Fridah+Kahlo

 =Maria, Luz, Jesmin, & Yudith =

Frida Kahlo

Biography Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist. She was born in 1907 as Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon in Coyoacan, Mexico. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, leaving her right leg skinnier than the left. At the age of 18 in 1925, she was involved in a terrible bus accident. She suffered a broken spinal cord, collarbone, pelvis, and more. Even tthough she recovered from these injuries, she remained in extreme pain for the rest of her life.

Due to this accident, she stopped her studies of medicine, and instead became a painter. Then in 1929 she married Diego Rivera, and by the end of the 1930s Kahlo was beginning to be recognized for her own talents, not just as the wife of a famed muralist.



//__**DEATH**__//
 * Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47 and the official cause of death was given as pulmonary embolism. Althought, many suspected that she had died from an overdose that may or may not have been accidental, but an autopsy was never performed to prove this theory. During the previous years before her death she had been very ill and had her right leg amputated at the knee because of gangrene. A few days before her death she wrote in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful - and I hopw never to return - Frida."

Frida was once asked what should be done with her body when she died, she replied: "Burn it....I don't want to be buried. I have spent too much time lying down...Just burn it!"

The day after her death, mournoers gathered at the crematorium to witness the cremation of Mexico's greatest and most shocking painter. Soon to be an international icon, Frida Kahlo knew how to give her fans one last unforgettable goodbye. As the cries of her admirers filled the room, the sudden blast of heat from the open incinerator doors caused her body to bolt upright. Her hair, now on fire, blazed around her head like a halo. Frida's lips appeared to break into a seductive grin just as the doors closed. Fridas ashes were placed in a pre-Columbian urn that is on display at the "Blue House" that she shared with Rivera. A year after her death, Rivera gae the house to the Mexican government to become a museum. Diego Rivera died in 1957. On July 12th, 1958, the "Blue House" was officially opened as the "Museo Frida Kahlo."

Frida has been described as: "...one of history's grand divas...a tequila-slamming, dirty joke-telling smoker, bi-sexual that hobbled about her bohemian barrio in lavish indigenous dress and threw festive dinner parties for the likes of Leon Trotsky, poet Pablo Neruda, Nelson Rockefeller, and her on-again, off-again husband, muralist Diego Rivera." Today, more than half a century after her death, her paintins fetch more money than any other female artist. A visit to the Museo Frida Kahlo is like taking a step back in time. All of her personal effects are displayed throughout the house and everything seems to be just as she left it.**


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//Back to Yudith's Home page//** =//Frida Kahlo// = = = = 19th Century Mexican Painter Fridah Kahlo Early on in her newly found artistic career, Frida had no style of her own and her early paintings reflected the motifs and styles of other artists that she admired. Frida's first self-portrait was [|"Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress"] in 1926. It was painted in the style of the 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. = = = = = = =

//The Two Fridas//
Painted in 1939 at the time of her divorce from Diego,The Two Fridas is believed to be an expression of Frida's feelings at the time. This double self-portrait was the first large-scale work painted by Frida.

In many of Frida's paintings she presented herself wearing this style of attire….probably because it was the style of clothing Diego preferred and she wanted to please him. She first appears in this style of dress in the 1931 double portrait [|"Frieda and Diego Rivera"], a painting that was probably based on a wedding photograph.

=//Diego and I// =

She was his //chicuita// ("little one") and he was her "frog prince," but the path of love was not a smooth one for Frida and Diego. Almost from the moment of their marriage in 1929, there were problems. But 1949 was a particularly low point in their relationship. Rumors circulated that Diego intended to marry the film star Maria Felix, with whom he was having an affair. Although nothing came of the affair and Diego remained with Frida, she was hurt. The self-portrait //Diego and I// came out of this experience.

Frida and Diego were married on August 21, 1929. After their marriage, Diego encouraged Frida to paint in the style of the Mexican popular art, a "folkloric" style of painting. He suggested that she paint the indigenous and working class people of Mexico as he did in his own murals. From that encouragement came the painting [|"Two Women"]



= = = = = Self-Portrait with Monkey =

In October 1938, Frida staged her first one-woman exhibition at the Levy Gallery in New York. In the crowd of spectators A. Conger Goodyear, president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spotted a painting he just had to have – //Fulang-Chang and I.// Unfortunately, the work had already been promised to someone else. Not to be dissuaded from owning a work by Frida, he commissioned her to paint a similar self-portrait. A week later she unveiled //Self-portrait With Monkey.//

Frida's obsession with not being able to bear children also produced some paintings that were all about sex and fertility.

Two obvious paintings are: [|"Flower of Life"] (1943) In [|"My Grandparents, My Parents and I"]

(1936), the fetus is Frida.