Kahlo Vs Picasso

Born July 6, 1907 in Coyocoán, Mexico City, Mexico Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón began life with great struggle. Kahlo’s mother, too ill to care for or feed her newborn, hired an Indian wet-nurse to breastfeed and care for the newborn. Kahlo was raised in the family’s home where she was born, later named La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Polio caused Kahlo to lose a great deal of control over her right leg and foot, but did not slow the adventurous child. During her youth Kahlo studied photography in her father’s studio, learning to use the camera, develop, retouch and color photographs and later studied commercial printmaking as a paid apprentice to her father’s close friend, Fernando Fernandez. However, it was while enrolled at The
National Preparatory School, to pursue medical studies, that Kahlo met famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. During her youth Kahlo was severely injured when the bus she and a follow political activist and love interest, Alejandro Gómez Arias, collided with a streetcar. In the collision, Kahlo’s spine and pelvis were fractured when she was impaled by a steel handrail. It was upon her returned home from the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City, that Kahlo began painting using a specially designed easel that could be positioned above her bed to allow her to paint without lifting her back. (biography)

During this period, Kahlo’s often featured Art Nouveau and Still life styles, as seen in her piece Tray with Poppies (1924) and Still Life Roses (1925). As with the majority of her work, Still Life Roses depicts Kahlo’s grief. The piece depicts Kahlo as the closed rose on the table next to full blooming roses which represent Alejandro Gómez Arias, Kahlo’s love interest and the women that he was secretly seeing while also dating Kahlo. They are painted in an open form because it was discovered that the two were intimate, which was something that Kahlo had avoided in an attempt to seek a more personal relationship. “The Peaked Caps (1927) plays slightly to the Cubism so popular in Europe during the time period. In it Kahlo depicts various members of the political group she belong to as well as many symbols and items representative of their cause. Her exploration in European styles can also be seen in Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926)” (kahlofans).
Kahlo and Diego Rivera reconnected in 1928 and married the next year. Together they traveled to locations where Rivera’s work was commissioned. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California, where Kahlo showed her painting Frieda and Diego Rivera at the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. The two then went to New York City for Rivera’s show at the Museum of Modern Art and later moved to Detroit for Rivera’s commission with the Detroit Institute of Arts. (wikipedia) Upon returning to San Angel, Mexico; heart-broken by Diego’s infidelities, including an affair with her sister Cristina, Kahlo cut off most of her long dark hair and the untraditional couple lived in separate, but adjoining homes.

During this decade of travel Kahlo completed roughly twenty or so portraits of friends, neighbors and others in her life that brought inspiration.
Each portrait contains not only an amazing likeness to each person, but also details objects or subtle hints into who the individual was and what attracted Kahlo to paint the. This quality is one of the great things that attracts me to Kahlo. While complex and abstract the pieces and understandable. They require some insight or thought, but overly secretive in their meaning. The emotion is obvious, making the person within the portrait as well as the artist herself real to me. Kahlo use of oil on canvas for the majority of these pieces also adds the charm. The various lines and brush strokes used demonstrates her exceptional attention to detail and individual credit to each piece.
In 1937 Kahlo and Rivera housed Soviet communist Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia after they received asylum in Mexico. Once a rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Leon feared that he would be assassinated. It has been suggested that Kahlo and Trotsky had an affair during this time. Kahlo completed Self Portrait Very Ugly (1933) which is believed to be a possible reflection at her disgust for her actions. Kahlo threw the piece in the trash once completed, however it was recovered by a friend of hers who later mounted it on masonite
board.
In 1938 Kahlo held a major exhibition at a New York City gallery, selling half of the twenty five paintings shown and receiving two commissions. Soon after she traveled to Paris, where she exhibited some of her paintings and met Pablo Picasso. Kahlo and Diego divorced later that year. “It was during this time that Kahlo completed The Two Freda’s (1939), What the Water Gave Me (1939) and Remembrance of the Open Wound (1939). Although Kahlo never considered herself a surrealist, these three pieces greatly depict the style” (fridakahlo). In them Kahlo tells of her heart break caused by her husband’s infidelity; the scares she bares from it and the things she will mourn the loss of. They remarried in 1940, but continued to lead mostly separate lives.
In Me and My Parrots, a lighter and less intense Kahlo used oil on canvas. This was the first self portrait Kahlo completed from a photograph of herself, taken by her Nickolas Muray, whom she was having an affair with. In the same year, Kahlo completed Self Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) in which she paints herself in a traditional gown and the image of Rivera in the center of her forehead. This represented how her husband was ever present on her mind, despite his thriving life apart from her. It has been suggested that the leaf pattern on the head-dress is symbolic of a spider’s web and that Kahlo indeed to trap her pray-Rivera there. (kahlofans)
Shortly after receiving a commission from the Mexican government to complete five portraits of important Mexican women in Kahlo’s father passed away, but despite this and her personal health battles her work continued. Plagued by her failing health Kahlo was hospitalized and diagnosed with gangrene. Amidst her recovery Kahlo received her first solo exhibition in Mexico. Determined not to miss the event she was transported by ambulance to the event where she spent to the evening celebrating with her guests from her four-poster bed. Kahlo’s persistence in her political activism continued through to her final appearance, a demonstration against the U.S.-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2. July 13, 1954, shortly after her forty-seventh birthday Frida Kahlo succumb to a pulmonary embolism and passed away in her sleep.
Just days prior, despite being in a morphine induced state of mind, Kahlo took a brush and painted “Viva la Vida” (live the life) into her Still Life painting of a plate of watermelons.
I admire Kahlo’s work so greatly because I feel as though each brush stroke meant something. It represented pain, friendship, life and the revolution of the soul. With each painting Kahlo left a piece of herself in this world, a women’s life in oil paints full of color and vibrancy. Frida Kahlo told the story of her life in her paintings I have no doubt that these final strokes were her last message to the world. We should live the
life!
As with so many other great artists, Frida Kahlo’s fame and appreciation has grown since her death. Her lifelong home, Blue House was opened as a museum in 1958. Kahlo became an icon of female creativity during the 1970’s feminist movement and Hayden Herrera’s book on the artist, A Biography of Frida Kahlo, published in 1983 drew great interest to her work. Although several biographical films have been made about her life and work, the most widely known is the 2002 film appropriately entitled Frida, starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. (fridakahlo)
Frida Kahlo used her art to tell the world of very personal yet universal psychological pains of her existence. These works are even more greatly respected because they were created in spite of physical pain, great heart ache and outside pressures, things which so many women can relate to. Along with feminists and revolutionaries, gay men have found Kahlo’s work spoke greatly to those in the gay community who also experienced great oppression during the twentieth century. Through her images Kahlo spoke of
Works Cited www.FridaKahloFans.com www.FridaKahlo.com www.biography.com Lawton, Claire “I Paint my Own Reality,” Phoenix News Times blog, (June 14, 2012).
Zamora, Martha, Frida Kahlo: Brush of Anguish, Chronicle Books, (August 1, 1993).