Magdalena Frida Carmen Kahlo Calderón, better known as Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was a Mexican painter of immense talent and artistic originality.
The accident
The third of four daughters of Matilde Calderón y González and Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, bourgeois district of Mexico City. At eight years old, she was stricken with poliomyelitis; his right leg atrophies and his foot no longer grows.
Despite her interest in art, Frida plans to become a doctor. At sixteen, she joined the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, an excellent school. On September 17, 1925, the bus taking her home hit a tram and Frida was seriously injured in the abdomen, leg, pelvis and spine. She has to spend long weeks in the hospital, undergo many surgeries and wear corsets. It was during this period that she began to paint. Her relatives install a mirror above her bed and she can take her reflection as a model, making many self-portraits.
An art witnessing physical and moral suffering
Sensitive to the cause of the emancipation of women, Frida Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1928. The same year, she met the painter Diego Rivera at her school and showed him her paintings to get his opinion; the artist was immediately impressed by the strength and personality of the young woman's works. On August 21, 1929, despite an age difference of 21 years, Frida and Diego got married. Due to her bus accident and the trauma to her pelvis and uterus, she suffered several miscarriages that marked her deeply.
Diego and Frida move to San Francisco. Continuing to paint, Frida met many artists and patrons but, unlike her husband, she quickly felt uncomfortable in the United States, a malaise she expressed in her paintings. His art, marked by realism and symbolism, largely bears witness to the suffering of his mind and body and vindicates Mexican identity and culture.
In 1933, Diego agrees to return to Mexico but, hurt by her husband's infidelities, Frida quickly leaves the marital home before returning in 1935. From then on, she will also have extramarital affairs, with men and women. women. In 1937, she had an affair with Trotsky, whom she and her husband welcomed.
Health problems
In October 1938, Frida Kahlo presented her works in New York then, the following year, in Paris where she met Picasso and Kandinsky. In December 1938, Diego and she divorced before remarrying in 1940. In 1943, she began to teach painting but her poor health increasingly prevented her from walking properly. At the end of the 1940s, she again had to wear corsets and undergo operations that forced her to stay in bed for many months in the hospital. In 1953, it was transported to her hospital bed that she attended one of her openings. The same year, her right leg was amputated and plunged into a deep depression.
On July 13, 1954, weakened by pneumonia, Frida Kahlo died of a pulmonary embolism.