Frida Kahlo

The life of the Mexican Frida Kahlo was marked by two accidents and a necessity.

The first accident was the one of which, on the 17th September 1925, aged eighteen, she came out miraculously alive, but incredibly devastated in her body: the spine broken in three points, two broken ribs and so the left shoulder and leg; the possibility of becoming mother, compromised forever.

The death escaped in the bus overwhelmed and crushed by a tram on the road to Coyoacán would resolve in a sort of mockery, forcing Frida, the vital Frida, to a daily and therefore exhausting battle against pain and to live stubbornly clinging to life in a body so often buried in busts and chalks as in sarcophagi.

The second accident in Frida’s life was the love of a lifetime for the famous muralist and, since 1929, unfaithful husband Diego Rivera, an exhausting passion, destructive like a physical suffering, which, however, she never managed to get rid of, so that she married Diego again just a year after divorcing him.

The necessity in Frida’s life was painting: equal only to itself because it was born in suffering from the irrepressible need to express everything that passed through her head "without taking anything else into consideration", as she herself used to say with naturalness about her own art.

And, in the background, the postrevolutionary Mexico. Frida felt she was the daughter of the Mexican revolution to such an extent that she decided to fix her date of birth in 1910, the year in which it had broken out. And Frida was truly the daughter of the revolution, if not anagraphically, certainly sentimentally, for her being naturally subversive and unconventional, contradictory and passionate in art as well as in life.

A cura di Cristina Raciti, 5BL

Anno Scolastico 2021/ 2022