Frida Kahlo, presentation

FRIDA KAHLO

Frida Kahlo was born on the 6 july 1907.  From the earliest age she knew she didn't want to be like the other mexican women, she wanted to travel, to study and most of all, freedom. She lived in a working-class district of Coyoacán in the south of Mexico. Her father was an european immigrant and her mother is a mexican coming from an Indian family. At 8, she had a polio that deformed her feet, that's why she was nicknamed "Frida the maimed person".

The most important thing to get to know her Art is at first to know her life. In 1922 she went to the national preparatory school, she's a young girl, she's beautiful and confident , she's aware of her talent. As many students of her generation, she starts being interested in politics, her questioning deals a lot with the "mexicanidad" which means the feeling of a national identity as the country just had its independence.  

At 18, on the 17th September 1925, while she comes back from school , her schoolbus hit a tramway, an iron bar pierced her from the abdomen to the vagina. Her legs and spine will suffer the most. This accident marked a a turning point in her life.

As she must lay in her bed,stuck in her corset, she asked a mirror to be installed above her bed, here is when she started painting most of her masterpieces. Most of them were self-protrait, she said " I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. "

 She will undergo many surgeries during her life and will most of the time lay in her hospital bed.

In 1928, she joins the Mexican communist part because Mexico is still unstable and weak. She's determined to change women's position in this country, she's leading a real revolution to get Women Emancipation in a machista society. As a woman she openly show her freedom as a modern woman, and evenmore she cam out as bisexual which is an action of bravery for a woman in this kind of society.

One day she met Diego Rivero, a famous painter, and it was like love at the first sight,  they got married on july 1929. She realized that despites her pain she can love and feel passion.

A year later, she undergo her first abortion. She was told that she will never have children. In 1932 , she had a second abortion, it was a horrible moment, full of pain, that she decided to paint through her painting the "Flying Bed" to show people how she felt at that moment.

In 1934, she discovered that Diego was cheating on her with her own sister, she painted "Unos Cuantos Piquetitos" as a terrible answer but she was not that innocent because she also cheated on her husband with the famous russian Leon Trotski, and we can notice it in her Self Portrait "Under the curtains" where she hold a letter aimed at  Leon hiself.  She divorced with her husband but they got married again a year later...