Frida Kahlo, Mexican Painter

John Berger speaks personally about the life of Frida Kahlo, her marriage, and re-marriage to Diego Rivera. Together, they were known as the Elephant and the Butterfly. Diego was larger in every sense, including his gigantic murals. Yet, she was legendary in her right, both in Mexico and within a small circle of artists in Paris. They, both, were passionate collectors of Mexican Art and Pre-Colombian artifacts. The Blue House in Coyoacan, where she lived, contains about 2,000 retablos that she collected over the years. These collections testify of her fascination with the power and symbolic content of her beloved images that transcended her own space. These images became re-elaborations of a utopian dream.

Kahlo was a still life artist. It was after the Black death during the late Middle Ages that the still life genre came into existence. The Black Death radically changed how people looked at life. The Church had a great influence on artists and condemned the love of objects, including personal attachments. The Church felt that this adoration and love of objects might distract people from the love of God. However, watching people die and its human brutalities questioned the faith of many Christians. They began to seek alternative ways of fulfillment on earth through things or persons. They rejected the wait for a blissful afterlife that might never appear. Out of tragedy of the Black Death, “avartia”, i.e., the passionate and eager love of the temporal, life, persons and things, was born.

The tragedies in Kahlo’s life had a great impact on how she viewed the world and was reflected in her art. She had polio as a child and then horribly crippled again in a bus accident. Diego, her husband introduced her to art and Communism. She hated the gringos. She later, in life, had one of her legs amputated and yet she had beauty, sensuality and humor. She was lonely and there are reports that she tried to commit suicide. “Even on days when pain or illness forced her to stay in bed, she spent hours every morning dressing and making her toilette. Every morning, she said, I dress for paradise! Easy to imagine her face in the mirror with her dark eyebrows, which naturally joined, and which her kohl crayon, she emphasized and transformed into black bracket for her two indescribable eyes. (Eyes for you remember only if you shut your own”, Berger, Pg. 27. Her corporeal sensitivity has been remarkable. She used body parts when painting organs, like the heart, uterus, mammary glands and spine to express her feelings and ontological longing. Her own illness and suffering certainly helped her to focus with intensity, on her drawings and paintings.

Frida Kahlo incorporates in her art Mexican retablo and ex-voto images. Retablos are also known as laminas in Mexico. They are oil paintings on zinc, copper, wood and tin and used to venerate Catholic saints. Ex-voto images or paintings are religious and are commissioned out of thanks for delivery from a dangerous situation. In the article Frida Kahlo’s Spiritual World, Maria A. Castro-Sethness discusses the influence of Mexican retablo and ex-voto on her art. These art forms convey their relationships with religion, the creation of art, the struggles of life and the inevitability of death. This dialectic reflects private devotional functions and collective shared traditions. This art form was born out of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). It was a nationalistic, intellectual and artistic fervor that established indigenous cultural identity. It revived popular art forms and Kahlo appreciated and had great respect for Aztec imagery. “Ex-voto paintings are also known as retablos ex-votos. Most depict a miraculous cure through the portrayal of one or more persons praying for the sick individual who us usually in bed. This “reality” special dimension or “earth realm” usually occupies the middle section of the composition”, Castro-Sethness, pg. 21.

With respect to her appreciation for Aztec Imagery, Janice Helland, in the article Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo’s Painting, writes Mexican nationalism, with its anti-Spanish imperialism, identified the Aztecs as the last independent rulers of an indigenous political unit. “Mexican indigenista tendencies ranged from a violently anti-Spanish idealization of Aztec Mexico to a more rational interest in the “Indian question as the key to a truly Mexican culture”, Helland, pg. 8. Kahlo often used bloody Aztec imagery as an intrinsic part of her social and political beliefs and that derived much of its power from the depth of her convictions.

The vast majority of her paintings are on either metal or Masonite, which is as smooth as metal. A few of her paintings are on canvas. However fine the grain of a canvas, it resisted and diverted her vision, making her brushstrokes and the contours too epic, too plastic and too painterly. Many scholars, including Salomon Grimberg, have recognized the influence of retablos and ex-votos in her art. However, none has done any extensive analysis or identified her iconographical sources. “First, the presence of ex-votos as objects of daily contemplation in her home and studio was certainly a powerful cultural and aesthetic source of inspiration. Second, the process of her incorporation of such religious objects establishes an emotional link between Kahlo’s present and past, her identification with the Mexican nation, and her private suffering. Third, the profound spirituality of the retablos and ex-voto paintings can be viewed as decisive forces that allowed for the existence of the supernatural and religious dimension in her at”, Castro Sethness, pg. 22.

Sharon Udall, in Frida Kahlo’s Mexican Body, describes the “struggles of life (mentioned by Castro-Seth) in her paintings that tell stories. They are intimate, engaging, terrifying and tragic. Her paintings explore the toughness and vulnerability of the human body. She often looked into a death’ dark mirror as she documented her own attempts to survive pain and make sense out of it. There is despair in her paintings and depict the search for salvation. At times, her work was romantic and brutally immediate, Kahlo’s subjects imposed stasis on history. She combined the freezing of history with living memories. She refused time’s linearity and, when it was used as a referent, it was with ambivalence. Some of her ambivalence can be seen in the following statement, “in that revealing statement (time goes on) the artist demonstrated early on that in her mind the present is living, continuous with a past history and of art. By following Kahl’s lead, by thinking about times as a thread connecting the episodic with the eternal, we can begin to understand her work in new and telling ways”, Udall, pgs, 10-14.

Salomon Grimberg comments on women artists and the domestic space. This type of art reflects women in ways that are trivial, taken for granted and less than vital. Women are thought of as being confined to the domestic space. Men go beyond the borders of the home, confront and conquer the outer world. Kahl was confined to her home and had a great deal of pain because of her accident illness. Her still lifes and self-portraits are a reflection of her internal reality as well as her self-portraits. She attempted to master her fear of being alone and death in the ultimate portraits. Kahlo understood still life and made direct references to the end of life. She painted flowers so that they would not die. “She would probe the insides of fruits and flowers, the organs hidden beneath the wounded flesh, and the feelings hidden beneath stoic features”, Grimberg, pg., 25. Lola Alvarez, a friend of Kahlo, tells a story that she always kept fresh flowers and fruit. She created still life, arranging and re-arranging them for paintings. Many of her paintings reconsider ordinary and humble things. She imbues them with human characteristics. For example, kitchen items are intentionally disconnected from domestic space and they become easily unfamiliar. “Building on her knowledge of traditional still-life painting, Kahlo referred to her foretaste of mourning with a personal inscription, thus introducing the viewer into the out of which she created it”, Grimberg pg., 25.   

In many ways, Kahlo is an artist for the people and of the people. She used personal tragedy to express feelings and sentiments that transcend race and culture. She is a forerunner of the feminist movement as she focused on body parts and especially, her fractured pelvis, uterus, miscarriages and abortions. More broadly, she was a social and political activist as she was a romantic nationalist.

Bibliography

Berger, John, “Cheek to Cheek”, The Three Penny Review, Fall 1998, pg. 27

Castro-Sethness, Maria, “Frida Kahlo’s Spiritual World”, Woman’s Art Journal,

Fall 2004/Winter 2005, pages 21-24

Grimberg, Salomon, “Frida Kahlo’s Still Lifes”, Woman’s Art Journal,

 Fall 2004/Winter 2005, pgs. 25-30

Helland, Janice, “Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo’s Paintings, Woman’s Art Journal     Fall 1990/Winter 1991, pgs. 9-13

Udall, Sharyn “Frida Kahlo’s Mexican Body”, Woman’s Art Journal, Fall

2003/Winter 2004, pages 11-14