The immense popularity of the work of Frida Kahlo

The immense popularity of the work of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and the overwhelming public interest in her life may lead some observers to conclude that her small output of paintings has been over-praised and over-valued. But, while the cult based on Kahlo's perceived status as the feminist heroine of a romantic tragedy may be somewhat misguided, there are sound reasons for incorporating biography into the study of her paintings. Kahlo's history, emotions, politics, and self-image constituted her primary subject. In electing to adhere quite closely to this limited range Kahlo produced an iconography and style that drew on both European and Mexican culture but were, considered in themselves, a radical departure from centuries of male-centered art. Kahlo brought all her influences and personal material together in a body of work that makes a coherent statement about culture, women, and suffering. A brief analysis of this art demonstrates that, no matter how many T-shirts feature her face, Kahlo was a uniquely gifted painter whose work opened the way to new, specifically female, modes of representation and expression.

Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoac�n, now a part of greater Mexico City, to Guillermo Kahlo, "the son of Hungarian Jews who lived in Baden-Baden, Germany," and Matilde Calderon Kahlo, "a Mexican of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry" (Herrera 18). Kahlo's father was a prominent and accomplished photographer, and amateur painter, who assembled a "prodigious ar

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wer. In practical terms, however, it also served to disguise Kahlo's damaged body and she came to conceive of it as a sort of "second skin, a magic armour" that protected her emotionally while projecting multiple meanings (Billeter, "World," 15). Two late works are especially interesting in respect to the meanings of Kahlo's choice of attire. In My Dress Hangs Here (1933-38), Kahlo's only combination of collage and oil painting, and The Two Fridas (1939) the symbolic importance of dress is apparent. In the former work a Tehuana dress hangs suspended between two columns--one topped with a toilet bowl and the other with a golf trophy. In this "critique of North American culture," Kahlo's traditional costume is the only object in the busy composition that is not subjected to the ironic gaze of the artist (Baddeley 15). A bin of garbage, a portrait of Mae West, burning buildings, neoclassical buildings signifying American government and power, masses of marching, anonymous people, a skyline of industrial smokestacks, a church, and the distantly placed Statue of Liberty form a commentary on the Western past as embodied in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. The architectural forms dominate and crush the masses of pe

Category: Arts - T