By:Kiara Marcano

   Frida Kahlo’s Career and Work

Frida Kahlo is a very well known self taught Mexican painter who was mainly known for her self portraits along with other naturalistic work. Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 and died in 1954, so she lived a very short life seeing as to how she suffered from pneumonia. However there was spectacle that she committed suicide at one point in time. Women artists weren’t as popular during this time compared to male painters. Interestingly enoug Kahlo actually changed her birthdate to the date of The Mexican Revolution on paper of course. Tina Olsin Lent states “She portrayed herself with schematic, almost iconic, features in which her likeness becomes a mask that hides all vestiges of life, age, and emotion”(70). She painted multiple self portraits of herself wearing different outfits but keeping that same straight face. As I looked and studied more of her work I noticed she uses her own face even in paintings that have nothing to do with her, meaning in nature. Frida Kahlo’s painting are solely based around her depression and loneliness throughout her life.

 One of Frida’s popular paintings was called The Two Frida’s which she painted sright after divorcing Diego Rivera.In this painting she’s holding herself mainly signifying that she really only has herself. The fact that she’s giving herself her own heart proves how lonely she probably felt.In an article in Fridakahlo.org on the painting it states, “she admitted in expressed her desperation and loneliness with the seperation of Diego. Most of Frida’s paintings are revolved around herself and seem to show that she is more in touch with her own feelings and prefers to paint based off of that and she also uses a lot, she seemed to be her own inspiration for her creations. Kahlo was also a feminisit and a bit of a revolutionist in a way she also went through many hardships in her life that inspired some of her work. Not only did she go through a divorce but she also got polio, was in an accident that caused her to go through multiple surgerier, had an abortion and misscarriage because she wasn’t able to carry a fetus all the way till the nine months( Lent 71).

The Tree of Hope painted in 1946 was a painting with nature in the background and the sun and moon one on both halves of the painting.In this painting the main take away was the light versus darkness shown in the background, once again the symbolism of her picking herself up.. This in my interpretation was Frida’s way of proving how strong she was even with all her challenges faced she picked her self back and didn’t give up hope while she kept pushing forward. A similar earlier  painting in where she paints based off of one of her hardships was the Henry Ford Hospital, all alone laying on a hospital bed having to deal with the pain of loosing her baby boy.These are two paintings in where her life struggles became inspirations for her to paint her pain.

Without Hope was painted in 1945, where Frida is laying on a bed with actual live stock coming out of her mouth. During this time Frida was struggling with eating which might make sense if she was depressed. She wanted to depict the events in her life that showed her true feelings. Going back to the concept of being lonely a most of the paintings I’ve mentioned have taken place in a dessert and they tend to be isolated most of the time. The wounded deer was a painting of a deer being shot with arrows in the woods with Frida’s face on it. All of the arrows have blood gushing out which could simply be to represent her hurting from all these things she’s had to face and that have come at her. 

The wounded table is an odd painting by Frida in where there are two children a skeleton, a deer and some weird very tall man it looks like with a small head. Frida is essentially surrounded by a bunch of people who in her eyes are broken and wounded similar to herself. This painting she puts herself in center of the table meaning she recognized that she was probably the most broken out of all of them. Moving on to another one of her paintings titled Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird here shes has thorns choking her around her neck as she’s enduring the pain along with a monkey and cat behind her. She’s literally being choked and suffocated by thorns which hurt so they might signify pain. Lastly, the final painting I included had a little more light to it while still seeming very sad at the same time. It is called Viva la Vida one of her very last paintings right before she died. It translates in to “Long live life” she used watermelons to signify joy and happiness that she was finally going to be able to escape her hardships which she wished to never have to face again. In Fridakahlo.org it states that in her diary she says “I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return”. Meaning she wanted a peaceful death one where she never has to relive her old life.

Most of Frida Kahlo’s work relvoved around her life and her sadness and lonliness seems to be the one thing she held on to throughout her entire career until the very end of her life where she felt joy from dying and being released from this depression and hurt she might’ve felt. All the paintings I decided to use in this exhibition were to show and prove how her loneliness and hardships inspired most of her paintings. Not only this but a lot of the paintings included had similar backgrounds like the use of the desert which signifies emptiness and desertedness literally. Along with the recurring theme between light and darkness or happiness vs sadness, while I don’t think any of these paintings signified her being happy I think they simply meant she came to accepting her life and her obstacles that were faced.

Work Cited

Lent, Tina Olsin. “Life as Art/Art as Life: Dramatizing the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo.” 

Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 35, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 68–76. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3200/JPFT.35.2.68-77.

“Frida Kahlo and Her Paintings.” Frida Kahlo: 100 Paintings Analysis, Biography, Quotes, & Art, fridakahlo.org/.