Self-Portrait

An enigmatic and brilliant artist, Frida Kahlo’s rebellious nature was the driving force for a life of pioneering courage

Frida Kahlo was a 20th-century artist who had a truly uncompromising life, one of passion, love, laughter, creativity, strength, and defiance. A trailblazer, she was a courageous outlier who was a force for good: for women and for art.

She was only 6 when she contracted polio. A bright student, she wanted to become a doctor, but the course of her life changed at 18, when a tram crashed into the bus she was traveling on, causing catastrophic injuries.

Frida underwent the first of 32 operations and was never pain-free again, often having to wear orthopedic corsets for support. Incredibly, this was the stimulus for her remarkable art career. To relieve the boredom during a long recovery, Frida’s father bought her a set of paintbrushes, and with a mirror cleverly attached to the underside of her canopy bed, she started to paint the subject she knew best: herself.

As an adult, Frida fully embraced life. She loved to dance, sing folk songs, cook, and be surrounded by a lively circle of artistic friends. If she rarely smiled for photos it wasn’t because she was an unhappy person, rather that she had bad teeth due to her fondness for candy.

A deeply passionate person and a rebel, Frida joined the Communist Party, chain-smoked, drank tequila straight out of the bottle, and fell in love with Diego Rivera, Mexico’s most famous – and infamous – artist who was twice her age. Taking him to meet her parents, Frida’s father pulled Diego aside and said: “She is a devil. I’ve warned you.” 

Diego was attracted by her natural artistic talent, quick mind, and mischievousness. The couple married and Diego encouraged Frida in her ambition to be a painter. She adopted a distinct way of dressing, taking on the traditional Tehuana dress. Coupled with ribbons and flowers in her hair and an abundance of jewelry, she became her own work of art.

The tumultuous marriage was often tempestuous with frequent infidelities by Diego. Frida countered this by taking lovers of her own, including exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. She longed to have a child, but her damaged pelvis made this impossible and she had a series of miscarriages, most powerfully portrayed in her 1932 painting, Henry Ford Hospital: The Lost Desire.

The all-consuming romance meant everything to Frida, but when it led to separation and divorce, she expressed her sadness in one of her most powerful works, The Two Fridas (1939). The European Frida in the painting shows her heart is not complete; while the Mexican Frida has in her hand a mini portrait of Diego and her heart is whole.

Just a year after divorcing, the couple’s love was rekindled and they remarried, moving to Frida’s childhood home, La Casa Azul, named for its vibrant cobalt-blue color. How that separation and reunion affected Frida can be seen in the dining room, where two clocks sit side by side. One has the date in which “the hours were broken,” when she divorced Diego. On the other is the date the couple remarried.

They shared a passion for collecting Mexican folk art and pre-Columbian sculptures, creating a lush and colorful garden filled with native plants. Frida acquired lots of unusual pets who all appeared in her paintings, such as Self Portrait with Monkeys (1943). 

Having the opportunity to get to know an artist’s lifespan is rare, but that’s exactly what you experience at Museo Frida Kahlo, a museum set in Frida’s La Casa Azul home. Located in the charming and bohemian neighborhood of Coyoacán, just south of Mexico City, the house offers an intimate encounter with one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

The house has been preserved to be just as it was during Frida’s lifetime. Wander the rooms and see the artist’s brightly colored clothes, jewelry, shoes, orthopedic corsets, personal letters, and photographs on display.

La Casa Azul was Frida’s refuge and an expression of her creativity, filled with her beloved collection of folk art and pre-Hispanic artifacts. Walk through the house and see how she lived, how the sun filled the bright yellow kitchen where she loved to cook, and glimpse inside her painting studio with easel and paints just as she left them. Then marvel at how much Frida packed into the 47 years of her life. Book tickets to visit Museo Frida Kahlo well in advance and you won’t be disappointed.

Frida was born in La Casa Azul in 1907. Her photographer father was a German immigrant and her mother was of Spanish and Mexican heritage. As an adult, in an emphatic affinity with her Indigenous roots, Frida dropped the Germanic spelling of her name, removing the “e” from “Frieda,” and claimed she was born in 1910 at the start of the Mexican Revolution. That link to her history was a two-way love story: the people of Mexico adored Frida as much as she did them.

From nods to Aztec and Indian mythology to embracing pop culture and Surrealism, Frida’s work is acknowledged as bold, unflinching, and groundbreaking.

During her lifetime, her paintings expressed experiences about being a woman that had not been seen before in Western art, paving the way for later female artists to more fully express themselves. For those fascinated by the human story behind artistic endeavors, Frida is a spellbinding study.

Famous for her self-portraits long before selfies and Instagram, the artist’s choice to paint self-portraits was a form of cathartic self-expression; her canvases, filled with vibrant colors that articulated both her joy and pain, were an autobiography of her life. She pointed out: “I never painted dreams or nightmares. I painted my own reality.”

During Frida’s lifetime, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso were all admirers of her work. When viewing a drawing by Frida, Pablo told Diego: “Look at those eyes: neither you nor I are capable of anything like it.”

The Surrealists Marcel Duchamp and André Breton arranged for an exhibition of Frida’s work in Paris in 1939, claiming she was one of their own. She firmly rejected this label, writing to a friend: “I detest Surrealism. To me it seems to be a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art.”

No longer able to sit or stand, Frida had to permanently wear the supportive orthopedic corsets. After an operation in New York to strengthen her spine, she painted The Broken Column (1944). In the painting the corset literally seems to hold Frida together and upright. Although her face is covered in tears, her look is one of defiant stoicism: I will not let this beat me.

In the early 1950s she painted mostly still life. Her reliance on increasingly strong pain medication meant her painting style became much looser and less precise. She said in an interview: “I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint,” and she did, right up until her death in 1954, a week after her 47th birthday. Her last painting was Vida la Viva (“Long Live Life”), a vibrant still life of watermelons, finished just eight days before she died.

More than 70 years later, Frida’s unique and groundbreaking way of expressing herself continues to inspire and stir us. There is much to admire in her joy for life and courage under adversity. Frida would be fiercely proud that her legacy has brought a greater interest in art and culture from her beloved Mexico.