Frida Kahlo's Unknown Life, Works and Meaningful Sayings

The painter, whose real name is Magdalena Carmen Frida Kohlo Calderon, is Mexican. She lived between 1907 and 1954. The painter, who became a popular icon, was defined as a surrealist. However, she always rejected the surrealist movement. The question of who Frida Kohlo is can be answered briefly as follows.

The Life of Frida Kohlo

The painter Frida Kohlo was born in 1907 in the city of Coyoacan, south of Mexico. The painter, known for her sensitivity to social events and her involvement with politics, was originally born in 1907, but announced her birth date as July 7, 1910, the day of the Mexican Revolution. She wishes that her life began with the birth of a new, modern and democratic Mexico.

However, the painter's life continued with great difficulties. She suffered from polio at the age of 6, and suffered a limp in one of her legs. The limp was tried to be eliminated or alleviated with a wooden plaque within the framework of the medical possibilities of the period. This led to Frida Kohlo being given a cruel nickname like ‘wooden leg Frida’.

Frida Kohlo clung to life with this disability. During her teenage years, she won the National Preparatory School, which provided the best education in her region. In this versatile school, what was important was not just passing the classes. The school aimed to produce very effective artists in fields such as art, science, philosophy and literature. Therefore, every student had to be interested in these fields. Therefore, Frida acquired the movements, views and skills that would be influential in her artistic life in this school. Names such as Alejandro Gomez Arias, Jose Gomez Robleda and Alfonso Villa, who would become important intellectual figures in Mexico, were Kohlo’s schoolmates. Kohlo, who also aimed to develop her art and views at school, became a member of an anarchist literary group. Frida Kohlo, who aimed to become a strong female actress, had her life completely changed with a traffic accident.

The Accident That Changed Frida Kohlo's Life

On September 17, 1925, Frida Kohlo, who was 18 years old, had a serious accident when the bus she was on crashed into a tram on her way home from school. Kohlo, who lost many of her friends in this accident, also suffered serious back and hip fractures in this accident. One of the iron bars of the tram entered Kohlo's left hip and exited her pelvis. The rest of Kohlo's life would be spent among doctors, hospitals and medications as a trace left by this accident. Frida Kohlo would live with an incurable pain in her hip bone throughout her life.

Frida Kohlo had 32 surgeries due to this accident. Her leg, which was twitching due to polio, could not withstand these procedures and had gangrene, so her aforementioned right leg would be amputated in 1954. Kohlo was able to leave the hospital 1 month after the accident. Frida, who started painting with the encouragement of her family and friends, devoted herself to painting to get rid of the distress and pain. However, she could not get out of bed. For this reason, she started to paint her own self-portraits by placing a mirror on the ceiling right across from her bed. The first of Frida Kohlo's paintings is Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress. The painter, who painted her first painting in 1926, could not get up for 2 years after the accident.

Frida Kohlo After the Accident

Frida Kohlo was only able to take her first steps in 1927 after the accident. Kohlo, who had not been able to get out of bed until then and had to learn about the country's politics from the news, started to get close to art and politics circles the day she got up. She met Cuban leader Julio Antenio Mella and photographer Tina Modotti and started to form a regular friendship with the duo. As three friends, they attended the exhibitions of the artists of the period, the invitations of the politicians and the discussions of the socialists. After all these activities, Kohlo became a member of the Mexican Communist Party in 1929.

Frida Kohlo and Married Life

While Frida Kohlo was making a name for herself with her paintings, her friend Tina Modotti decided to introduce her to a painter just like her. Diego Rivera, known as the Mexican Michelangelo, would become Frida Kohlo’s husband. Frida showed Diego her paintings during their first meeting and agreed to marry him as a romantic relationship began between them. The couple married on August 21, 1929. Rivera married Frida for the third time. Their marriage is known in the art community as the ‘marriage of the elephant and the dove’.

Although Frida Kohlo has not stopped painting until now, her paintings are generally not self-portraits. Specializing in drawing inanimate objects, Frida made her second self-portrait the year they got married. This second self-portrait was purchased by an American collector for 5 million USD in 2000. Frida Kohlo's husband Rivera was also a member of the Communist Party. However, he was expelled from the party the year they got married. Frida decided to leave the party for this reason. After these developments, the couple started living in the USA. The couple moved to the USA in 1930 and made a living by making wall paintings. Kohlo created her work called 'Frida and Diego Rivera' in the USA, where they stayed until 1933. This work was made by Frida Kohlo based on the couple's wedding photographs. The painting is the only drawing among Frida Kohlo's works that includes Diego. At the same time, this work was included in the annual exhibition organized by the San Francisco Women Artists Society. Therefore, this is the first painting of Kohlo to be exhibited in any exhibition.

A Stormy Marriage

The couple's marriage was quite complicated. Due to health problems, Frida Kohlo had an abortion. In addition, Kohlo, who had many miscarriages, was also exposed to her husband's unfaithful attitudes at this stage. Kohlo, who learned that her husband was cheating on her, left him in 1939. However, the couple remarried a year later. After their second marriage, they moved to the Blue House where Frida Kohlo was born and raised.

It was known that Frida had relationships with various men before they had even ended their marriage. One of them, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, moved into Frida's house over time. Trotsky, who moved in with Frida with special permission from the president of Rivera, separated from Frida after learning about his wife's relationship with Frida. Frida was among the people questioned after the assassination attempt on Trotsky. After a while, Frida found it appropriate to leave Mexico. Afterwards, she returned to Rivera in San Francisco.

Frida Kohlo's Last Years

Kohlo, whose health began to deteriorate frequently, devoted herself even more to painting in order to suppress her pain. She opened exhibitions not only in Mexico but also in America and France. As the Frida Kohlo story ended, the exhibition she opened in New York in 1938 brought her great fame. The exhibition she opened in Paris in 1939 attracted the attention of even the most famous painters of the period. Her paintings were highly praised in the Paris exhibition, and she was offered to take classes at La Esmeralde Art School, one of the most powerful art schools of the period. Frida accepted this offer and despite her deteriorating health, she taught art there for 10 years. This educational process, which began in 1943, was suspended in 1953 when Kohlo's health completely deteriorated. However, a group of students came to her home at Kohlo's request and continued her lessons. This group of students was called Los Fridos.

In the last years of her life, in 1948, she applied to the Mexican Communist Party and stated that she wanted to become a member again. After her request was accepted, she was hospitalized in 1950 due to problems with her spine. She had to stay there for 9 months. However, when she was released from the hospital after 9 months, she devoted herself to her own paintings even more and opened a personal exhibition in Mexico City in April 1953. Her right leg was amputated due to gangrene that occurred in July of the same year.

How Did Frida Kohlo Die?

Kohlo died on July 13, 1954 due to a pulmonary embolism. The last painting she painted, ‘Long Live Life’, was found in her house. This painting was a still life. Her body was cremated the day after her death and placed in the Blue House. The Blue House was donated to the state treasury by Diego Rivera in 1955.

Frida Kohlo’s Works

Frida Kohlo has 143 works. 55 of these works are self-portraits. The mastery in her paintings, especially her self-portraits, also caught the attention of Pablo Picasso. For this reason, Picasso said of Kohlo, ‘We don’t know how to draw human faces like her’. Frida often had pets. For this reason, she drew portraits of her pets together. The drawing she made in 1941 called ‘Me and My Parrots’ and the ‘Self-Portrait with Monkeys’ she made in 1943 are examples of these.