When Sorrows Learn to Swim: The Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

Article by Sarah Murphy-Young. Edited by Amy Calladine. Additional Research by Helen Midgley.

Although Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, she would later claim that the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution three years later marked her true birth. The small question of birth date is just the starting point in a tale marked by colourful contradiction. Kahlo would become a revolutionary painter whose intense and vibrant works embodied the indigenous art of her homeland, a devoted wife who passionately indulged in the seduction of both men and women, an adopted surrealist who decidedly painted her own reality, a proud communist who hated pretension and a vivacious, quick-witted woman who was tortured by the bitterness of life.

Kahlo had never been a stranger to suffering. Born amidst the political chaos of her homeland, she could remember as a young girl the sound of gunfire on the street and her mother preparing meals for hungry revolutionaries. She contracted polio at the age of six, leaving her right leg thinner and shorter than the other which she would later disguise by wearing the long, elaborate Tehuana costume of Indian maidens. Many years later while studying medicine, she was riding a bus when it collided with a trolley car.

The accident left her body shattered with a broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis and foot as well as a pierced abdomen and uterus – an accident that she never lost consciousness in. Bed-bound for months she discovered a love for painting and although she later recovered and even learnt to walk again, the agony that plagued her body for the remainder of her life would become the cruel inspiration for some of her most personal works whilst painful relapses left her with an obsession about her own inevitable mortality.

Publically at least, Kahlo’s character seemed to have little in common with her volatile, despairing and dramatic paintings. She danced, flirted, drank, seduced, told dirty jokes, gossiped, encouraged mischief and treated students, servants and children as her esteemed colleagues whilst fussing proudly over her husband.

Though the iconic combination of ‘pain and passion’ present in Kahlo’s vivid and uncompromising artwork often reflected her physical condition, her paintings are profoundly connected to her turbulent marriage. When describing her husband, artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo declared, ‘there have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.’

Married in 1929, their relationship would endure countless problems, mutual infidelities and divorce. Rivera, who was twenty years Kahlo’s senior and diagnosed as ‘unfit for monogamy’ by his doctor, had affairs with numerous women including her sister Christina while Kahlo, openly bisexual, had intimate relationships with notable characters such as Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky. However, loyalty to their work and love for each other would nevertheless endure, against all speculation.

Although eclipsed for most of her life by the fame of her lover, Kahlo did receive some commendable recognition. Rivera welled up with tears of pride when Picasso once admired the eyes in one of her paintings and although Kahlo fostered a violent dislike for what she called ‘this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of surrealists’, she was fondly described by one of them as being a ‘ribbon around a bomb’.

In 1953, Frida Kahlo held her first solo exhibition in Mexico, the only one held in her native country during her lifetime. At first it seemed that she would be too ill to attend but she commanded the triumphant event from her richly decorated four-poster bed that she had ordered to be placed in the centre of the venue. A local critic wrote: ‘It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.’

Kahlo died July 13, 1954. Although the official cause of her death was pulmonary embolism, some suspect that she died of an overdose that may or may not have been accidental. As an artist she had painted over 140 canvases, more than a third of which were self-portraits. She once explained ‘I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.’ Although physically mortal, her will to live and to be remembered continues to reside in her iconic portraits, in the compositions that are both enigmatic and revealing, in the stern and almost comical self-depiction, in the beautiful yet grotesque imagery and in the interweaving of reality and fantasy. Even in death she was remarkable. At her funeral, the blast of heat from the opening incinerator doors shockingly caused her body to bolt upright. Her hair now emblazoned with fire framed a face that was said to smile seductively as the doors closed. Written in her diary were the words, ‘I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to return – Frida’.

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Frida Kahlo was born on 6th July 1907 to Guillermo Kahlo, a German/Austro-Hungarian Jewish photographer, and Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, a Catholic Mestiza-Spanish woman.

Kahlo is famed for her artist style. Her work was, in the words of Diego Rivera (her husband), a ‘series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art – paintings which exalted the feminine quality of truth, reality, cruelty and suffering’. 

Kahlo grew up through the Mexican Revolution, which was an armed uprising against the dictator Porfirio Diaz from 1910 to around 1920. The revolution was fought from vague socialist and agrarian reformist principles.

She was also a committed communist.

Frida’s life was one of extremes, especially extreme emotions. She declared that “I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint”.

Her life was immortalised on screen in 2003 in the Academy Award winning film Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek and Geoffrey Rush.

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