FRIDA KAHLO: HER LIFE, HER ART.
Item
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Title
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FRIDA KAHLO: HER LIFE, HER ART.
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Identifier
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AAI8501138
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identifier
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8501138
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Creator
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HERRERA, HAYDEN.
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Contributor
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Prof. Milton W. Brown
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Date
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1981
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Fine Arts | Biography
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Abstract
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The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1908-1954) is already something of a cult figure in her native Mexico. Her legendary stature is in part due to her marriage to the renowned muralist Diego Rivera, in part to her extraordinary personality and in part to her pursuit of a career in painting despite being a partial cripple. If Kahlo's value as an artist has long been recognized in Mexico, however, it is still not well known in the United States. Nonetheless, there seems to be a growing interest in her work here, mainly because her art speaks directly and vividly about the most private facets of specifically female experience.;Kahlo's life and art are so intimately connected that one connot be understood without the other. My central concern has been to unravel the various levels of meaning in Frida Kahlo's highly personal imagery and to relate formal and iconographic analysis to events in Kahlo's life and to her feelings about those events. To do this I have drawn upon Kahlo's writings--among them her letters and her diary--and upon over one hundred interviews that I conducted in Mexico, France and the U.S.;However distanced by fantasy and by mock-naive style, Kahlo's paintings--almost all of them self portraits--record an invalid's quest for strength through direct confrontation with her own painful reality. She painted herself weeping, for example, split open in surgery, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage and pierced by arrows, thorns and nails. She painted, also, the joys and sorrows of being Rivera's wife. In her art and in her life, Frida Kahlo stressed her Mexican identity. She portrayed herself in the Mexican costumes she wore daily; the primary sources for her art were Mexican pre-Columbian, Colonial and popular art. But Kahlo was a sophisticated painter, one whose art bespeaks her knowledge of Surrealism, European modernism and the work of her Mexican contemporaries. She thus chose a primitivistic approach for complex reasons. She lived in a cultured and varied milieu (both in Mexico and the U.S. where she and Rivera spent several years). The leftist politics she shared with her husband and her involvement in the ferment of Mexican culture during the post-revolutionary year inform her work. Though she did not paint paeans to Mexico nor Marxist messages on public walls, she did paint emphatically Mexicanista images on small pieces of tin. Her art, amazingly enough, is not local or parochial: it focuses so narrowly, but so intensely on herself that it speaks to virtually all people.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History