The Story Behind the Greatest Break-Up Painting of All Time
Frida Kahlo’s story is well known. There’s the childhood polio. The elite female student at a predominantly male school. The bus crash at 18 that crushed her and her ambition to become a doctor. The monobrow. The early marriage to Diego Rivera, a fellow Mexican artist and revolutionary twenty years her senior. His affairs. Her affairs, including a brief fling with Leon Trotsky. Membership of the Mexican Communist Party. Her flirtation with Surrealism. Her death at 47. The 500 people who attended her funeral at the Palace of Fine Arts.
Frida Kahlo’s life was as colorful as her outfits. It’s been the subject of movies, of books, and of many, many exhibitions. But her biography is not why she is famous. There are countless individuals with vivid life stories who are now long forgotten. She has risen to the status of international icon because of her art, which has connected with people across time and space. Fans from the Americas, Europe and Asia politely wait in line to see her politically charged, allegorical images. They resonate universally, even though her paintings are neither technically brilliant nor staggeringly beautiful. They are more like poems in picture form, an artist baring her soul with brushstrokes rather than a pen.
Frida Kahlo had incredible vision. She knew it. When she was 19 she wrote a letter to her boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias about her uncanny ability to perceive what others could not. ‘I know everything now, without reading or writing… I know there is nothing else beyond; if there was, I would see it.’ She wasn’t boasting, more lamenting. The horrific accident that turned her from being a promising medic into a fledgling artist had happened only a few months earlier. She and Alejandro were traveling back to her hometown of Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City when a tram crashed into the side of their bus, causing Frida to be impaled on a metal handrail. She survived, just, with a broken back, a smashed pelvis and several badly damaged organs. Her life thereafter was one of chronic discomfort and frequent operations. ‘Now I live on a painful planet,’ she wrote in the same letter, ‘transparent as ice; nothing is concealed.’