The artist produced works inspired by her chronic pain and exploration of gender and womanhood
BY LARA IQBAL GILLING, PHOTO BY LUCIENNE BLOCH, COURTESY OLD STAGE STUDIOS
This 6 July marks 118 years since Frida Kahlo’s birthday. Although she was born in 1907, the world-renowned artist claimed it was during the year of the Mexican Revolution, 1910.
This nationalist spirit was seen in her outfit choices, too, as she often wore native Mexican clothing to show her affinity for her culture and people. She also cross-dressed, as seen in a family photograph from 1926, using masculine clothes to project power and autonomy.
Aged only 17, she stares boldly into the camera. As the daughter and granddaughter of photographers, she said: “I knew the battlefield of suffering was reflected in my eyes. Ever since then, I started looking straight into the lens, without smiling.”
Her independence from expectations placed on women comes to light in several similar photographs and in one of her self-portraits, which shows a bald Frida in a suit. She regularly portrayed herself with a moustache and monobrow in her paintings, too.
But, Frida’s crossdressing wasn’t the only queer thing about her. Her tumultuous relationship with her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, involved both parties partaking in affairs. He was 21 years her senior, and already had two common-law wives.
Some of Frida’s extra-marital partners included Leon Trotsky, artist Georgia O’Keeffe and actress Dolores del Rio, who Diego proclaimed he was in love with. In fact, Frida had a habit of romancing her husband’s girlfriends.
Many sources, including the biopic Frida, link her romantically to Parisian actress, singer and dancer Josephine Baker. There is no evidence that their relationship was anything other than platonic, but as a Resistance spy against the Nazis, Josephine kept her entanglements with women under wraps. She made a trip to see Kahlo in Mexico in 1952, but there is no record of what they got up to.
Frida’s friend Lucienne Bloch remembers Diego saying: “You know that Frida is a homosexual, don’t you?” However, the state of their fraught marriage makes this likely to be more of a jab than the truth. Frida refused to define her sexuality, but is celebrated today as a bisexual icon.
One of Diego’s affairs was with Frida’s sister. Frida didn’t react well, cutting off her hair to show how this betrayal had wounded her. In 1940, they divorced at his request, but ended up remarrying later that year.
During their relationship, Frida suffered a miscarriage after a failed abortion, which
led to a nine-week hospital stay. She depicted the experience in her painting Henry Ford Hospital.
Her myriad of health issues started at age six, when she contracted polio. As a result of the illness, her right leg and foot grew to be thinner and shorter than the left. She tended to hide this asymmetry with long skirts, but was bullied at school.
By the end of her education, she had gained a reputation for being outspoken. She joined a group of students with similar political beliefs, and dated its leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. They were on a bus journey together when it crashed into a streetcar.
A metal handle impaled her hip, fracturing her pelvis and spine. Alejandro and others pulled it out at the scene. She was 18 and headed for medical school, but the resulting chronic pain forced her to redirect.
Healing required three months in a full body cast. In order to distract herself, she picked up painting. She later said that the accident and recovery made her wish “to begin again, painting things just as [she] saw them with [her] own eyes and nothing more.”
Frida has been described as a surrealist artist, a label she strongly rejected. She scorned the movement’s overly intellectual method and said that her work was based on her own reality.
Although she saw success during her lifetime – her paintings displayed and sold in shows in the US, Paris, and Mexico – she did not become so celebrated until the early 1990s.
One patronising headline in the Detroit News was “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”. In the interview she says: “Of course he does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”
As she was becoming better known in Mexico, her already fragile health was declining. She was largely confined to her part of the house, Casa Azul, which was joined to Rivera’s half with a bridge.
Her first solo exhibition in Mexico was held in 1953. Against the doctors’ advice, she had her bed moved to the gallery, and was carried there via ambulance and stretcher so she could attend. She died less than a year later, aged 47. Officially, the cause of her death was a pulmonary embolism, but some suspect it was a deliberate overdose on the painkillers she was addicted to.
You can watch Frida on Amazon Prime.
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