Frida Kahlo, glorifying life

The daughter of a Jewish photographer who came to Mexico from Germany and a devout conservative Mexican, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo was preparing herself for a scientific career. On September 17, 1925, a tram crashed into a bus carrying an eighteen-year-old medical student. As a result of the accident, the girl was pierced through a metal rod. Multiple fractures of the spine and leg, fractures of the pelvic bones … To drive away boredom and distract from pain during a long recovery, she began to paint. For the rest of her twenty-nine years, the pain will not leave her. And all these years she will draw. Suffering, mixed with an unquenchable thirst for life, gave rise to a kind of artistic creativity, in which life and death, intertwined in a riot of colors, never cease to amaze us. Frida Kahlo, who was admired by the surrealists, who became an idol in her midst, an outstanding woman, a convinced communist and an original artist, tormented by physical suffering, will write in her last picture in blood-red large letters: “Viva la vida!” The credo of her whole life.

Keys to Understanding

Life as a work of art

At six, Frida, limping with polio, endures ridicule from other children and wears trousers to hide her stiff leg. She learned her lesson: it is better to proudly assert your otherness than to bow to circumstances. Later, it would be her flamboyant folk costumes and proud head carriage that would draw attention, not her mutilations. Her father, a photographer and amateur artist, encourages her to express herself openly and without any self-censorship in her work, and Frida does not look for her own style – she finds it right away, in the very first painting Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926). Her paintings are to match herself – they also do not look like anyone else. Drawing, she writes and rewrites the story of her life, combining joy and pain in one desperately bright and endlessly gloomy dance.

Many-sided femininity

Frida Kahlo does not want to deny herself anything: neither in women, nor in men, nor in marriage, nor in extramarital affairs – with men (including Trotsky) and women. In spite of decency and Latin American machismo, she wore a man’s suit with pleasure, swearing, smoking and drinking tequila with might and main …

But with her “frog king” and great love Diego Rivera, Frida was a caring wife, seeking to satisfy his slightest desire, and the “girl” of an adult man (he was 20 years older than her). They married twice, but there were no children, and she sublimated maternal feelings, taking care of her husband (“He is my child, my newborn baby”), nephews, husband’s children and, finally, about her students – when, at the end of her life, Kahlo began to teach painting, she affectionately called them muchachos, “children.”

Fight with death

“I laugh at death so that it does not take away the best that is in me.” Blood-drenched beds, pierced hearts, prostrate naked bodies – death lives in her canvases, and Frida challenges her. Kahlo loved to brag about how many operations she had to endure, as if trying to outplay her great rival. The subject of her pride is to forget about her sufferings and injuries, rejoicing in life over the edge: drinking, making love, painting, cooking, traveling. A thousand times to die from pain and not show it. “My painting carries a message of pain,” she said. A month before her leg is amputated, Frida writes in her diary: “I have extra wings, let them cut them off, and then we will fly!” An outrageous provocation in order to destroy your fear and once again tease your close friend – death.