Document

Some of my thoughts:
The reason why I chose Frida Kahlo as the artist of my work is quite … random I would say. I was planning to work on feminism theories for all of my final projects. (Fun fact: I didn’t in the end, at all :P
I am much attracted to Frida Kahlo’s eyebrow in her self portraits. I think it demonstrates her firmness and boldness. Looking into her other paintings, I am also very impressed by her bold choice of color and imageries on self, love and death. I think this will be an on going project as I read more about this great artist and other feminist theories.

Beyond the Mirror

Name: Frida Kahlo
Date & Place of Birth: July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico
Date & Place of Death: July 13, 1954, Coyoacán, Mexico

She grew up in the family's home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister.

Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.

The Two Fridas, 1939 by Frida Kahlo

This painting was completed shortly after her divorce with Diego Rivera. This portrait shows Frida's two different personalities. One is the traditional Frida in Tehuana costume, with a broken heart, sitting next to an independent, modern dressed Frida. In Frida's diary, she wrote about this painting and said it is originated from her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. Later she admitted it expressed her desperation and loneliness with the separation from Diego.

In this painting, the two Fridas are holding hands. They both have visible hearts and the heart of the traditional Frida is cut and torn open. The main artery, which comes from the torn heart down to the right hand of the traditional Frida, is cut off by the surgical pincers held in the lap of the traditional Frida. The blood keeps dripping on her white dress and she is in danger of bleeding to death. The stormy sky filled with agitated clouds may reflect Frida's inner turmoil.

Self Portrait, Dedicated to Dr Eloesser, 1940 by Frida Kahlo

In another 1940 Self Portrait, Dedicated to Dr Eloesser Frida's necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida's necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida's headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort.

Frida's work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color's capacity to drive home emotional truths. As a self-taught artist, she began with a highly personal and unorthodox feeling for color. Her palette came out of her love for the startling combinations of bougainvillea pinks, purples, and yellows seen in the decorative arts of Mexico. She chose colors the way she chose her clothes - with exquisite aesthetic calculation. In such early works as Henry Ford Hospital, pastels create an ironic disjunction with the painful subject matter. In later paintings the choice of colors is just as odd and often even more dissonant and complex. The soft, pearly sky and the bright flowers in the Eloesser Self-Portrait, for example, only accentuate the chill of Frida's predicament. Their richness recalls the way statues of the scourged Christ in Mexican churches are often surrounded by flowers, lace, velvet, and gold.

The Frame (painting), 1938 by Frida Kahlo

In 1939, the Louvre bought Kahlo's "The Frame," making it the first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist to be purchased by an internationally renowned museum. Despite such an accomplishment, Kahlo was still known for most of her life, and the 20th-century, as the wife of Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1929.

In this unusual self portrait by Kahlo, she seems to be experimenting with "mixed medium". The self portrait of Frida and the blue background are painted on a sheet of aluminum while the boarder of birds and flowers is painted on the back side of a glass that lays on top of the portrait.