Frida Kahlo:
Notas Sobre una Vida
Notes on a Life

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month 2001

About Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) first came to the United States with her husband, artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), in 1930. In the years that followed, they continued to sojourn to the United States, working as artists and frequently socializing with such prominent American figures as Conger Goodyear, the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, and Clare Boothe Luce, often making the newspaper headlines. Although Kahlo and Rivera spent a number of years working in the United States, their connection with the life and culture of Mexico – their sense of Mexicanidad – remained absolute and was the defining element of their identities.

Kahlo was born in 1907 in the "Blue House" in Coyoacán, a quiet town in the outskirts of Mexico city. Her father Wilhelm Kahlo, was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who arrived in Mexico in 1891 and married a Mexican native. He changed his first name to Guillermo and worked as a photographer specializing in architectural monuments of the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras. Soon after his first wife died in childbirth, Kahlo's father married Matilde Calderón, a mestiza, a Mexican of mixed European and American Indian ancestry, who was to become Frida's mother.

A tragic bus accident in1925 left Frida with a fractured spine, a crushed pelvis, and broken foot. She was to remain partially handicapped and in pain for the rest of her life. This life-changing event set in motion the practice of faithfully recording the painful episodes of her life through her art.

Kahlo first met the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City. Having just returned from Paris and enjoying a certain level of fame in his native country, Rivera was perched high on a scaffold and absorbed in the creation of his first fresco when Kahlo interrupted "el Maestro" by boldly requesting he come down from the scaffold to critique her work. Rivera graciously complied and was impressed with Kahlo's original style and mode of expression. Twenty-four years his junior, Kahlo married Diego Rivera in 1929, marking the beginning of a complex relationship defined by mutual admiration, painful separations and reconciliations.

In 1942, Kahlo began teaching and her ardent followers and students were collectively known as "Fridos". She was, however, forced to abandon her teaching because of numerous painful surgeries to correct her spine and foot. Her physical suffering, coupled with the torment of her husband's waywardness became the primary subjects of her art, well documented in a lifetime's worth of emotionally charged canvases. These sad chapters of Kahlo's life were the subjects of some of her most powerful and notable works of art.

Near the end of her life, in response to the many critics who had said her work belonged to the school of Surrealism, she replied, "They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."