published a determinant and
influential biography: Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, which
became a worldwide bestseller. Raquel Tibol, a Mexican artist and
personal friend of Frida, wrote Frida Kahlo: una vida abierta [17].
Other works about her include a biography by Mexican art critic and
psychoanalist Teresa del Conde and texts by other Mexican critics and
theorists, such as Jorge Alberto Manrique.[15]
On June 21, 2001, she became the first Hispanic woman to be honored
with a U.S. postage stamp.[18]
In 2002, the American biographical film Frida,
directed by Julie
Taymor, in which Salma
Hayek portrayed the artist, was released.[19]
The film was based on Herrera's book. It grossed US$
58 million worldwide.[19]
In 2006, Kahlo's 1943 painting Roots set a US$ 5.6 million
auction record for a Latin
American work.[20]
The 2009 novel by Barbara
Kingsolver, "The Lacuna," prominently features Kahlo, her life with
Rivera, and her affair with Trotsky.
Centennial
celebrations
The 100th anniversary of the birth of Frida Kahlo honored her with
the largest exhibit ever held of her paintings at the Museum of the Fine
Arts Palace, Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico.[21]
Works were on loan from Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Nagoya, Japan. The exhibit included one-third of her
artistic production, as well as manuscripts and letters that had not
been displayed previously.[21]
The exhibit was open June 13 through August 12, 2007 and broke all
attendance records at the museum.[22]
Some of her work was on exhibit in Monterrey,
Nuevo
León, and moved in September 2007 to museums in the United States.
In 2008, a Frida Kahlo exhibition in the United States with over
forty of her self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits was shown at the
Walker
Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues.
Previously, the most recent international exhibition of Kahlo's work
had been in 2005 in London, which brought together eighty-seven of her
works.
La Casa Azul
Kahlo's Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán,
Mexico
City, where she lived and worked, was donated by Diego Rivera upon
his death in 1957 and is now a museum housing artifacts of her life. Her
former home is a popular destination for tourists. |
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