FRIDA KAHLO Painting

Magdalena del Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, better known as Frida Kahlo (Coyoacán, July 6, 1907 – Coyoacán, July 13, 1954), was a Mexican painter and poet of German and Spanish descent. Married to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, her life was crossed by the misfortune of a childhood illness and a serious accident in her youth that kept her bedridden for long periods, undergoing up to 32 surgical operations. . She led an unconventional life, she was bisexual and among her lovers was Leon Trotsky. Her pictorial work revolves thematically around her biography and her own suffering. She was the author of some 200 works, mainly self-portraits, in which she projected her difficulties in surviving. Kahlo’s work is influenced by her husband, the renowned muralist Diego Rivera, with whom she shared her taste for Mexican folk art with indigenous roots, inspiring other Mexican painters of the post-revolutionary period. In 1939 she exhibited her paintings in France at the invitation of André Breton, who tried to convince her that they were «surrealist», although Frida said that this trend did not correspond to her art since she did not paint dreams but her own. life of her. One of the works in this exhibition (Self-Portrait – The Frame, which is currently in the Center Pompidou) became the first painting by a Mexican artist acquired by the Louvre Museum. Until then, Frida Kahlo had painted only privately and it was difficult for her to admit that her work could have general interest. Although she enjoyed the admiration of prominent painters and intellectuals of her time such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinski, André Bretón or Marcel Duchamp, her work achieved fame and true international recognition after her death, beginning in the 1970s. 1970.