“Nobody is separate from anybody else . . . Everything is all and one, Anguish and pain—pleasure and death are no more than a process of existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.”[1]
Today (13/07/2024) marks 70 years since the death of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. She is best known for her paintings which unflinchingly depict the female form and her own experiences of disability. Kahlo was also a dedicated socialist and exponent of Mexicanidad, a romantic form of post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism that emphasised the importance of indigenous culture as a means of resistance to colonial power.
Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Kahlo had intended to study medicine before she was injured in a bus accident at 18 years old. During her recovery, she returned to her childhood interest in art, painting from her bed with an adapted easel provided by her mother.[2] The injuries Kahlo sustained from the accident exacerbated chronic health issues that she had experienced since childhood—as well as being diagnosed with polio at six years old, researchers believe Kahlo was born with spina bifida, a congenital condition that affects spinal and leg development. She underwent 35 surgical operations between the ages of 18 and 47.[3]
Confined to bed, in a wheelchair, or wearing supportive medical corsets for periods throughout her life, Kahlo created work which represented her chronic illnesses through a fusion of autobiographical, realist, and fantastical art. In “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940), “The Broken Column” (1944), and “The Wounded Deer” (1946), arrows, nails, and thorns are recurring motifs which dig into the figure of Kahlo. She shows herself hewn open, spine exposed, or anthropomorphised as a mortally wounded deer in a thicket of dark trees, a glimpse of the ocean far in the background. Two figures of Kahlo form the focal point of “Tree of Hope, Remain Strong” (1946), one of which continues the motif of pierced, painful flesh as she lies with deep gashes in her exposed back. But the other figure carries a flag emblazoned with the words “Árbol de la Esperanza / Mantente Firme” (“Tree of Hope / Remain Strong”). This hangs from a flagpole, the tip of which can be interpreted as either a bloodied spear or a paintbrush raised defiantly. Thus, Kahlo casts herself as her own protector and as a heroic survivor, driven to continue creating. As she later stated, “I am not sick. I am broken. But, I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”[4]
Kahlo also produced explicitly political work. From the late 1920s, she embraced indigenous Mexican dress, specifically the Tehuana, which embodied her anti-colonial ideals, and which she frequently painted herself wearing. As well as belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicanidad or Mexicayotl movement that revived the indigenous religion, philosophy, and traditions of ancient Mexico, Kahlo twice became a member of the Communist Party: once in 1927, and again in 1948 (she had previously left following a dispute between the party and her husband, Diego Rivera, in 1929).[5] In the interim, she was a member of the Fourth International, and was a founding member of their solidarity committee which provided aid to Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.[6] Perhaps most famously, Kahlo played a vital role in petitioning the Mexican government to grant asylum to the former Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, with whom she allegedly had an affair, and to whom she dedicated a 1937 self-portrait.[7]
Kahlo remained a committed socialist and anti-colonialist until the end of her life. Her final public appearance was only 11 days before her death—despite suffering from bronchopneumonia and still being in recovery from a leg amputation, she joined a demonstration against the CIA’s invasion of Guatemala.[8] One of her final portraits, “Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick” (1954) intertwines the two themes that preoccupied much of her life and work—her staunch Marxist politics and experiences of chronic illness. The painting features Kahlo in her medical corset with a red Marxist book in hand. Marx himself floats overhead with arms reaching towards the figure of Kahlo, befitting the painting’s original title: “Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism.”
Despite her anti-capitalist political convictions, in recent years Kahlo’s image has become something of a commodity in itself. Twenty-first-century mainstream feminism has catapulted Kahlo to the centre of what Guy Trebay has called a “kitsch marketing bonanza” of “Fridamania”, consisting of her image “emblazoned on sneakers, T-shirts, tote bags, coasters, cosmetics, even tequila and beer”.[9] There is an undeniable irony to all of this—the image of a queer, disabled socialist who in her life and work constantly espoused anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist beliefs, being sold in countless Etsy and Amazon shops, or printed on Primark t-shirts sold for £7 and produced in unethical working conditions.[10] As the poet and academic, Christine Bylund, put it in “Crip-femme-ininity”:
Frida. If they knew.
That you painted the hammer and sickle on your corsets.
Now a mug with your face on can be sold for 200 SEK.
I know, because I have one.[11]
[1] Frida Kahlo, quoted in Anna Haynes, “Frida Kahlo: An Artist ‘In Between’”, eSharp 6, no. 2 (Spring 2006), 1.
[2] Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 62–63, available at https://archive.org/details/frida00hayd/page/n1/mode/1up.
[3] Hayden Herrera, “Frida Kahlo: The Palette, the Pain, and the Painter,” Artforum (March 1983), available at https://www.artforum.com/features/frida-kahlo-the-palette-the-pain-and-the-painter-208110.
[4] Herrera, “Frida Kahlo”.
[5] Christina Burrus, "The Life of Frida Kahlo," in Frida Kahlo, ed. Emma Dexter (London: Tate Modern, 2005), 201.
[6] Christina Burrus, “The Life of Frida Kahlo,” 203.
[7] Herrera, Frida: A Biography, 192–215.
[8] Ibid., 425–433.
[9] Guy Trebay, “Frida Kahlo Is Having a Moment,” New York Times, 8 May 2015, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/style/frida-kahlo-is-having-a-moment.html.
[10] Lara Robertson, “How Ethical Is Primark?”, good on you, 2 August 2023, available at https://goodonyou.eco/how-ethical-is-primark/; Lizzie Rivera, “Primark ethics: is Primark actually worse than other high street shops?,” Live Frankly, 8 February 2024, available at https://livefrankly.co.uk/sustainable-fashion/primark-ethics-is-it-really-better/.
[11] Christine Bylund, “Crip-femme-ininity,” Lambda Nordica 4 (2020), 32.