The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

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Labeled and embraced by turns as a style/feminist/LGBTQ/cult icon, Kahlo's storied life ironically tended to divert attention from her journey as an artist and the history behind her art, Lozano feels. People either viewed her paintings through the lens of her publicized private life or are overwhelmingly drawn to her better-known pieces. Kahlo dedicated and gave this still life to her surgeon, Dr. Juan Farill whom she highly respected Image: Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust/VG Bild-Kunst More than meets the eye Furthermore, the wealthof information on religious and cultural symbolism in her choice of colors, clothing, subject positions, fruits, animals, draw attention to the tiniest details,adding further layers to appreciating her art. Even as Kahlo was gaining recognition in Mexico, her health was declining rapidly, and an attempted surgery to support her spine failed. [70] Her paintings from this period include Broken Column (1944), Without Hope (1945), Tree of Hope, Stand Fast (1946), and The Wounded Deer (1946), reflecting her poor physical state. [70] During her last years, Kahlo was mostly confined to the Casa Azul. [71] She painted mostly still lifes, portraying fruit and flowers with political symbols such as flags or doves. [72] She was concerned about being able to portray her political convictions, stating that "I have a great restlessness about my paintings. Mainly because I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement... until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self... I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live." [73] [74] She also altered her painting style: her brushstrokes, previously delicate and careful, were now hastier, her use of color more brash, and the overall style more intense and feverish. [75] In the absence of a Kahlo boy, Frida assumed something of a son’s role in the family—certainly she was her father’s favorite, and the one who identified most with him. Frida told Campos in her clinical interview, “I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.” Lucienne Bloch, a close friend of Kahlo’s and disciple of Diego Rivera’s, recalls that “she loved her father very much, but Frida did not have these same feelings for her mother.” In fact, in 1932, when Kahlo returned to Mexico from Detroit upon hearing that her mother was dying (Bloch accompanied her on the journey), she failed to visit Matilde or even view her body. The painfully obstetric work My Birth (now owned by Madonna), in which Frida’s head emerges from the vagina of a mother whose face is covered by a shroud, was most likely her painted response to Matilde Kahlo’s death.

Weidemann, Christiane (2008). 50 women artists you should know. Larass, Petra., Klier, Melanie. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3956-6. OCLC 195744889. Mahon, Alyce (2011). "The Lost Secret: Frida Kahlo and The Surrealist Imaginary" (PDF). Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. 5 (1–2): 33–54. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 April 2018. Kahlo's posthumous popularity and the commercialization of her image have drawn criticism from many scholars and cultural commenters, who think that, not only have many facets of her life been mythologized, but the dramatic aspects of her biography have also overshadowed her art, producing a simplistic reading of her works in which they are reduced to literal descriptions of events in her life. [276] According to journalist Stephanie Mencimer, Kahlo "has been embraced as a poster child for every possible politically correct cause" and An entry from April 29, 1977 reads: “This is a blue moment . . . it’s blue because I’m confused, again; or should I say “still”? I don’t know what I want or how to get it. I act like I know what I want, and I appear to be going after it—fast, but I don’t, when it comes down to it, even know. I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or an example that is some entirely different life. I should be relating it to my life only in the sense that each has good and bad facets. Each is separate. The only way the other attained enough merit, making it worthy of my admiration, or long to copy it is by taking chances, taking it in its own way.” In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the recently reformed, nationalistic Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda". [62] She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art and to derive their subjects from the street. [63] When her health problems made it difficult for her to commute to the school in Mexico City, she began to hold her lessons at La Casa Azul. [64] Four of her students– Fanny Rabel, Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, and Arturo Estrada– became devotees, and were referred to as "Los Fridos" for their enthusiasm. [65] Kahlo secured three mural commissions for herself and her students. [66] In 1944, they painted La Rosita, a pulqueria in Coyoacán. In 1945, the government commissioned them to paint murals for a Coyoacán launderette as part of a national scheme to help poor women who made their living as laundresses. The same year, the group created murals for Posada del Sol, a hotel in Mexico City. However, it was destroyed soon after completion as the hotel's owner did not like it. [ citation needed]Castro-Sethness, María A. (2004–2005). "Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-Voto Paintings on Her Art" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 25 (2): 21–24. doi: 10.2307/3566513. JSTOR 3566513. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019. For a teenager as lively as she was, sending letters became an extremely useful way of keeping in touch with her classmates at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory High School), especially after the accident which left her bedridden for months at home. urn:lcp:diaryoffridakahl00kahl:epub:e2e7c165-2510-4b8f-8d39-9b7ca1494a36 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier diaryoffridakahl00kahl Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t2797tm08 Invoice 1213 Isbn 0810932210 a b Delsol, Christine (16 September 2015). "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's Mexico City". SFGate . Retrieved 15 November 2016. Dexter, Emma (2005). "The Universal Dialectics of Frida Kahlo". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.

Gardner, Lyn (14 October 2002). "She was a big, vulgar woman with missing teeth who drank, had an affair with Trotsky and gobbled up life". The Guardian . Retrieved 16 November 2016. Kahlo often featured her own body in her paintings, presenting it in varying states and disguises: as wounded, broken, as a child, or clothed in different outfits, such as the Tehuana costume, a man's suit, or a European dress. [126] She used her body as a metaphor to explore questions on societal roles. [127] Her paintings often depicted the female body in an unconventional manner, such as during miscarriages, and childbirth or cross-dressing. [128] In depicting the female body in graphic manner, Kahlo positioned the viewer in the role of the voyeur, "making it virtually impossible for a viewer not to assume a consciously held position in response". [129] There were several causes for the almost morbidly elated tone of Kahlo’s note to Gómez Arias. Surgery always gave her a strange high—she gleefully soaked up the ministrations of doctors, nurses, and visitors (in bed she entertained guests like a hostess at a party). She also was receiving huge doses of morphine, which left her addicted to painkillers for the rest of her life. But, most pertinent to the genesis of her diary, she had embarked on what would be her last and most satisfying romance with a man. Kahlo enjoyed art from an early age, receiving drawing instruction from printmaker Fernando Fernández (who was her father's friend) [7] and filling notebooks with sketches. [8] In 1925, she began to work outside of school to help her family. [9] After briefly working as a stenographer, she became a paid engraving apprentice for Fernández. [10] He was impressed by her talent, [11] although she did not consider art as a career at this time. [8] In 2018, San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to rename Phelan Avenue to Frida Kahlo Way. Frida Kahlo Way is the home of City College of San Francisco and Archbishop Riordan High School. [311]Though she gave her birth date as July 7, 1910, Frida Kahlo was actually born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico, now a suburb of Mexico City. This most basic lie alone qualifies her for a name she goes by in the diary: “the Ancient Concealer.” Her epileptic father, Guillermo Kahlo, and her mother, Matilde, had another daughter, Cristina, 11 months later. Before Frida arrived, Matilde had had a son who died a few days after birth. Unable, or too ambivalent, to breast-feed her, Matilde passed Frida on to two Indian wet nurses (the first, Frida told Campos, was fired for drinking). Probably because of the confusion of having three erratic caregivers, and her mother’s general depression over the loss of a son (Frida called her family’s household “sad”), Kahlo had from earliest infancy a very damaged sense of self.

Kahlo soon began a relationship with Rivera, who was 21 years her senior and had two common-law wives. [177] Kahlo and Rivera were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall of Coyoacán on 21 August 1929. [178] Her mother opposed the marriage, and both parents referred to it as a "marriage between an elephant and a dove", referring to the couple's differences in size; Rivera was tall and overweight while Kahlo was petite and fragile. [179] Regardless, her father approved of Rivera, who was wealthy and therefore able to support Kahlo, who could not work and had to receive expensive medical treatment. [180] The wedding was reported by the Mexican and international press, [181] and the marriage was subject to constant media attention in Mexico in the following years, with articles referring to the couple as simply "Diego and Frida". [182] Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky". NMWA. National Museum of Women in the Arts . Retrieved 29 October 2023. Nearly a century later, Rebecca Solnit would write her own lyrical meditation on blue as the color of distance and desire. The twenty-first-century Frida is both a star– a commercial property complete with fan clubs and merchandising– and an embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of a near-religious group of followers. This wild, hybrid Frida, a mixture of tragic bohemian, Virgin of Guadalupe, revolutionary heroine and Salma Hayek, has taken such great hold on the public imagination that it tends to obscure the historically retrievable Kahlo." [251]Frida Kahlo Facts". www.uky.edu. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021 . Retrieved 6 July 2020. In 2014 Kahlo was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields". [308] [309] [310]

Soon after the marriage, in late 1929, Kahlo and Rivera moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos, where he had been commissioned to paint murals for the Palace of Cortés. [183] Around the same time, she resigned her membership of the PCM in support of Rivera, who had been expelled shortly before the marriage for his support of the leftist opposition movement within the Third International. [184]

4. Keith Haring’s Journals

A painting known today by the descriptive title Two Nudes in the Jungle (1939; originally titled The Earth Herself) is usually interpreted, like the contemporaneous Two Fridas, as a double self-portrait. Painted for Dolores Del Rio around the time of Frida’s divorce, it may in fact be a slightly veiled sapphic image of Kahlo with the screen goddess. In the Campos interview Frida states that she painted a portrait of Del Rio, yet in the actress’s estate only two Kahlo pictures turned up: Girl with Death Mask (1938) and Two Nudes. The fairer, recumbent nude, with her sloe-eyed, oval face, bears an undeniable, if somewhat stylized, resemblance to photos of Del Rio from the period. The painting brings to mind a salacious confession Kahlo made to Campos—that she was “attracted to dark nipples but repelled by pink nipples in a woman.”