Frida Kahlo Wrote Her Diary on Canvas
She found a way to reveal herself to herself, just as we all wished we could do
I have a few books about the early 20th-century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are her diary of an amazing life story. I soaked up everything I could about her when we all idolized her in the 1980’s.
I’m not sure why I was fascinated with Frida Kahlo. Her subject matter with its female imagery and death-related ethnic, religious symbolism makes you feel uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable. Maybe that’s her point. She said, “I paint my own reality.”
Kahlo’s childhood polio and her bus accident at age 18 led to many operations and plaster corsets during her lifetime of 47 years. Her response to fate was to transform her pain into art. “I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."
Her relationships were personal, emotional theater. I think her life story attracted us perhaps even more than her paintings, beginning in the 1980’s when Hayden Herrera published her biography.
Of Kahlo’s 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits. "I paint myself because … I am the subject I know best."
In the ‘80’s didn’t we all want to be as unrestrained as Frida was in her art? Weren’t our inner lives just as full of outrageous emotions?
At that time I was a librarian in Louisiana. One day a woman I worked with said, why not take our vacations together and go to the Frieda Kahlo Museum in Frida’s famous Casa Azul? The Blue House! But our husbands (at the time) were alarmed to think of us as two women alone in Mexico City. They refused to let us go.
But the beautiful Casa Azul stayed with me as a pilgrimage to dream about. Later, over the course of my several moves, I was always imagining how to make a studio out of this room or that one.
In my book The World of Frida Kahlo I came across a photo of her studio. It was as if she had left for a minute to go into the garden.
If she lived for art, I could, too. It was so easy to get out a pen, watercolor, paper, scissors and glue and make a shadowbox of this creative place I never saw.
I guess Frida Kahlo’s life inspired my own art. And that’s why I found her so fascinating.
Thanks for this, Deda. Before my visits and travels succumbed to Covid, I had a chance, while visiting my daughter, to attend the Kahlo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. What a treat! She was so unique in her outlook and driven to create from her vision.
There is such exuberance in her work and life! Wonderful column--thanks Deda!