Frida Kahlo Case Study

1. She was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico

2. She had german dad (photographer) and half Amerindian and half Spanish mother and also two older sisters and one younger sister.

3. Had very poor health in her childhood and contracted polio at age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. The disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one and as a result she only wore long skirts to cover it up

4. Her father (who was a major influencer in her life) encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. Including soccer, swimming, and even wrestling , which is very unusual at that time for a girl ii. Later in life

1. Frida attended Escuela National Preparatoria School with only thirty-five

While traveling with a school club, there was a terrible bus accident which caused Frida to get severely injured by a steel handrail being impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis were fractured. This accident left her in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically.

3. Stayed in hospital for several weeks and had to wear body cast for three months.

4. To kill time she started painting and created her 1st self portrait iii. Towards the end of her life

1. Kahlo later became politically active and married fellow communist artist Diego Rivera in 1929. Diego also encouraged her and evaluated her painting.

2. She started to find her theme of painting herself and her internal as well as external struggles and started to add realistic and surrealistic components in her painting style and painted over 200 pieces.

3. She exhibited her paintings in Paris and Mexico before her death in 1954.

4. And in the same year she died at the age of 47 due to heart disease and respiratory failure and that’s the basic overview of Frida Kahlo’s extraordinary

Not only does she deal with pain, but she also deals with self image. She's constantly looking at herself through her self portraits.

4. Chadwick states: "...Kahlo's The Broken Column (1944)... reinforces the woman artist's use of the mirror to assert the duality of being, the self as observer and observed. ... Kahlo used painting as a means of exploring the reality of her own body as her consciousness of its vulnerability; in many cases the reality dissolves into a duality, exterior evidence versus interior perception of that reality." (Chadwick, 2007)

5. Another part to her story is that she had suffered a miscarriage. She, of course, turned to painting to deal with her suffering. This happened in 1932 while her husband, Diego Rivera (11 years her senior), was painting murals in Detroit. He later said, "Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which has no precedent in the history of art - paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit." (Mencimer,