The Two Fridas

by Helen Arden

2022, Frida Kahlo’s cumulative influence is staggering compared to the modest fame she had achieved by the time of her death at 47 in 1954. Throughout her active years, other active female Mexican painters were far more famous than Kahlo. She produced only around 150 known paintings from 1924 to 1954. (For context, Georgia O’Keeffe produced 2000 works in her long career, and over a period of just 10 years, Vincent Van Gogh produced 900 paintings.) The rarity of Kahlo’s work, her short, difficult life, her high-profile marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, her agency to revolutionary movements, and her carefully cultivated look combined over the years after her death to create a towering figure, separate from the woman herself, larger than life. Her image is a meme. In the 1990s, the meme was called Fridamania, culminating in a 2002 critically acclaimed biopic starring Salma Hayek. Her branding was such a part of her that it eventually transcended her.

Swirling around Frida Kahlo was a unique stew of social, cultural, and political moments that directly influenced whom she became, whom she represented herself as, and what she painted. The image we can conjure of Kahlo just by hearing her name—colorful shawl around her shoulders, hair full of flowers, her famous unibrow—is so strong because she herself was so focused on it, not only her own physical image but an image of herself in her moment, an attempt to answer the questions: What does it mean to be Frida? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be Mexican?

Of her 143 works, 55 are self-portraits. She was asking audiences to look at her, which is perhaps part of why we still love to do so. The complexity of self on display in Kahlo’s work is totally immersive, a self-examination so layered the viewer must look for a long time to see everything there is to see.

Frida Kahlo was born to German and Mexican parents in 1907 in Coyoacán, outside of Mexico City. Her father was a talented photographer and painter who encouraged his daughter’s artistic pursuits from an early age. Kahlo suffered from polio at age 6, only the beginning of the physical trauma that would plague her all of her life. She began her pursuit of a medical degree (and was one of only 35 female students admitted to her school) in 1922, but in 1925 she was a victim of a horrific bus accident. Several passengers were killed, and Kahlo suffered extensive serious injuries. An iron rail impaled and fractured her pelvis and punctured her abdomen and uterus, and broke her spine in three places, among many other fractures and dislocations. Kahlo wore plaster corsets the rest of her life to support her spine, and over the course of the next 30 years underwent over 30 intensive reparative surgeries with limited success. Much of her life, both after the accident and in her final years, was spent bedridden or confined to a wheelchair. Her parents constructed an easel and mirror that allowed her to paint self-portraits in bed, and this was where her career began.

Kahlo married the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in 1929. Her courthouse wedding attire was borrowed from a maid, a tiered and embroidered peasant dress. Kahlo wore her own interpretation of traditional Tehuana dress, a matrilineal indigenous people from Oaxaca. Her colorful attire became a way to turn heads on the streets of San Francisco, Detroit, New York, and Paris, with Rivera, and also a way to disguise her disabilities.

Three years after Kahlo’s birth in 1907, the Mexican Revolution began. From 1910 to 1920, groups of revolutionaries, including the Zapatistas, fought to depose and replace the Federal Army in the most historical period in the formation of modern Mexico. Victory in 1920 brought sweeping political, economic, and social change to Mexico. Kahlo was born at the end of one country and the dawn of another. Growing up, her teachers introduced students to indigenismo, a school of thought and a new form of Mexican identity that celebrated the indigenous cultures of Mexico in an effort to combat colonial thought. Postrevolution Mexico saw the rise of a new middle class and stronger attempts to include rural and ingenious Mexicans into a new, cohesive cultural identity, which became known as Mexicanidad.

This surge of cultural identity influenced the young, educated women of Mexico, including Kahlo, to incorporate native dress into their daily wear. Kahlo wore traditional native Mexican clothing to advertise and emphasize her mestiza ancestry: bright-colored long-tiered skirts, huipils (square cut embroidered tops), rebozos (colorful shawls), elaborate Tehuana headdresses, and jade jewelry. She wrote in a letter to her mother

1 1 2 from San Francisco: “The gringas really like me a lot and pay close attention to all the dresses and rebozos that I brought with me; their jaws drop at the sight of my jade necklaces.”

Kahlo traveled with Rivera to the United States several times between 1931 and 1933, following Rivera’s commissions for murals at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, California School for Fine Arts, a retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, a mural at the Rockefeller Center, and a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Kahlo miscarried a child, began her long affair with photographer Nikolas Murray at this time, and both subjects feature heavily in the work she produced in the States. She painted only 13 paintings during these years.

In America, Kahlo thrived on turning heads with her bold dresses and severe face. She painted herself in these outfits as expressions of the emotional support they represented for her. Around 20 outfits she once wore now tour in an exhibition around the world. Symbols of native Mexican culture litter Kahlo’s paintings. Her interest in naive folk art was part of a movement to centralize rural Mexican tradition to the country’s identity, and this iconography combined with her European influence is the basis for Kahlo’s unique style. Much of Kahlo’s work plays in such contradictions. Roots symbolize both personal growth and a sense of being trapped (My Grandparents and I). Scissors represent female empowerment and male dominance (Self Portrait with Cropped Hair). Medical imagery connotes both healing and pain. She was fascinated by the Aztec’s concepts of duality and hybridity, the idea of being two things at once. This is a fundamental conceptualization of many identities to Kahlo—Mexican, mestiza, female, personal—a combining of disparate elements that conflict and support each other.

Other representations of Mexican identity can be found in Kahlo’s animal iconography. Once again drawing inspiration from ancient Aztecs, Kahlo painted monkeys (Self Portrait with Monkeys), parrots (The Frame, which was the first painting by a Mexican woman to appear in the Louvre), and the pre-colonial hairless dog Xoloitzcuintle, or Xolo. Kahlo was an avid animal lover, and painted Diego, Me, and Señor Xolotl, in honor of the couple’s beloved hairless dogs. In several famous photographs taken in 1944 by Lola Álvarez Bravo, Kahlo wears a striking lace black dress and peers into a mirror in a courtyard, surrounded by her two dogs. The Mexican hairless dog is a breed with ancestry traced back to the Aztecs. She also owned two spider monkeys named Fulang Chang and Caimito de Guayabal, who would entertain guests with tricks at the couple’s home, Frida’s childhood Casa de Azul Rivera and Kahlo returned to her childhood home in 1934, and while they divorced in 1935, they remained close friends, and Kahlo managed Rivera’s finances and household—his studio was right next door—until her death. Kahlo hosted plenty of influential artists and political figures in the blue house in Coyoacán, including former Soviet leader Leo Trotsky and his wife. (When Trotsky was killed in 1940, Kahlo was briefly considered to have been involved with the murder.) Kahlo’s health declined rapidly between 1940 and her death in 1954. She underwent multiple surgeries, including the amputation of her right leg in 1953, and she wore 28 different spinal supports from 1940-1954, which she painted and decorated herself. Her paintings from this period reflect her health problems, including The Broken Column (1944), Without Hope (1945), and The Wounded Deer (1946).

By this time, word of Kahlo’s paintings had reached Surrealist artist André Breton. He was so impressed by her work that he helped her arrange her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938. Held in November, artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and many other popular painters attended, and over half the paintings sold. The showing was so successful that Kahlo earned another solo exhibition opportunity in Paris the year after. This one was less successful, and it only showed two of her paintings, declaring the rest too vulgar to display, but it did result in the purchase of a painting by the Louvre. Kahlo’s fame and reputation began to gain much of its speed in the later years of her life and grew posthumously. During her life, she was known most as the wife of Diego Rivera, as a socialite, and as an important member of the international cultural elite.

Back in Mexico, Kahlo helped found the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of 25 artists commissioned by the Mexican government to expand local and global knowledge of Mexican culture. Kahlo worked as an art teacher out of the Casa de Azul for much of the 1940s, until her health took a turn at the end of the decade. Kahlo painted a few of her most famous works during this period, perhaps the most recognizable of her paintings— The Two Fridas—as well as Self-portrait with Cropped Hair and The Wounded Table Her paintings were featured at three more exhibitions in Mexico City, San Francisco, and New York.

After a long decline in her health, Kahlo died in her bed in 1954, and her reputation slowly grew, gaining speed in the 1970s during the feminist movement’s challenge to the exclusion of women and artists of color from the historic canon of art. This moment also aligned with the Chicano movement of the 70s, a social and political wave that sought to elevate Mexican icons. In the 1980s, Mexico forbade the export of any more of her works, as they are part of the country’s national cultural heritage. This added to the allusiveness of Kahlo and her work: complete retrospectives are almost impossible, and her work rarely appears at an international auction. (The last Frida Kahlo painting to be auctioned, Two Lovers in a Forest, sold in 2016 for around $8 million.) Historian Oriana Baddeley compares the intense, everlasting interest in Frida Kahlo to the fascination of Vincent

Frida Kahlo was enamoured with the Mexican hairless dog breed xoloitzcuintli, whose name is derived from two words in the Aztec language: Xólotl, the god of death; and itzcuintli, or dog. She even named her favorite “Mr. Xolotl,” after the Aztec canine deity and guardian of the underworld.

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Van Gogh, but cites one crucial difference: Van Gogh is associated most with his paintings and work, and Kahlo is associated most with an image of herself, which, printed on stickers and t-shirts and candles has more in common with Bob Marley. Kahlo has even been made into a Barbie doll. Kahlo’s unusually complex and compelling art, portraying a dark but inspired mindset, only deepens her mystery.

Often in Kahlo’s paintings, there are two Fridas. In The Two Fridas, two sides of her sit together, holding hands, one in a high-collared white dress, the other in Tehuana traditional dress, both figures with hearts exposed. In Self Portrait on the Mexican Border, Kahlo paints herself in a dainty pink dress, standing between Mexico on the left, represented by a desert with Aztec symbolism, and America, represented by the Ford factory. In Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo is dressed as a man, holding the scissors she has just used to cut her hair short. In a drawing for the exhibition Appearances Can Be Deceiving, Kahlo drew herself naked beneath a voluminous skirt and shawl, her plaster corset, the scars of her body, visible beneath it. Between these many Fridas must be the real thing, and perhaps this is why her legacy still commands attention. Kahlo integrated the tragedies of her life with raw emotion. She did not resolve feelings in paintings, she merely expressed them as she felt them. Perhaps this is why, other than her physical limitations, there are so few paintings from her active years: these paintings took emotional effort, and became a way for Kahlo to pour frustration, pain, confusion, longing, and the many conflicting but important identities she found within herself all at once. Kahlo once said, “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.” Though her image now feels culturally ubiquitous, her reality is still a swirling mystery to us, even after she painted it 143 times. ■