Creative words of wisdom series #1
Frida Kahlo
"I have the will to do many things and I never feel disappointed by life."
Spanish Artist Frida Kahlo was the first woman artist to focus on her own body, both inside and out as the "subject." She painted fifty-five self-portraits depicting her wounded body, due to disease, a horrendous accident and outlandish medical interventions, and her outer body adorned in the laces, ribbons, silks, bracelets, petticoats, ruffles and headdresses of her Mexican culture. "I paint myself because I am the subject that I know the best," said Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo was born in 1907. She was in a devastating bus accident when she was eighteen that shaped her whole existence. In her lifetime she underwent thirty-five operations, an amputation, miscarriages, and dubious medical practices for the purpose of stretching her spine. Physical suffering was her constant companion and she began painting in bed to manage the long months of convalescence.
The first public showing of her work was in 1931 at the Annual Celebration of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She accompanied her husband Diego Rivera to Detroit in 1932 when he was working on a mural for the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1938 she had her first professional sale to actor Edward G. Robinson who purchased four of her paintings. That same year some twenty-five of her paintings were featured in New York with surrealist Andre Brèton writing the catalogue. By 1940 her work was being shown all over the world. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1953 at the Bravo gallery of Contemporary Art in Mexico City. Much to the joy of the adoring crowd, the very weak Kahlo arrived in an ambulance and was taken into the exhibition on a stretcher. Her words, "I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint," delighted her followers. Photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo has said "Frida is the only painter who gave birth to herself." She died in 1954 at the age of forty-four.
