Knowing Frida always felt like knowing a friend. Her death felt like losing that friend. Why the pain of losing her felt so personal? How was she so successful to make such a deep connection with us?
Art urges to ask the questions that have been long hidden by the answers. The artist that will be the topic of discussion is Frida Kahlo. Out of the 143 paintings she has, only 55 of them are self-portraits but these have some of the best works of her lifetime. Here we are going to talk about three of her paintings most important paintings “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird”, “Self-portrait along the borderline between Mexico and the United States”, and “Self-Portrait as Tehuana: Diego On My Mind”. The paintings of Frida has often been labelled as surreal, but the truth is that she never painted dreams but her realities.
Figure 1
Note: Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird by Frida Kahlo. From Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Life, by Hesse, M. (2018). The University of Texas Press.
Critique
Frida had a natural talent for the dramatic. Born in Mexico, and brought up during The Mexican Revolution, a decade long struggle to establish an equal society, Frida tries to establish herself as a paragon of the new Mexico. After the dictatorship was overthrown and equal society was established, there was a renewal in the interest of Mexico’s rich heritage of the indigenous culture and pride. Along with her husband, Frida was one of the key figures who developed the new national identity whose focus was the native land and was less Eurocentric. Her husband Diego Rivera championed this identity by using overtly political symbols in his murals, Frida had the new Mexico located within herself.
Figure 2
Self-portrait along the borderline between Mexico and the United States
Note: Self-portrait along the borderline between Mexico and the United States by Frida Kahlo where she is wearing the necklace of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. From Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Life, by Hesse, M. (2018). The University of Texas Press.
Self-Portrait as Tehuana: Diego On My Mind
Note: Self-Portrait as Tehuana: Diego On My Mind by Frida where she is wearing the traditional Tijuana dress. From Frida Kahlo: An Illustrated Life, by Hesse, M. (2018). The University of Texas.
Frida creates a personal identity, national identity and gender identity, and works of art especially these three which are all equally complex and layered, from these elements by combining the iconography of different cultures and traditions. Much like the modern selfie, these portraits of Frida are a simultaneous performance and recording of identity they are naturally relatable to the generation of the present as they think on these terms daily. Recently the culture of the world has come to reward this quality and the creativity to capture the attention of people in an instant which the painting of Frida exhibits.
The works of Frida including the ones mentioned here are very intimate. It is so because Frida in all these self-portraits is looking directly at us. The eyes make the painting feel alive. Her eyes gazed through the canvas into the soul of the one who is looking at it. They are not just looking at a painting, it is a person on the wall they are looking at and that person is looking back at them. Here comes the most interesting part, Frida is looking at her viewer, not with any assurance or relief but with a face that is stoic, impenetrable and one that does not let the viewer go. The eyes hypnotise the ones looking at the painting.
The style as one tends to notice is that the paintings of Frida has an amateurish quality to them in their anatomy, skewed perspectives and it flattening of the depth but this is not because she was not familiar with techniques and study of art. She was in fact, an educated artist who knew how to use realistic features in the paintings. She adopted this primitive and naive style intentionally, as she drew inspiration from the traditional paintings of Mexico called the Votive Paintings also known as retablos or ex-botos, religious images made by actual self-taught painters as a token of thanks for a miracle which one can find in churches and altars of home across Mexico. Some of these painting depicts angels or any religious figure and some depict the story of the miracle itself. Frida herself had a collection of over 2000 such paintings. Through her works, she not only elevated this Mexican tradition of folk-art painting she also borrowed its quality of being very down-to-earth. This quality is a predominant theme in these paintings, where the viewer feels that someone whom they know, someone from around their corner made these paintings. This is the feeling that one can paint these themself. Frida never positioned her works purposefully as highbrow, which often erects a wall between her audience and her. She has done exactly the opposite.
Frida and her paintings have through many decades managed to amaze not just children but also adults. When a viewer looks at her paintings they do not dwell on complicated undertones and themes but in it, they find a friend. When one looks at these paintings they feel close to Frida, they feel like they were there when the paintings were painted almost as if they were friends with Frida. This is a valuable quality of her paintings.
Of the uncountable artists in history, only a handful, a fraction gain their deserved recognition and most of the time that recognition is local and frail. Only a tiny fraction of a fraction gets the privilege to have their names on the lip’s of the world, spoken by art enthusiasts, scholars and children alike. Frida is one of them and she will remain so. Her intimate and bold work will be celebrated as people celebrate a friend.
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