Research Notes: Frida Kahlo

Rough notes in preparation for this  final review pdf.

Notes from Thames and Hudson book. (Burrus, C, 2008)

Bio

Born in Mexico to a Mexican depressed tyrannical mother and German photographer father. Received her maternal nurturing from her sisters and half-sisters.

Enjoyed helping her dad with his work. She was his favourite.

Had an illness around 6 (polio?) which left her with a limp/wasted leg which she was self-conscious of.

Went to study at medical school but had an accident where a bus hit a tram when she was 19 which was nearly fatal. She broke many parts (back, pelvis, etc) and her health was never the same again. She had health issues for the rest of her life. Parts of the wreckage even took her virginity (unless you believe the film with Selma Hayek) .

Her parents and most of her family were too busy mourning the accident to actually go and see her for the first 3 weeks!! Only her sister came. Her first love was with her so was recovering from his own much lesser injuries so also didn’t visit but she wrote him many letters during her stay in hospital. Her father brought her a mirror and paints.

Her oerdeve was made of self-portraits mainly from that first moment.

Diego was already an established painter (muralist ) at that time and already married and in his forties. They fascinated each other from the first moment she demanded him to stop work and see her pictures. He divorced his wife and married Freda against her family’s wishes (even though he came from a better off family). Only her father was there to witness the marriage of an ‘elephant and a dove’.

They loved and supported each other. Her famous mode of traditional Mexican dress she wore because he liked it. Eventually he was unfaithful but even that didn’t completely destroy them until later, when he had a long affair with her favourite sister. She had affairs too, (many of whom she remained friends with). They got divorced and remarried a year later, Freda’s conditions for that were financial independence and no sex. They remained together until she died aged 47.

During their life together, Diego’s fame took them to NYC. Where he was well received at first. She didn’t like America and was homesick but it features in many of her paintings of that time. There she met Dr Eloesser whom she confided in for the rest of her life.

Andre Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement in Paris discovered her in Mexico and tried to persuade her she was a surrealist. She didn’t think so but exhibited with them on numerous occasions. She went to Paris and was disappointed in their lack of professionalism and practicality. Only Marchel Duchamp  helped her arrange the gallery and exhibition. She was disappointed with the number of pictures of hers the the group show too. She said she detested the whole lot of them for being too into the theory. She said ‘I paint my reality’

In his introduction to Frida in the ‘Mexique’ catalogue, Pierre Colle gallery, 1939, Breton said ‘The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb’ (Burrus, C, 2008)

Both her and Diego were communists, often protesting and going on marches together. When Trotsky feed Europe he came to stay with them in Mexico. Politics entered both Frida and Diego’s art. Even in her last days she was out protesting.

She was very prolific during the year due and Diego split. She poured her emotions into paint as she always had.

Her one and only solo show was arranged at the very end if her life and she was too sick to attend so they brought her and the whole bed, with sirens blazing, to the gallery opening.

In her work, she is very connected to place and what is going on with her medically. She had a kind of visual short hand.

For a while she was a teacher of Art at the Mexican college and she was take everyone out onto the streets and into the markets for inspiration.

Women artists and the Surrealist movement book by Whitney Chadwick, Thames and Hudson , 1991 (written 1985)

Carrington remembers finding the theoretical and judgemental side of Surrealism extremely distasteful ; in a recent biography of Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera makes clear the Mexican artist’s scorn for Breton’s position. (Chadwick, W, 1991) p12

Note: (Herrera, frida, p263 and passim)

P88: todo write up notes

P90/1: todo write up notes

‘Kahlo used painting as a means of exploring the reality of her own body and her consciousness of that reality; in many cases the reality dissolves into a duality, exterior reality versus interior perception of that reality, or two selves, one loved, the other not.’ (Chadwick, W, 1991) p92

eg the two fridas, 1939 when frida was getting divorced from Rivera.

As Chadwick points out, many of the Surrealist women use luxurious flowing hair as a metaphor for sexual/creative energy and femininity. Vegetation or its deficit as a metaphor for psychic reality. ‘In Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944), the bleak, forbidding landscape becomes a potent metaphor for inner desolation.’ (Chadwick, W, 1991) P95

‘I paint myself because I am so often alone…  because I am the subject I know best’. She said… ‘Surrealism provided a supportive environment for women artists’ exploration of inner reality; it did not furnish them with a shared set of artistic goals. As a result, most of them did not see themselves as true Surrealists; at the core of their art lay only individual reality.’ (Chadwick, W, 1991)  p95

P98 todo write up notes

Berger portraits book (Berger, J, 2015)

when commenting on her decision to paint on metal, or Masonite,  Berger in his book on portraits, sees more than just to incorporation of traditional Mexican retablo, he posits that it actually affects her vision not to paint on a surface that is as smooth as skin, something that can only be noticed when viewing the original works.

‘The sensitivity of her own mutilated body made her aware of the skin of everything alive – trees, fruit, water, birds, and naturally other women and men. And so, in painting her own image, as if on her own skin, she speaks of the whole sentient world.’ (Berger, J, 2015) p337

He points to Diego and I, 1949 as a sort of confession to this.

‘Her art talks to pain, mouth pressed to the skin of pain, and it talks about sentience and its desire and its cruelty and its intimate nicknames.’ (Berger, J, 2015) p337/8

 

‘she remembered what she had touched, what was there when the pain wasn’t. She painted, for example, the feel of polished wood on a parquet floor, the texture of rubber on the tyre of her wheelchair, the fluff of a chicks feathers, or the crystalline surface of stone, like nobody else. And this discreet capacity – for it was very discreet – came from what I have called the sense of double touch: the consequence of imagining she was painting her own skin.’ (Berger, J, 2015) p339

About the self-portrait 1943, where she’s laying on a rocky landscape where plants grow from her body, her veins giving way to leaf veins, he comments that the flat rocks that extend to the horizon are ‘like waves of a petrified sea’ (Berger, J, 2015) p339 Yet what the rocks are exactly like is what she would have felt on the skin of her back and legs if she had been lying on those rocks. Frida Kahlo lay cheek to cheek with everything she depicted’. (Berger, J, 2015) P339/40

 

References:

Alexandrian, S. (1970) Surrealist art. Thames and Hudson Ltd

Bauer, C. (2007) Frida Kahlo. Prestel

Berger, J. (2015) Portraits: John Berger on Artists. Verso Books

Burrus, C. (2008) Frida Kahlo : ‘I paint my reality’. Thames and Hudson Ltd

Castro-Sethness, M. (2004-2005) ‘Frida Kahlo’s Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-voto Paintings on Her Art‘In: Woman’s Art Journal Vol. 25, No. 2 (Autumn, 2004 – Winter, 2005), pp. 21-24 [online] At: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3566513?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
(Accessed on 19 Aug 17)

Chadwick, W. (1991) Women artists and the surrealist movement. Thames & Hudson

Encyclopedia Britannica, (2016), Huitzilopochtli: AZTEC God, [online]   https://www.britannica.com/topic/Huitzilopochtli (Accessed 19th Aug 2017).

Harrison, C & Wood, P (Ed.). (2003) Art in theory 1900-2000, an anthology of changing ideas. Blackwell publishing

Honour, H & Fleming, J. (2009) A World History of Art. (7th Ed), London, Laurence King Publishing

Kahlo, F. (2006) The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (essay and commentary by S. Lowe & introduction by C. Fuentes). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc

Pankl, L & Blake, K. (2012) ‘Made in Her Image: Frida Kahlo as Material Culture‘In: Material Culture Fall 2012, Vol. 44 Issue 2, p1 [online] At: https://www.k-state.edu/geography/kblake/papers/Made%20in%20Her%20Image,%20Frida%20Kahlo%20as%20Material%20Cutlure.pdf
(Accessed on 19 Aug 17)