Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned, at $54.7 million.
Paintings by Frida Kahlo
The Wounded Deer (1946)
The Wounded Deer (El venado herido in Spanish) is an oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo created in 1946. It is also known as The Little Deer. Through The Wounded Deer, Kahlo shares her enduring physical and emotional suffering with her audience, as she did throughout her creative oeuvre. This painting in particular was created towards the end of Kahlo's life, when her health was in decline. Kahlo combines pre-Columbian, Buddhist, and Christian symbols to express her wide spectrum of influences and beliefs.
Kahlo was injured at the age of 18 in a bus accident that resulted in serious injuries to her entire body. Her spine, ribs, pelvis, right leg, and abdomen were particularly damaged. She would deal with the wounds from this accident for the rest of her life. Kahlo painted this self-portrait after an operation on her spine, which would leave her bedridden for almost a year. During her recovery, she wore a steel corset, which can be seen in her late self-portraits. Her right leg would eventually be amputated up to her knee, as a result of gangrene.
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Spanish: Autorretrato con Collar de Espinas y Colibrí) is a 1940 self-portrait by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo which also includes a black cat, a monkey, and two dragonflies. It was painted after Kahlo's divorce from Diego Rivera and the end of her affair with photographer Nickolas Muray.
Muray bought the portrait shortly after it was painted, and it is currently part of the Nickolas Muray collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Broken Column (1944)
The Broken Column (La Columna Rota in Spanish) is an oil on masonite painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, painted in 1944 shortly after she had spinal surgery to correct on-going problems which had resulted from a serious traffic accident when she was 18 years old. The original is housed at the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Xochimilco, Mexico City, Mexico.
As with many of her self-portraits, pain and suffering is the focus of the work, though unlike many of her other works, which include parrots, dogs, monkeys and other people, in this painting, Kahlo is alone. Her solitary presence on a cracked and barren landscape symbolizes both her isolation and the external forces which have impacted her life. As an earthquake might fissure the landscape, Kahlo's accident broke her body.
The Two Fridas (1939)
The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas in Spanish) is an oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The painting was the first large-scale work done by Kahlo and is considered one of her most notable paintings. It is a double self-portrait, depicting two versions of Kahlo seated together. One is wearing a white European style Victorian dress, while the other is wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. The painting is housed at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
Kahlo painted The Two Fridas in 1939, the same year she divorced artist Diego Rivera, although they remarried a year later. According to Kahlo's friend, Fernando Gamboa, the painting was inspired by two paintings that Kahlo saw earlier that year at the Louvre: Théodore Chassériau's The Two Sisters and the anonymous Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters.
Self-Portrait with Monkey (1938)
Self-Portrait with Monkey (Autorretrato con mono in Spanish) is an oil on masonite painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, commissioned in 1938 by A. Conger Goodyear, then president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It is one of the many self-portraits painted by Kahlo for friends and patrons during her career.
The commission came after Goodyear attended Kahlo's first solo exhibition in November 1938 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. There, Goodyear admired Kahlo's 1937 painting Fulang-Chang and I, which depicted Kahlo with her pet monkey, but Kahlo had already promised this painting to her friend Mary Schapiro Sklar.
The Frame (painting) (1937)
The Frame (El marco in Spanish) is a 1938 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. The painting features Kahlo's self-portrait in oil on a sheet of aluminum framed in glass which she purchased from a market in Oaxaca, Mexico. Although the glass frame is included as part of the painting, the flowers, birds, and other details on the frame were painted prior to being purchased by Kahlo.
The painting is notable as the first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist to be purchased by a major international museum, when it was acquired by the Louvre in 1939. The painting is now shown at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was the only sale Kahlo made in her Paris exhibition. Upon Kahlo's death in 1954, the New York Times stated that she was "said to have been the first woman artist to sell a picture to the Louvre."
Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931)
Frieda and Diego Rivera (Frieda y Diego Rivera in Spanish) is a 1931 oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. This portrait was created two years after Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera married, and is widely considered a wedding portrait.
The painting shows Kahlo standing next to her husband and fellow artist, Rivera. Rivera, portrayed as a painter, holds a palette and four brushes in his right hand while Kahlo tilts her head towards him. Both are looking out toward the viewer, unsmiling. Kahlo holds her bright red shawl with her left hand. Rivera and Kahlo hold hands in the center of the portrait. Rivera is physically much larger than Kahlo. The pigeon or dove at the upper right carries a banner that reads: "Aquí nos veis, a mí, Frida Kahlo, junto con mi amado esposo Diego Rivera. Pinté estos retratos en la bella ciudad de San Francisco, California, para nuestro amigo Mr. Albert Bender y fue en el mes de abril del año 1931" ("Here you see us, me Frieda Kahlo, with my dearest husband Diego Rivera. I painted these pictures in the delightful city of San Francisco California for our companion Mr. Albert Bender, and it was in the month of April of the year 1931.”) The work had been commissioned by Albert M. Bender, an art collector and supporter of Rivera.
The Wounded Table (1940)
The Wounded Table (La mesa herida in Spanish) is an oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Although lost in 1955, three photos of this painting were taken between 1940 and 1944. The painting was first displayed in January 1940 at the International Surrealism Exhibit at Inés Amor's Gallery of Mexican Art in Mexico City, and a replica is currently displayed in the Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund, Baden-Baden, Germany. The painting was last exhibited in Warsaw in 1955, after which it disappeared, and is the subject of an ongoing international search.
The painting reflects ongoing themes in Kahlo's work, including Mexicanidad, indigeneity, self-portraiture, and grief/loss. Kahlo is seated at the center of the table where figures previously seen in her painting The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City also appear. The table is spattered with blood and framed by a theatrical curtain, providing a stagelike setting, and she is surrounded by a precolumbian Nayarit figurine (part of her by now ex-husband Diego Rivera's collection), a papier-mâché skeleton (often called a Judas-like figure), two children, and her pet deer Granizo.
The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl (1949)
The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl is a 1949 painting by Frida Kahlo. Created in Mexico, the 70 cm x 60.5 cm painting was painted with oil on Masonite. It was featured on the reverse of the Series F $500 peso banknote, issued in 2010.
The Love Embrace holds many layers of entwining embraces. The twofold face of the Universe, the light and dark background of planets and ethereal fog, is holding a murkier Earth (Mexico), whose breasts are lactating. The Earth (Mexico), with all her vegetation, is subsequently holding Frida Kahlo. Continuing further, Frida is then holding a nude Diego Rivera, whose forehead contains a third eye. This work is rich in symbolism, with multiple layers of meaning. However, the symbols are not unlike many of Kahlo's other works. Many art critics have contended that The Love Embrace portrays several of Frida's life struggles, including but not limited to: womanhood, motherhood and Diego Rivera.
What the Water Gave Me (painting) (1938)
What the Water Gave Me (Lo que el agua me dio in Spanish) is an oil painting by Frida Kahlo that was completed in 1938. It is sometimes referred to as What I Saw in the Water.
Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me has been called her biography. As the scholar Natascha Steed points out, "her paintings were all very honest and she never portrayed herself as being more or less beautiful than she actually was." With this piece she reflected on her life and memories. Kahlo released her unconscious mind through the use of what seems to be an irrational juxtaposition of images in her bathwater. In this painting, Frida paints herself, precisely her legs and feet, lying in a bath of grey water.
Memory, the Heart (1937)
Memory, the Heart, a 1937 painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, depicts the pain and anguish Kahlo experienced during and after an affair between her husband, artist Diego Rivera, and her sister, Cristina Kahlo.
The painting is sometimes known by the title Recuerdo (Memory). The oil-on-metal work measures 40 x 28 cm, and is held in the collection of Michel Petitjean in Paris, France.
The Dream (The Bed) (1940)
The Dream (The Bed) (Spanish: El sueño (La cama)) is a 1940 self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
It shows Kahlo asleep in a wooden bed that appears to float among clouds, wrapped in vines and leaves, while a papier-mâché skeleton wired with sticks of dynamite lies on the canopy above her. Commentators have connected the imagery to Kahlo's chronic pain and long periods of enforced bed rest following a near-fatal bus accident in her youth, and to her preoccupation with the line between sleep and death.