Frida Kahlo

The life and art of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter who turned her own broken body into the most searching self-portraiture of the twentieth century, is the story of how physical catastrophe and unbreakable will were fused into a single body of work. Anyone trying to understand who Frida Kahlo was and why she became so famous must begin with a contradiction that runs through everything she made. She painted, again and again, her own face. Roughly a third of the some two hundred works she finished in her lifetime are self-portraits, and the woman who looks out of them is instantly recognizable: the joined dark eyebrows, the faint shadow above the lip, the elaborate braided hair threaded with ribbons and flowers, the Tehuana costume of long ruffled skirts and embroidered blouses. Yet for all that obsessive return to her own image, the paintings are never simply about vanity or appearance. They are about pain, endurance, identity, fertility and its loss, love and betrayal, the colonized history of a nation, and the strange persistence of joy inside suffering. Frida Kahlo made her life into her subject because, for long stretches of that life, her body left her almost nothing else.

To understand the story of Frida Kahlo's life and paintings, it helps to hold two facts side by side. The first is that she was, for most of her adult years, a person in continuous physical pain. A childhood illness withered one leg. A streetcar accident at the age of eighteen shattered her spine, her pelvis, and her right foot, and drove an iron handrail through her body. She would undergo something on the order of thirty operations across the rest of her life, spend months at a stretch immobilized in plaster casts and steel corsets, and finally lose a leg to gangrene the year before she died. The second fact is that, out of exactly this material, she built one of the most original and influential artistic identities the modern world has produced. She did not paint in spite of her suffering, and she did not merely paint about it. She converted it, with ferocious honesty and a startling lack of self-pity, into images that millions of people who have never set foot in a museum now recognize on sight.

The question of what made Frida Kahlo such an important artist is therefore inseparable from the question of how she lived. She was born in a house in a quiet southern district of Mexico City, the daughter of a German immigrant photographer and a Mexican mother of mixed Indigenous and Spanish descent, and that house, painted a vivid cobalt blue, would frame her entire life. She left it as a girl to attend one of the finest schools in the country, returned to it broken after the accident, and came back to it to die. Between those points she married, divorced, and remarried one of the most celebrated artists in the Americas; traveled through the United States in the depths of the Great Depression; sheltered an exiled Russian revolutionary and conducted an affair with him; was claimed by the Surrealists of Paris and rejected the label; saw the Louvre buy her work; taught a devoted circle of young painters; and joined her name to the cause of communism and to a fierce, lifelong celebration of Mexican identity. She did all of this while the accident slowly took her body apart.

This account follows that life from the Blue House in Coyoacán to the same address half a century later, tracing how Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón became simply Frida, a single name now attached to an entire visual language. It is the story of a marriage that her biographers have compared to a collision and that she herself once described, with grim humor, as one of the two great accidents of her life, the other being the streetcar. It is the story of a painter who insisted, against the critics who wanted to file her under European movements, that she painted not dreams but her own reality. And it is the story of how a body of intensely private work, made largely for herself and a small circle of friends, became after her death a global phenomenon, her face printed on more surfaces than perhaps any other artist of the modern age. To know how that happened, one has to start in 1907, in a blue house on a corner in Coyoacán.

A Daughter of Coyoacán and the Blue House

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on the sixth of July 1907, in the town of Coyoacán, then a leafy and semi-rural community on the southern edge of Mexico City and now one of its central boroughs. The Spanish-style house in which she was born had been built only a few years earlier, and it stood, as it still stands, on a corner of the streets later named Londres and Allende. It was, and remains, painted a deep and saturated blue, and it is by that color that the world has come to know it: the Casa Azul, the Blue House. Few artists have been so completely identified with a single building. Kahlo was born in this house, spent most of her childhood in it, lived in it through much of her marriage, and died in it. Today it is the Frida Kahlo Museum, and the queues that form outside its blue walls are a daily measure of how large her legend has grown.

Coyoacán in the first decade of the twentieth century was a place apart from the noise of the capital. Its name comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs and is usually translated as the place of coyotes. It had cobbled streets, colonial churches, shaded plazas, and the slow rhythms of a town rather than a metropolis. Mexico itself, in 1907, was a nation on the edge of upheaval. The country had been ruled for more than three decades by the aging dictator Porfirio Díaz, whose long regime, known as the Porfiriato, had brought railways, foreign investment, and a brittle order to the country while leaving the great mass of its rural and Indigenous population poor and disenfranchised. Within three years of Kahlo's birth, that order would collapse into the long and bloody convulsion of the Mexican Revolution, a decade of civil war that would kill an enormous share of the population and remake the nation's sense of itself.