I used this theory for much of the background information given to the students. It’s a very intriguing idea and makes sense when using cross-curriculum ideas for students. Also, this biographical information was concise and easy to use as an introduction to her work.

Introduction:

Within Pratt’s essay “Arts of the Contact Zone” she provides many examples. Using her definition, we can apply this idea to studying other cultures. Frida Kahlo, a Mexican artist, was born in Mexico in 1907. Her life was full of complications, including injuries and hardship and Frida used canvas as the medium to express her sufferings. Her work also depicts her love for her husband Diego Rivera and the struggles that the couple encountered. Simultaneously, Mexican culture is revealed throughout Frida’s work. When placed in the context of Pratt’s definition, the art work of Frida Kahlo is an example of a contact zone, a powerful teaching tool.

Frida Kahlo’s art work communicates the story of her life, depicting individual events and the emotions they invoke. Solidifying her life on canvas, Frida’s paintings are a

“testimony to certain events...never exaggerating in the slightest or showing any discrepancy in the precise events, preserving them realistically and profoundly...her exactitude and intensity...poetically didactic and rigorously dialectic.” (Tibol 132)

A contact zone shows us an individual in action, how he or she interacts, behaves and thinks. Kahlo narrates the events of her life and the feelings they carry through her art work. She has created a successful contact zone, providing a better understanding of her life and Mexican culture because “in Frida’s work oil paint mixes with the blood of her inner monologue.” (Raquel Tibol)

Paintings used in this unit:

Two Fridas - 1939
Self-Portrait (with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird) - 1940
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - 1940
Thinking of Death - 1943
Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego in My Thoughts) - 1943
The Wounded Deer - 1946
Diego and I - 1949

INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTWORK

SUBJECT MATTER: What can I determine about what the artwork means, if anything?

The approximately 200 works that she produced between 1926, when she began painting, and her death in 1954, at the age of 47, force us to come face to face with Frida, both the legend and the reality, and through her to come face to face with unexplored parts of ourselves.

She painted herself with tremendous directness, laying herself wide open. Her self-portraits give an appearance of being absolutely alone. With her carnal lips, surmounted by a slight mustache, and her obsidian-dark eyes slanted upward beneath eyebrows that join like outstretched bird’s wings, Frida Kahlo was bewitching, almost beautiful. Her gaze is often disconcerting. It seeks a response from the viewer. She cries to be seen and known. She was the person she knew best. Her first self portrait in 1926, reveals that, from the beginning, painting the image she saw in the mirror was both a self-exploration and a plea for attention. This double dialogue continues for the next 28 years during which time Kahlo produced some of the most extraordinarily personal and original imagery of the 20th century.

Her paintings are filled with contradictions. Even as she presents herself as a heroine, she insisted that we know her vulnerability. Even though she presented herself to be seen, she hid behind the mythic creature she invented to help her withstand life’s blows. Self-portraits were a form of both psychological surgery and denial. By projecting her pain out onto an alternate Frida, she not only confronted and confirmed her embattled reality, she also exorcised pain. (Herrera pp. 3, 4)

Two Fridas - 1939

This a painting from the divorce period and is not pretty or charming. This dual personality shows her unhappiness regarding her separation from Diego. Diego loved the lady in the native costume. The other Frida in the white costume, the blouse of which looks like a Mexican wedding dress, is, she said, the Frida whom Rivera no longer loved. The two Fridas is also Frida’s dual heritage, with the Indian side being stronger. It may also refer to Frida’s love for women. The extracted hearts show pain in love. The unloved Frida’s heart is broken; the other Frida’s heart is whole. The Tehuana Frida holds a miniature portrait of Diego as a boy. From its red oval frame springs a vein that travels through both women’s hearts and is finally cut off by surgical pincers held in the lap of the rejected Frida. She tries to stop the flow of blood but it keeps dripping and stains her embroidered skirt. The stormy sky shows her inner turmoil but the two figures are disconnected to the empty space surrounding them. They seem to be in a self-enclosed world of their own. She holds her own hand, binding herself to herself with a strong red vein. She is her only companion.

Self-Portrait (with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird) - 1940

By wearing Christ’s thorns Frida presents herself as a Christian martyr. Several of the necklace’s twigs are broken: Frida uses broken things often - broken tables, broken veins, broken hearts. The dead hummingbird with its outstretched wings like Frida’s eyebrows, point to her feeling of being cut down in flight or to her rejection by Diego. In Mexican folk tradition the dead hummingbirds were used as charms to bring luck in love. In Aztec mythology the hummingbird symbolized reincarnation - the spirits of dead warriors returned in the form of hummingbirds. In Christian symbolism birds in general stand for the winged soul. The large leaves close off the space and give her no exit. The filigree dragonflies and butterfly brooches may stand for transcendence

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - 1940

Shortly after her divorce from Diego, Frida wrote to Nickolas Muray: “I have to give you bad news: I cut my hair, and look just like a ferry (fairy). Well, it will grow again, I hope!” One story has it that Frida warned Diego that if he continued his affair (probably with Paulette Goddard), she would again crop off the long hair he so admired.

Thinking of Death - 1943

By this time she is back with Diego but her health has quite deteriorated. She has moved back to Casa Azul to work. There are stems with blood-red thorns and veins of leaves that form a wall behind her which create a web: again there is no exit from obsessional thoughts. Yet, Frida’s confrontation with death is almost Egyptian in its imperturbability; her portrait recalls the famous bust of Nefertiti, of whom she said, “I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been ‘a wild one’ and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband.” (Herrera, p. 167)

Self-Portrait as a Tehuana - (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943

Frida’s head pokes out from a large Tehuana headdress. The lace ruff appears to close off space and makes her looked trapped. The split between face and clothes underscores psychological dividedness. The portrait of Diego on her forehead uses her eyebrows as a pedestal. She is tethered to the frame by the radiating network of threads. The tendrils that spring from her headdress are like conducting wires carrying her positive and negative energy out into the world. But, once again, these connectors are disconnected: the black threads that are continuations of the veins of leaves adorning her hair are uprooted and dangle in the air. There is no exit from her obsessional thoughts.

The Wounded Deer - 1946

It’s a beautiful deer body with Frida’s head. The body has been impaled with arrows. The creature faces her fate with equanimity, much as Frida did when she agreed to the operation in New York. She was optimistic about the prospect of relief from the constant pain she endured, but as time went on, it became clear that this point marked the beginning of the end.

Diego and I - 1949

Her hair has grown out and wraps around her neck as if to bind her to Diego or strangle her. She seems to be wearing a traditional blouse with Indian design. Her eyebrows, like a pedestal, holds a portrait of Diego. He has a third eye on his forehead. He appears to look up and far away. This is the all-seeing eye. This third eye refers to Rivera’s superior mental and visual acuity. His eyes look out over the viewers head to the beyond. His artistic venue was panoramic and epic. She also has tears falling from her eyes showing again her suffering and hurts. (It was at this time that Diego nearly divorced her again to marry Maria Felix, the beautiful film star.) Her eyes stare out but not directly at the viewer. Frida is looking at someone twice as far from her (and much smaller) than the viewer. Even though Diego is pictured, Frida seems to be alone.

TOOLS, MATERIALS, AND PROCESSES: What can I learn about how the artwork was made?

Although Frida experimented in various media, she mostly painted in oils. Her work was usually small in size since many of the painting were done while she was in bed or in a wheel chair. They had to be a size she could manage. She painted in small, precise brush strokes making every detail important to the whole.

She also painted on tin. This is a traditional art process in Mexico. Small paintings on metal are known as retablos. Retablos are devotional paintings, that, through the process of their creation, commemorate and/or thank saints and deities for salvation in a time of crisis. Kahlo works with the retablo form, but for thematic purposes that are very different than those for which the devotional paintings were intended.

Two Fridas - 1939

Oil on Canvas, 173 X 173 cm
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
Only did a few painting of this large size

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird - 1940

Oil on Masonite, 60 X 40 cm
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Art Collection
University of Texas at Austin

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - 1940

Oil on Canvas, 40 X 28 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

Thinking of Death - 1943

Oil on Canvas, 45 X 37 cm
Private Collection

Self-Portrait as a Tehuana - (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943

Oil on Masonite, 75 X 60 cm
Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

The Wounded Deer - 1946

Oil on Masonite, 22.4 X 30 cm
Collection of Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City

Diego and I - 1949

Oil on Canvas, mounted on Masonite, 28.8 X 22.4 cm
Private Collection, courtesy Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Arts, New York

SENSORY ELEMENTS: What visual elements do I see?

Two Fridas - 1939

Two portraits of Frida sit on a bench one is dressed in traditional Indian dress the other in white like a wedding dress. Their hearts are detached one whole and one broken. A blood vein runs through them both which is cut with surgical scissors on the left Frida. Each woman has one hand in her lap near her genitals. The right Frida holds a very small portrait of Diego from which springs a vein that travels through both women’s hearts. Blood drips and stains the dress. The sky is stormy and cloudy grey.

Self-Portrait (with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird) - 1940

Full frontal presentation in this self-portrait. Large veined leaves fill up the background. A necklace of thorns with broken twigs is broken with a hummingbird hanging from it. Blood drips on her neck. There are four insects in a filigree design. Behind her shoulders, Frida’s cat and monkey are black and menacing. The cat is ready to pounce and the monkey Caimito de Guayabal (meaning Guava patch Fruit), a gift from Diego, fingers the necklace of thorns in a way that could deepen Frida’s wounds. Very symmetrical in appearance.

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - 1940

She appears as a mutilated saint which is dear to Mexican Catholicism. In her left hand she holds a lock of her shorn hair like an emblem of her sacrifice. In her right, she holds the scissors with which she martyred her femininity. There is a mood of suppressed fury. This was a defiant act on her part. Diego loved her long hair. The words and notes to a popular song are displayed across the top: “Look, if I used to love you, it was because of your hair, now that you’re pelona, I don’t love you any more.” Pelona, a slang word of the sort Frida liked to use, means bald or shorn.

Thinking of Death - 1943

Instead of thinking about Diego, she focuses on a skull and crossbones, which appear in a circular window opened in her forehead. There is again the webbing effect of thorns and veined leaves which seem to hold her in place and give no exit.

Self-Portrait as a Tehuana - (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943

Frida wears a Tehuana headdress. It has a lace ruff. Her face pokes out like it’s poking from one of those stage flats used by photographers at Mexican fairs. There are black, web-like lines radiating out from her headdress to the edge of the painting.

The Wounded Deer - 1946

Before a surgery she was to have in New York in 1946 she presented this painting to her good friend Arcady Boytler. It’s a beautiful deer body and Frida’s head. The body has been impaled with arrows.

Diego and I - 1949

A nearly 3/4 view of her face. Her hair has grown out and wraps around her neck. She seems to be wearing a traditional blouse with Indian design. Her eyebrows, like a pedestal, holds a portrait of Diego. He has a third eye on his forehead. She also has tears falling from her eyes. Her eyes stare out but not directly at the viewer.

COLOR:

Her palate of colors also reveals the feelings behind her paintings. Similar to learning from an ancient letter, the paintings of Frida Kahlo show us her life. The fundamental key to any interpretation of Frida’s work is color. She was a self taught artist who used color to drive home emotional truths.

From her diary, she revealed each color’s meaning:

• GREEN: warm and good light
  
• REDDISH PURPLE: Aztec. Tlapali (Aztec word for “color” used for painting and drawing); Old blood of prickly pear. The most alive and oldest
  
• BROWN: color of mole, of the leaf that goes. Earth
  
• YELLOW: madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and of joy
  
• COBALT BLUE: electricity and purity. Love
  
• BLACK: nothing is black, really nothing
  
• LEAF GREEN: leaves, sadness, science. The whole of Germany if this color
  
• GREENISH YELLOW: more madness and mystery. All the phantoms wear suits of this color....or at least underclothes
  
• DARK GREEN: color of bad news and good business
  
• NAVY BLUE: distance. Also tenderness can be this blue
  
• MAGENTA: Blood? Well, who knows!

Yellow is “madness, sickness, fear”. Several of Frida’s 1940 paintings are dominated by a yellow that only exacerbates the dour mood. This yellow is not sunny, it is glaring. The yellow kitchen chair in the bleak Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair has the inappropriate gaiety of the yellow bed and chair that van Gogh painted at Arles . (Herrera, page 147)

Frida Kahlo used fine brushstrokes to illustrate gradual changes in value (light and dark). She gives special attention to detail. Very fine lines are used.

FORMAL ORGANIZATION: How do the elements in the artwork work together?

Most of the self-portraits are very symmetrical. Everything revolves around Frida Kahlo. Her prominence is emphasized by the size of her face which generally fills the space in the center. Symbols and Indian ideas are represented throughout. The colors dramatize the feelings. Her physical character traits are over emphasized.

Two Fridas - 1939
Self-Portrait (with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird) - 1940
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair - 1940
Thinking of Death - 1943,br> Self-Portrait as a Tehuana - (Diego in My Thoughts) 1943
The Wounded Deer - 1946
Diego and I - 1949

INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTMAKER

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 to Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderon. Her father was a famous German photographer known for his picture documentation of Mexican architecture. Frida and her family lived in Coyoácan, Mexico, a town southwest of Mexico City.

Soon after she was born, Frida’s mother became pregnant again with her little sister and this prevented her from breast-feeding Frida. A nurse was hired to feed her, which became a source of contention later in Frida’s life.

Frida grew up in Mexico at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Fighting and skirmishes took place in the streets right outside of the Kahlo’s front door. At the age of five, Frida contracted polio and her right leg was damaged, leaving her bed-ridden for nine months. That limp leg remained a sign of inferiority and embarrassment for the rest of her life. As a child, Frida was favored by her father and he shared the secrets of photography and art with her. His clear pictures influenced Frida to develop an appreciation for detail which would show up in her painting career.

Although many women did not receive any formal education during the early nineteen-hundreds, Frida was lucky to attend one of the best high schools in Mexico, the National Preparatory School, where students received schooling to prepare them for professional careers. In fact, Frida was one of only twenty-five girls studying with two thousand boys.

During this time, Frida met Diego Rivera, her future husband, while he was commissioned to paint a mural in the Preparatory’s auditorium. Frida was instantly fascinated by him; yet she was still very young. The Preparatory School provided Frida with significant experiences that would influence her political life. As many students in Mexico are politically active, Frida and her classmates held many protests and rebellions to improve the conditions at school. This gave her a firm background for involvement, and later in her life Frida would fight for international peace.

In 1925, misfortune hit when a public bus that Frida was riding collided with a trolley. The accident left her with severe injuries to her back, arms and legs, and several internal organs. Frida, who was never able to conceive any children, saw the accident as a life-dominating event. Throughout her life Frida would go on to have thirty-two surgical operations in attempt to reconstruct her spinal column. While recovering, Frida discovered that painting could occupy her time and communicate her emotions.

In 1928, Frida met up with Diego Rivera again and this time she asked him to mentor her painting. With his encouragement, Frida gained confidence to improve her skills. She could often be found on the rafters with Diego as he painted murals. By this time, Diego had established himself as a world-renowned artist. On August 21, 1929, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were married.

In addition to being politically active, Frida taught art classes at La Esmeralda School of Painting and Sculpture. She shared her skills and influenced many of Mexico’s upcoming talents.

Frida continued to gain a reputation as a painter and as a leader. Her paintings attest to belief in the double life that she led. This stems from the Aztec traditions of opposites that exist in life, like, for example, the cosmic and terrestrial forces. This duality is also known in Mexican culture. It involves the difference of life and death, male and female, and light and dark. Individually, Frida lives as a liberated thinker and as a flirtatious woman dependent on her husband.

As feared by Frida, her marriage began to struggle because both artists were reaching the peak of their artistic careers. Believing that she could repair their relationship, Frida painted scenes designed to win back her husband’s attention.

Diego and Frida’s rocky relationship ended in divorce in 1939. The break up was a difficult one for Frida and once again she expressed her sorrow through her art. They remarried at the end of 1940, but kept separate residences and led somewhat separate lives.

Unfortunately her medical disabilities confined Frida to a wheelchair, and later to a bed, remaining there in pain for most of the rest of her life. Fortunately, Frida continued to paint until her death on July 13, 1954.

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

NATURAL CONTEXT: What can I learn about the natural environment where the artwork was made?

Frida Kahlo was born, lived, and died in her Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico. The valley of Mexico is very fertile. Frida’s house was filled with flora, trees and cacti. She had many pets such as monkeys, dogs, cats, birds and a deer, many of which were included in her paintings

FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT: What can I learn about how the artwork was used?

Frida, has stated in her personal correspondence and her own writing that one of the main reasons for painting self portraits was that “I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best”. She told a friend , “My painting carried with it the message of pain.... Painting completed my life. I lost three children.... painting substituted for all this.” She also said, “I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration. “ After her last exhibition in Mexico, Frida told reporters, “I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.” Her self-portraits worked as a sort of therapy for her survival, as a way to alienate herself from suffering and physical pain, a kind of repression of the ravages on her body inflicted by external events. The body surely was for Frida the center of any kind of thought, both about her internal self (as a woman and artist) and about external environment (cultural, political and social aspects of her time). She let nothing stand in her way. No matter how painful things could become for her, she stood tall, facing all obstacles with a sense of style and strength. Her personality was theatrical and electrifying. She was considered an extremely sexy and talented woman who had a love for art and life.

CULTURAL CONTEXT: What can I determine about what people thought, believed, or did in the culture in which the artwork was made?

Frida Kahlo was a child during the Mexican Revolution and grew up in an era of social change. In the 1920s Frida espoused a communist philosophy, and did not agree with capitalism. The official stance of the Mexican government was hardly communist, but it was much more left-leaning than the United States, and the government did split up numerous haciendas and ranches and parceled the land out in the form of ejidos (jointly owned farms) to many Mexican rural communities. Frida believed that industry was part of capitalism, and even though Diego Rivera believed in the necessity of technological progress, Frida believed machines to be bad luck and the cause of pain.

In Mexico Frida Kahlo is recognized as the country’s greatest woman artist, and, in the opinion of many, Mexico’s greatest artist. In 1984 the Mexican government decreed Frida Kahlo’s work to be national patrimony, because it has “an unquestioned aesthetic value and has reached unanimous recognition within the national artistic community.” For women everywhere, and especially for women artists, Frida is an example of persevering strength. She painted against great odds: she worked in a macho culture during the heyday of muralism, when a woman making small, highly personal easel paintings did not win much respect. She was not discouraged by the enormous fame and ferocious artistic drive of her husband - she neither competed with nor deferred to him.

ARTWORLD CONTEXT: What can I learn about the art ideas, beliefs, and activities that were important in the culture in which the artwork was made?

As a child, Frida Kahlo spent most of her time with her father in his photography studio. There she learned precision and patience. His photographs of her show a woman who had a great sense of style and the ability to capture attention. She married Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, when she was 22, and he was 42 years old. He was by this time a very well-established, renowned artist. Her marriage to Rivera fully immersed her in the art world. She knew many famous painters such as Picasso, Duchamp, Siqueiros, and Orozco.

Kahlo was told by André Breton, the surrealist poet, that she was a surrealist. She was aware of the art movements of, the time but she did not necessarily affiliate herself with Surrealism. Instead she said she painted her own reality. But because of this association she was given shows in New York City and Paris. Still she did not have her first solo show in Mexico until 1953, a year before her death.

CULTURAL/HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

MAKER’S INTENTION: What can I learn about why the maker wanted the artwork to look the way it does?

She is remembered by her friends as greatly enjoying life, happy, clever, and lively, always ready for fun. She smoked too much and drank to excess. Bisexual during much of her life and a lesbian in her last years, Frida was unfaithful to her husband with the same frequency he evidently was to her. Yet, they loved each other immensely. He was an obsession to her.

She traveled in Europe and the United States. She built for herself a personal world separate from that of her famous husband. She was much more than an artist’s model or the wife of a famous painter. With strength and patient dedication, she created her own work, distinct from the art movements of her time. She demonstrated that she could flourish beneath the shade of a tree as prominent as Diego.

This life she portrayed to everyone through her paintings. All the physical and spiritual suffering Kahlo experienced is reflected in her art. Her work is sensitive and tells the viewer what she wanted us to know of her life. Her paintings reveal her interior world and at the same time they force an awareness of her loneliness and misery. She was often sweet and tender but more often brave, tough, manipulative and haughty. She often smiled and laughed but never in her paintings of herself. She was firmly rooted in the traditions of Mexico and almost always portrayed herself in traditional Mexican costumes. Her subject matter is also concerned with traditional Mexican culture. Her many impressions of herself give the audience the knowledge of an extraordinary woman whose work has and will stand the test of time as one of the finest of women artists.

ARTWORLD VIEWER UNDERSTANDING: What can I determine about how the viewer, patron, or user understood the artwork?

In her own day, the art world press usually referred to Frida Kahlo in the context of her husband. For example, Time magazine stated: “The flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego River’s German-Mexican wife, Frida Kahlo.” (“Bomb Beribboned,” Time, November 14, 1939)

On the other hand, major artists such as Andre Breton appreciated Frida’s originality immediately. Breton wrote, “My surprise and joy was unbounded when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, that her work has blossomed forth, in her latest paintings, into pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas motivating the activities of my friends and myself.” (Andre Breton, Frida Kahlo de Rivera, p 144.)

Over the decades since her death, she has attained worldwide recognition as an artist and serves as a model for women artists and art viewers. In fact several authors have written biographies of Frida Kahlo including: Frida Kahlo, The Brush of Anguish, Martha Zamora, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1990.

CULTURAL IMPACT: What can I learn about how the artwork was understood within the culture in which it was made?

During her life, Frida Kahlo was recognized primarily by the intellectual elite, both in Mexico and internationally, but was not well known among ordinary Mexicans, particularly because she worked in media that did not lend themselves to mass distribution. She did not do murals, no mass-printed graphics, both of which were the media of choice for providing access to the Mexican masses. As one autobiographer of Kahlo stated, “A visit with Frida was becoming obligatory for every important person traveling throughout Mexico City. Through her home passed the Rockefellers, Edward G. Robinson, Josephine Baker, poet Gabriela Mistral, the presidents of various countries, many ambassadors, and other luminaries.” (Zamora, p 99)

Almost 30 years after her death, her biographers, especially Hayden Herrera, wrote influential works that brought both her extraordinary personal life as well as her art to the center of attention within the international art world. The greatest portion of her artwork is held in private collections, not museums.

EXPLANATION OF RELATIONSHIPS AMONG ARTWORKS

STYLE: How does the artwork look like other artworks?

Frida Kahlo was considered a naive painter even if she was well-read and educated. Frida’s work combines dreamlike imagery with realism. For these reasons Frida may be understood as a surrealist.

Her paintings share stylistic and technical characteristics with traditional Mexican retablos or devotional paintings. Many of her works are small paintings, some on tin. They were executed with great attention to detail and sometimes include text.

INFLUENCE: What can I learn about how earlier artworks influenced this artwork or about whether this artwork influenced later artworks?

“Influenced first by Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painters such as Boticelli and Bronzino, Kahlo was later influenced by Rivera himself, and then more profoundly by Mexican folk art, and especially by retablos.” (Latin American Art of the Twentieth Century, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson, NY, 1993.)

Frida Kahlo has inspired many artists. Edward Weston, Héctor Garcia, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo, Nickolas Murray, and Guillermo Zamora have all photographed Frida. Many Chicana/o artists have included versions of her self portraits in their work, among them Rupert Garcia, Alfredo Arreguín, Yreina D. Cervántez, Marcos Raya, and Carmen Lomas Garza.

THEMES: What general ideas connect these artwork to other artworks?

One central theme of Frida Kahlo’s work includes the evocation of dualities in life, nature and society. Such dualities as life/death, earth/industry, woman/man, and dark/light are found in the majority of her work. Self-portraits define Kahlo’s work. Her deep introspection has influenced many artists to do the same. Self-portraiture unites Kahlo’s work with many contemporary artists, such as Ana Laura Garza and Gilberto Luján.

A second theme is her adaptation of elements of Mexican folk art into a contemporary evocation of social and personal identities. In some of her artworks she used traditional Mexican art forms such as the retablo. This is an art of painting on tin which has a function of providing a devotional image. Kahlo uses the tradtitional medium but alters it rather drastically, even iconoclastically. Instead of a traditional, serene, divine image to whom someone would normally pray, she used the retablo medium to represent a duality of her own personality. Kahlo’s persona thus becomes the center of attention, not as an object of reverence or awe, but as an example of contemporary dualities, complexities, and confusion. Kahlo substitutes her own persona instead of a divine image.

Kahlo uses symbols of pain, hurt, suffering and injury. Many painting include scenes showing blood, broken parts, symbols of death, hospitalization and dark colors. Her painting of these feelings allowed her to face constant pain and hurt and yet, be able to face them head on.