The subject matter for her work consisted of mainly self-portraits of herself. Within the self-portraits she showed the viewers the physical pain she was going through because of her accident. She also showed us her personal pain of not being able to have a child as well as her roller coaster ride of a relationship with Diego Rivera. In the painting, "The Broken Column", Frida shows herself crying and in pain. It shows her typical days struggle of trying to move on in life but its nearly impossible with all the damage that has been done to her body. It also can symbolize her broken relationship with Diego Rivera. They both loved each other but were on and off numerous times. Frida even admitted to having affairs of her own with other men and even some women. In the painting, "The Flying Bed" (also known as Henry Ford Hospital) Frida is laying down in her bed bleeding from the pain of loosing her son due to a miscarriage. The symbols around her symbolize her accident and broken parts of her body as well as the many miscarriages she has faced.
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| "The Flying Bed" 1932 |
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| Frida Kahlo "The Broken Column" 1944 |
Frida Kahlo's biography discusses many of the things we talked about in class. By the time of Frida's death she had created about 200 paintings and has only been to one exhibit that had featured her work. Many of her paintings were not recognized until after her death when some of them were finally placed in exhibits. As for why she always painted herself she says "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best. Kahlo is known as a Surrealist because she painted her life. "The duality of Kahlo's life- an exterior persona constantly reinvented with costume and ornament, and an interior image nourished on the pain of a body crippled in a trolley accident when she was an adolescent-invests her painting with a haunting complexity and a narrative quality disturbing in its ambiguity" (Chadwick, 313). Chadwick is saying that Kahlo's paintings tell a story of her life and that she isn't afraid to show it how it was. The ambiguity part of her paintings is that one thing symbolizes multiple things. A good example of that is shown in the painting of "The Flying Bed."
The difficulties that women artists during this time period faced was trying to get their art into exhibitions. Many of the women artists never got to see their paintings in exhibitions because no one paid attention to their artwork until after they died. In the Guerilla girls book, Kahlo says "My husband, Diego Rivera, was treated like a god in his lifetime, but I was a martyr and was canonized only after I had suffered and died. My first solo exhibition was just one year before I was dead. Some say it was given to me because I was about to go" (Guerilla Girls, 78). This quote is proving the point that many women artists struggled to get their work into museums and that they had to die in order for it to happen. The men very easily got their work across while the woman had to fight and die for it.
Kahlo left a mark on many contemporary artists that came after her. She opened up the doors with the idea of talking about her personal life and speaking on a personal level in terms of childbirth. Some artists after her continued with the self-portraits and using disturbing images to best describe the reality that they were living through. An example of a disturbing image from Frida Kahlo was from the painting of "My Birth" in 1932. That painting was what Frida imagined what it most have been like for her mother to give birth to her.
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| "My Birth" 1932 |
Recent rare photos of Frida Kahlo's last few years of her life have been found and posted for people to see. Some of the pictures show Frida mainly at home painting and spending time in her garden. Pictured below is Frida Kahlo enjoying her garden. It was probably a place where she went to think and get her mind off of things.
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| Frida in her garden 1951 |
| Works Cited |
Schwiegershasenu, Erica. "Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo From the Last Years of Her Life." The Cut. NY Magazine, 29 Mar. 2015. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th ed. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print.
Guerilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
"Frida Kahlo Biography." WELCOME TO FRIDA KAHLO WEBSITE ». N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.
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