Frida Kahlo

In the short, unusual, and productive life of Frida Kahlo, the following events stand out as most important. She was born in the town of Coyoacan on 6 July 1907, the same year in which the notable portrait painter Hermenegildo Bustos had died in Purisima del Rincon, Guanajuato. Her grandmother, Isabel Calderon Gonzalez, entered her in the civil registry, giving her the name Magdalena Carmen Frida. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was then thirty-six and her mother, Matilde Calderon, was thirty. By that time her paternal grandparents, Jacobo Enrique Kahlo and Enriqueta Kaufmann, were dead, as was her maternal grandfather, Antonio Calderon, a photographer like her father.

The poet Miguel Guardia once wrote of Frida Kahlo that "little could be said; surrealist or not, invalid or not, Frida walked and amused herself like you or me, even if she were suffering at times; she is one of the typical women of our art." Miguel Guardia was correct in observing a vague ambivalence in her person and in her work, but he was mistaken in minimizing her value because of that ambivalence. In addition to being a "typical woman" of Mexican art, Frida Kahlo is a singular human being in the history of culture; her personality could hardly be called simple. Franz Kafka could also be called a "typical man" of European literature, although perhaps it is more useful to consider him as being deeply introspective.

Overcoming countless physical misfortunes, praising life and making fun of the death that lay in wait for her-and which at times she sought in trying to commit suicide-Frida Kahlo succeeded in prolonging her life to the age of forty-seven. That she lived to the utmost is shown by a photo of her in a wheelchair as she took part in a demonstration to protest the fall of the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala , days before her death on 13 July 1954. Full of pain and aware of her premature decrepitude, she went out to express her disagreement with imperialism and its lackeys, rather than shutting herself up to bemoan her enormous personal misfortune.

Frida Kahlo knew very well the aesthetic and human value of her big eyes crowned by thick eyebrows joined in the middle like the wings of a bird in flight. Painting them dry or raining tears, she always represented them as fixed on the viewer, wide open and defiant. Her face was always serious and thoughtful. Rivera was the one who painted her smiling to commemorate the first anniversary of her death, and in a Mexicanist drawing he shows her as she used to appear before the others: smiling, playful, and vital. In spite of the enormous physical suffering contained in this medical history, Frida Kahlo demonstrated with her existence and her work that social defects are far more oppressive than physical ones.