The Art of Frida Kahlo

Along with her husband, Diego Rivera, she was at the forefront of the post-revolutionary movement that linked the arts and cultural identity in Mexico.

Frida Kahlo was primarily a folk artist who painted with overtones of surrealism.  She was heavily influenced and inspired by indigenous Mexican culture, and created works in the style of artesania, which pays homage to the beauty in everyday life, and frequently used bright colors, primitive style and dramatic symbolism.

Kahlo suffered both physically and emotionally throughout her life.  She contracted polio as a young child which left her leg crippled and was involved in a serious streetcar accident at age 18, the injuries from which she never fully recovered.  Her marriage to artist Diego Rivera was also tempestuous and she was famously quoted as saying “I suffered two great accidents in my life…one in which a streetcar knocked me down and the other was Diego”.

These sufferings were reflected in her work and her great number of self-portraits, 55 of her known 143 paintings, were a response to the amount of time she spent alone and bedridden.  She claimed “I never painted dreams.  I painted my own reality”.

Although a widely recognizable figure, the work of Frida Kahlo was not truly lauded until the early 1980’s, decades after her death, and her home, La Casa Azul (the Blue House), is now a museum in the city of Coyoacán, just outside of Mexico City.

Photo sources: 

1) biografiasyvidas.com
2) tierra.free-people.net
3) christinespenglerenhunabstyle.wordpress.com