Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait (Mexico)

Frida Kahlo Self-Portrait Mexico

Frida Kahlo (born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon, July 6, 1907, Coyoacan, Mexico City; died July 13, 1954, Coyoacan) is among the 20th century's most recognizable visual artists. Working largely in small-format oil on canvas or masonite, she produced 55 self-portraits among roughly 143 paintings, weaving personal mythology, bodily autobiography, Mexican folk tradition, and Latin American surrealism into a uniquely compelling visual idiom.

Kahlo's Visual System

Kahlo's self-portraiture is built on consistent visual elements that function almost like a personal heraldic system. The unibrow and faint mustache were consciously preserved and emphasized -- she described her face as her subject because she was the person she knew best. Traditional Tehuana dress from the Tehuantepec Isthmus of Oaxaca -- embroidered blouses (huipiles), floor-length skirts, elaborate headdresses -- frames nearly every self-portrait. This was a deliberate political statement: Tehuana society is matrilineal, and wearing its dress was an assertion of indigenous Mexican identity over European colonialism.

Her jewelry is Pre-Columbian and Oaxacan: jade and obsidian necklaces, Mixtec gold earrings, coral and bone beads. Hair is arranged in complex braided, coiled, and flower-adorned structures. When she painted herself with cropped hair (After the Divorce: What I Cut My Hair, 1940) it was a devastated political act following her separation from Diego Rivera.

Key Works

The Two Fridas (1939) is her largest canvas (173 x 173 cm), painted immediately after her divorce from Rivera: two seated Fridas, one in European white lace, one in Tehuana red, their hearts exposed and connected by a single artery that the European Frida severs with surgical scissors. It was the centerpiece of the 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City.

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) shows a hummingbird (good luck amulet), a black cat, and a monkey against a jungle-leaf background -- the dense botanical backdrop appears in over a dozen of her works, referencing the garden of La Casa Azul (Blue House) where she spent most of her life.

The Broken Column (1944) rendered her spine as a crumbling Ionic column following her spinal fusion surgery, her body bound in a medical corset, tears falling in a barren landscape.

Influence and Register

Kahlo's visual language has become one of the most widely circulated in contemporary popular culture. Her color sensibility -- deep jungle green, crimson, gold, terracotta, cobalt blue against brown skin -- is saturated and warm. The combination of intimate psychological disclosure with elaborate folk-costume and Pre-Columbian symbolism is her singular contribution.