Frida Kahlo
Wonderful Female Painters
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Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932)
In all her work, Frida used a fantastic iconography to narrate her personal experience. An experience that had to do mainly with three things: her love for the painter Diego Rivera —a great influence for her as an artist—, the suffering for her body disintegration, and her revolutionary, anti-imperialist ideas. In this painting we can observe that Mexico is colorful and United States is polluted.
The sum of these apparently incongruous objects defines a very personal style that some interpret as Surrealist, although it really has little automatism, liberation of the unconscious —characteristics that define Surrealism— and instead it has a lot of symbols placed “consciously.”
We can also observe the deliberate “naivety” in the drawing, in opposition to the terrible subjects she addresses in her paintings.
All her work is a silent scream of her suffering and passion. The expression, the symbolism and the spirit full of life in the paintings are strengthened when combined with a drawing that is at times childish, fresh, and spontaneous and with solid roots in the Mexican popular art.
Diego Rivera, the great referent of Mexican art and of all Latino America, who also loved Frida and got married to her (although he made her sentimental life as painful as the physical pains that tormented her), defined her with unconditional admiration: “Your genius as a painter is in the picture and in your image. Decidedly, there is no other painter alive that can do what you do. You have made mincemeat of the whole brood of painters.”
Recommended links:
Wonderful Female Painters: Remedios Varo.
Wonderful Female Painters: Grandma Moses.
Wonderful Female Painters: Florine Settheimer.
Wonderful Female Painters: Leonora Carrington.
Wonderful Female Painters: Paula Modersohn-Becker.
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