The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

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Durozoi, Gerard (2002). History of the Surrealist Movement. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. p.356. ISBN 978-0-226-17412-9. Herrera 2002, pp.180–190; Kettenmann 2003, pp.38–40; Zamora 1990, pp.50–53; Burrus 2005, p.203; Ankori 2002, p.193. Courtney, Carol (23 January 2017). "Frida Kahlo's life of chronic pain". Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World. Oxford University Press . Retrieved 6 December 2020. According to Nancy Cooey, Kahlo made herself through her paintings into "the main character of her own mythology, as a woman, as a Mexican, and as a suffering person... She knew how to convert each into a symbol or sign capable of expressing the enormous spiritual resistance of humanity and its splendid sexuality". [130] Similarly, Nancy Deffebach has stated that Kahlo "created herself as a subject who was female, Mexican, modern, and powerful", and who diverged from the usual dichotomy of roles of mother/whore allowed to women in Mexican society. [131] Due to her gender and divergence from the muralist tradition, Kahlo's paintings were treated as less political and more naïve and subjective than those of her male counterparts up until the late 1980s. [132] According to art historian Joan Borsa, Gates, Anita (13 July 1999). "Theater Review: Sympathetic, but Don't Make Her Angry". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 November 2016.

They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris.”

a b c d "Frida Kahlo Biography | Life, Paintings, Influence on Art | frida-kahlo-foundation.org". www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org . Retrieved 6 July 2020. 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. In addition to other tributes, Kahlo's life and art have inspired artists in various fields. In 1984, Paul Leduc released a biopic titled Frida, naturaleza viva, starring Ofelia Medina as Kahlo. She is the protagonist of three fictional novels, Barbara Mujica's Frida (2001), [285] Slavenka Drakulic's Frida's Bed (2008), and Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna (2009). [286] In 1994, American jazz flautist and composer James Newton released an album titled Suite for Frida Kahlo. [287] Scottish singer/songwriter, Michael Marra, wrote a song in homage to Kahlo entitled Frida Kahlo's Visit to the Taybridge Bar. [288] In 2017, author Monica Brown and illustrator John Parra published a children's book on Kahlo, Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos, which focuses primarily on the animals and pets in Kahlo's life and art. [289] In the visual arts, Kahlo's influence has reached wide and far: In 1996, and again in 2005, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC coordinated an "Homage to Frida Kahlo" exhibition which showcased Kahlo-related artwork by artists from all over the world in Washington's Fraser Gallery. [290] [291] Additionally, notable artists such as Marina Abramovic, [292] Alana Archer, [293] Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, [294] Yasumasa Morimura, [295] Cris Melo, [296] Rupert Garcia, [297] and others have used or appropriated Kahlo's imagery into their own works. The Diary is her lifeline to the world. When she saw herself, she painted and she painted because she was alone and she was the subject she knew best. But when she saw the world, she wrote, paradoxically, her Diary, a painted Diary which makes us realize that no matter how interior her work was, it was always uncannily close to the proximate, material world of animals, fruits, plants, earths, skies.

These letters reveal a Frida who felt neglected again, this time by her husband: Diego refused to have children and worked morning, noon, and night, leaving her on her own. She got bored when meeting people, found it difficult to communicate in English, and preferred to paint, which she was only able to do for short spells. 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. For more information regarding the acquisition of international rights, permits and collaborations: Piecing together other circumstances in her life then,historians speculate that she reused the canvas as money may have been tight and she may have been pressed for time to deliver pieces for an exhibition. X-ray photograpy of "Ixcuhintli Dog With Me (Self-portrait With Xoloitzcuintli Dog)" reveals an earlier painted-over piece underneath Image: akg-images

Broude, Norma; Garrard, Mary D., eds. (1992). The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. p. 399. Ankori, Gannit (2002). Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-31565-7. Deffebach, Nancy (2006). "Frida Kahlo: Heroism of Private Life". In Brunk, Samuel; Fallow, Ben (eds.). Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-71481-6.

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]

Barson, Tanya (2005). " 'All Art is At Once Surface and Symbol': A Frida Kahlo Glossary". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5. a b Herrera 2002, pp.133–160; Burrus 2005, pp.201; Zamora 1990, p.46; Kettenmann 2003, p.32; Ankori 2013, p.87–94. February – 30 April 2016 – Frida Kahlo: Paintings and Graphic Art From Mexican Collections at the Faberge Museum, St. Petersburg. Russia's first retrospective of Kahlo's work. Kahlo tried to conceal her heterosexual liaisons from Rivera—not so difficult after they moved into his-and-hers houses, adjacent residences connected by a bridge. Once detected, these dalliances, such as her mid-1930s fling with the dapper Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, usually ended. (In contrast, Rivera boasted to anyone who would listen of her flings with women.) Her brief liaison with Leon Trotsky—whom Rivera, with his potent political pull, had helped bring to Mexico in 1937—infuriated him most. (Kahlo also did not miss the opportunity to seduce Trotsky’s secretary, Jean van Heijenoort.) Friends recall that long after Trotsky’s assassination Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist. The Kahlo-Rivera duet was, a friend says, “heightened torture and heroism.”

A severe bus accident at the age of 18 left Kahlo in lifelong pain. Confined to bed for three months following the accident, Kahlo began to paint. [12] She started to consider a career as a medical illustrator, as well, which would combine her interests in science and art. Her mother provided her with a specially-made easel, which enabled her to paint in bed, and her father lent her some of his oil paints. She had a mirror placed above the easel, so that she could see herself. [13] [12] Painting became a way for Kahlo to explore questions of identity and existence. [14] She explained, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." [12] She later stated that the accident and the isolating recovery period made her desire "to begin again, painting things just as [she] saw them with [her] own eyes and nothing more." [15] Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón [a] was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacán, a village on the outskirts of Mexico City. [134] [135] Kahlo stated that she was born at the family home, La Casa Azul (The Blue House), but according to the official birth registry, the birth took place at the nearby home of her maternal grandmother. [136] Kahlo's parents were photographer Guillermo Kahlo (1871–1941) and Matilde Calderón y González (1876–1932), and they were thirty-six and thirty, respectively, when they had her. [137] Originally from Germany, Guillermo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891, after epilepsy caused by an accident ended his university studies. [138] Although Kahlo said her father was Jewish and her paternal grandparents were Jews from the city of Arad, [139] this claim was challenged in 2006 by a pair of German genealogists who found he was instead a Lutheran. [140] [141] Matilde was born in Oaxaca to an Indigenous father and a mother of Spanish descent. [142] In addition to Kahlo, the marriage produced daughters Matilde ( c. 1898–1951), Adriana ( c. 1902–1968), and Cristina ( c. 1908–1964). [143] She had two half-sisters from Guillermo's first marriage, María Luisa and Margarita, but they were raised in a convent. [144] a b c Maranzani, Barbara (17 June 2020). "How a Horrific Bus Accident Changed Frida Kahlo's Life". Biography . Retrieved 6 July 2020. Frida began to seek solace in others. During her time in San Francisco, Frida met Dr. Leo Eloesser, whom she fully trusted to be her personal doctor. As time went by, she maintained a correspondence with him in which the doctor-patient relationship turned into an intimate and confessional friendship. When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which eventually made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than the left. [149] [b] The illness forced her to be isolated from her peers for months, and she was bullied. [152] While the experience made her reclusive, [145] it made her Guillermo's favorite due to their shared experience of living with disability. [153] Kahlo credited him for making her childhood "marvelous... he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems." He taught her about literature, nature, and philosophy, and encouraged her to play sports to regain her strength, despite the fact that most physical exercise was seen as unsuitable for girls. [154] He also taught her photography, and she began to help him retouch, develop, and color photographs. [155]

His book is a study of each of Kahlo's 152 paintings done between 1924 and 1954, identified by their origins and exhibition history. Paintings that were destroyedor whose present whereabouts are unknownare identified only by photographs. Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings includes previously unseen or overlooked works by the artist (Credit: Taschen) Image: Frida Kahlo/Taschen Verlag Beyond her renowned portraits Nearly a century later, Rebecca Solnit would write her own lyrical meditation on blue as the color of distance and desire. January 2022 onwards Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney. Audio visual exhibition created by the Frida Kahlo Corporation. [315] [316] O'Sullivan, Michael (2 December 1996). "Putting the Best Face on Frida Kahlo". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved 21 July 2020. Weidemann, Christiane (2008). 50 women artists you should know. Larass, Petra., Klier, Melanie. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3956-6. OCLC 195744889.