Frida Kahlo - Art & Identity from Pain — Disability Throughout History

While I am very passionate about history generally, art history has never been specifically interesting to me. I know the names of the famous artists but generally know little more than surface-level information. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Frida Kahlo lived with disability and chronic pain! All I had known about her was that she was a Mexican self-portrait painter and had a unibrow. Learning so much more about her life was fascinating, especially since it allowed me to also explore a time period I didn't know as much about.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, known as Frida Kahlo, was born in Coyoacán, a village outside of Mexico City, Mexico. She was born on July 6, 1907 in her maternal grandmother's home, near her family's home La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a 36-year-old German Lutheran photographer. He had immigrated to Mexico in 1891, when a traumatic brain injury caused epilepsy and ended his university studies. Her mother, Matilde Calderón y González, was 30 years old. She had been born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca to an Indigenous father and a mother of Spanish descent, meaning Matilde was considered mestiza (a racial classification for someone of mixed European and Indigenous American descent). Frida had two older sisters, Matilde and Adriana, and a younger sister, Cristina. She also had two older half-sisters, María Luisa and Margarita, from her father's first marriage and who were raised in a convent.

The Mexican Revolution was one event that significantly shaped Frida's childhood. It lasted from 1910-1920. To put it incredibly succinctly: this decade of revolt ended a 30-year dictatorship in Mexico and established a constitutional republic. Though a constitution was drafted in 1917 to legitimize many of the desired reforms, periodic violence continued until the 1934 when a reformist president took office. The human cost of this conflict was enormous: historians estimate approximately 900,000 people lost their lives. Frida's father's photography business suffered as well, since the government that was overthrown had commissioned works from him and the country's instability limited the number of private clients. This hardship, combined with both parents' illnesses and lack for love for each other, led Frida to describe her childhood home as "very, very sad." She and her mother, Matilde, had a strained relationship; Frida described her as: "kind, active and intelligent, but also calculating, cruel and fanatically religious."

The other event that shaped Frida's life was contracting poliomyelitis at the age of six. She luckily survived but was left with a right leg that was shorter and thinner than the left. The nine months spent in bed made her reclusive and isolated, leading to bullying whenever she did interact with peers. She wore extra socks and a shoe with a built-up heel to mask her asymmetric legs, but other children called her "Frida pata de palo" ("Frida peg-leg"). For the rest of her life, she wore long skirts to cover up her leg, calling it "sick" and "ugly."

However, polio and its aftereffects also led to a very close relationship with her father, Guillermo. Since he also lived with disability due to his epilepsy, Frida became his favorite daughter. He taught her photography, painting, literature, nature, and philosophy. He encouraged her to engage in sports - such as soccer, wrestling, and swimming - as part of her recovery, even though rigorous physical exercise was not seen as proper for girls at the time. She later wrote that he had made her childhood "marvelous" and that "he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems." She also received drawing instruction from her father's friend and printmaker, Fernando Fernández, and filled notebooks with sketches.

Due to polio, Frida started school later than her peers. She attended the local kindergarten and primary school and was home-schooled for the fifth and sixth grades. While her sisters attended convent schools, she enrolled in a German school at the encouragement of Guillermo. She was soon expelled for "disobedience" and sent to a vocational teacher's school. This also did not last: Frida, at the age of thirteen, was sexually taken advantage of by a female teacher (who was also sexually abusing two other girls) and left the school.

In 1922, at the age of fifteen, she began attending the elite secondary school Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School) in Mexico City. It had only recently began accepting females: out of 2,000 students, only 35 were women. Frida thrived there, focusing on the natural sciences in order to become a physician. She was described as a "carefree student...Irreverent, ebullient, fun-loving, intellectually avid, with a large group of comrades, she flew through corridors like a bird and created anarchy in the classrooms." The school promoted indigenismo, which was a sense of Mexican identity and pride and rid itself of the mindset of European colonialism. Frida became "deeply immersed and seriously committed to Mexican culture, political activism and issues of social justice." She and a group of friends, the Cachuchas, rebelled against conservatism together by pulling pranks, staging plays, and debating philosophy. Frida presented herself as a "daughter of the revolution" by claiming she was born in 1910, the year it began (this also masked the fact that she had begun school later than her peers). Many of the Cachuchas became part of the Mexican intellectual elite in their adulthood. Along with these activities, Frida began working as a stenographer and then as a paid engraving apprentice to Fernández.

Frida's first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias, was also present for the next event that significantly shaped her life. In 1925, when she was eighteen, she and Arias were involved in a serious bus accident. The bus driver had attempted to pass an oncoming electric streetcar; the streetcar crashed into the side of the wooden bus and dragged it several feet. Many passengers were killed and Arias was mildly injured. Frida, however, was not as fortunate: her pelvis was impaled by an iron handrail. Her boyfriend and others removed the handrail, which was, of course, incredibly painful. She reportedly had to beg paramedics for help because they thought she was not able to be saved. Frida spent a month at the hospital and two months at home recovering from her intensive injuries: a fractured pelvis, broken collarbone, broken ribs, broken elbow, dislocated shoulders, punctured abdomen and uterus, spine broken in three places, right leg broken in eleven places, a left foot dislocated, and a crushed and dislocated right foot. While recovering, she also developed peritonitis and cystitis. Due to wearing a plaster corset for her broken spine, she was confined to bed for most of this three months. She wrote in a 1926 letter that, "I became old in instants and everything today is bland and lucid."

This accident changed the course of her life. Frida could no longer pursue her dream of becoming a physician. The rest of her life was full of pain and illness; she used alcohol and pain medication throughout to cope. A friend later said that Frida "lived dying." From her bed, she began painting. Guillermo lent her some oil paints and Matilde gave her a special easel and mirror to help her while in bed. She even briefly considered a career as a medical illustrator, but then Frida began painting herself. "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best," she explained. Painting during her recovery helped her explore her identity, existence, and more. She later said, "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality." Frida eventually began socializing with her old school friends once more, now all attending university and becoming involved in politics. She joined the Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party) and was introduced to many activists and artists.

At a party in 1928, she was introduced to the artist Diego Rivera. She asked him to judge her paintings to see if a career as an artist was realistic. He was impressed by her works, saying later that they showed "an unusual energy of expression, precise delineation of character, and true severity...They had a fundamental plastic honesty, and an artistic personality of their own...It was obvious to me that this girl was an authentic artist." Frida and Rivera, who was much older and had two common-law wives, began a romantic relationship. They were married in a civil ceremony at the Coyoacán town hall on August 21, 1929. She was 22 and he was a few months shy of 43. Her parents referred to it as a "marriage between an elephant and a dove" since Rivera was tall and overweight while Frida was small and delicate. Her mother opposed the marriage but her father appreciated that Rivera was wealthy, since Frida could not work and required many expensive medical treatments. Both the Mexican and international presses reported the marriage and followed the couple for years afterward, referring to them simply as "Diego and Frida."

The couple moved to wherever Rivera was commissioned to paint murals. They first lived in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. This area, which had seen heavy fighting during the Revolution, helped refine Frida's sense of Mexican identity and pride. She, like other Mexican female intellectuals and artists at the time, began dressing in traditional indigenous Mexican peasant clothing to emphasize her mestiza ancestry: long and colorful skirts, huipils and rebozos, elaborate headdresses and masses of jewelry. Her painting style drew more inspiration from Mexican folk art as well.

The next few years were a string of moves in the United States for Rivera's work, first to San Francisco, then to New York City, Detroit, and back to New York. The couple was "feted, lionized, [and] spoiled" in America, with Frida becoming more confident in her English and bolder in her assertions to the media that she was the better artist of the two. She was able to experiment with other artistic styles, as well, such as etching and frescos. Even with her abilities growing, the media was unimpressed: a Detroit News article was titled "Wife of Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art."

While in America, she also began a decade-long love affair with a Hungarian-American photographer, Nickolas Muray (Rivera also had affairs during their marriage). Overall, however, Frida disliked Americans, whom she found "boring." She hated the rich capitalists they were forced to socialize with, saying, "although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States," she felt "a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger."

***Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States*** *(1932)*

Though Rivera enjoyed the United States, Frida was homesick for Mexico. Her mother had died in 1932 and Frida herself was continuing to undergo serious health problems. While in Detroit, for instance, a miscarriage (following a therapeutic abortion attempt, her second of the marriage) caused a near-fatal hemorrhage that resulted in her being hospitalized for two weeks. Her chronic miscarriages and therapeutic abortions were a result of the severe injury to her uterus in the bus accident.

The couple returned to Mexico in early 1934 and moved to the wealthy neighborhood of San Ángel in Mexico City. Rivera resented being forced back to Mexico and, between this and Frida's health (she had an appendectomy, more abortions and/or miscarriages, and an amputation of gangrenous toes), the marriage was falling apart. He began having an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, causing Frida to move out to her own apartment. There she had her own affair with the American artist Isamu Noguchi. The couple eventually reconciled though both continued having affairs (Frida, being bisexual, had affairs with both men and women). Rivera and Frida finally divorced in November 1939, though they remained friends and she continued managing his finances and correspondence.

Frida moved back to her family's home, La Casa Azul. She had become more politically active, joining the socialist organization the Fourth International. Following her move home, Frida threw much energy into her art. She had been extremely productive in the last years of her marriage, with her first exhibition in early 1938 and her first significant sale that summer. She had traveled to both New York and Paris in 1939 and received more commissions and had more affairs. Three exhibitions in 1940 alone showcased her work. In 1941, she was featured in Boston and twice in New York in 1942 and again the next year. She and Rivera had also reconciled during this time and were remarried in a civil ceremony in December 1940. The two appeared to have reached an understanding: they respected each other's independence and both continued having affairs.

Frida was popular in her homeland as well. In 1942, she co-founded Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of artists devoted to educate the public about Mexican culture. The next year, she began teaching at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (National School of Painting, Sculture, and Printmaking). When her health impacted her ability to commute to work, Frida began teaching lessons at her home. She accepted commissions for murals and continued painting, even winning a 5000-peso (about $13,000 in today's money) national prize in 1946.

*Frida's wheelchair and adjustable easel*

She continued to fight health problems, which were exacerbated by heavy drinking. She had a chronic fungal infection in her hand, was treated for syphilis, and had severe pain in her legs and back (between 1940 and 1954, she wore 28 separate supportive corsets made of steel, leather, or plaster). Frida's father's death in 1941 had also caused her to sink into depression. She was confined to La Casa Azul, taking care of the house and garden while servants, friends, and pets kept her company. By the mid-1940s, she could no longer sit or stand for any length of time due to her spinal pain. She went to New York City for a surgery that fused a bone graft and a steel support to her spine; the surgery failed, by some accounts due to her refusal to rest as required. Frida underwent surgery again in Mexico City in 1950 for a new bone graft on her spine. This caused a bone infection and led to several more surgeries. After almost a year in the hospital, she was able to return home, using a wheelchair and crutches to navigate La Casa Azul. Her right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene in 1953, causing severe depression and anxiety and a further dependence on painkillers. When her husband began another love affair, Frida attempted to kill herself with an overdose. Her art during this time reflects her declining physical and mental state.

***Tree of Hope, Remain Strong*** *(1946)*

Through all of this, Frida had become involved in politics once more as her health allowed. She rejoined the Mexican Communist Party in 1948. In the summer of 1954, though she was fighting bronchopneumonia, she attended a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. On the morning of July 13, 1954, following a night of pain and a high fever, Frida's nurse found her dead in her bed. The official cause of death was listed as a pulmonary embolism, though they did not do an autopsy. Frida was only 47 years old. Her body laid in state for one day at Palacio de Bellas Artes under the Communist flag before being taken to Panteón Civil de Dolores for a small funeral with her family and friends. Hundreds of admirers stood outside. Her body was cremated, per her wishes. Her ashes are currently displayed at La Casa Azul (which opened as a museum in 1958) in a pre-Columbian urn. Rivera, who said that Frida's death was "the most tragic day of my life," died just three years after her, in 1957.

During Frida's lifetime, she created around 150-200 paintings, all while enduring over 30 surgeries. Much of her work feature her Mexican cultural pride, identity, and medical influences. She often portrayed her body in different outfits, as a child, or as wounded or broken. Frida Kahlo is now internationally known, especially from the 1970s and on. The term "Fridamania" was even coined to describe her popularity. In 1984, Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage (meaning they cannot be exported from the country). Her diary, kept from the mid-1940s until her death and mixed both sketches and writings, was published in 1995 under the title El diario de Frida Kahlo: Un íntimo autorretrato (The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait) in both Spanish and English. Her paintings continue to break records for Latin American artists - in 2016, one painting sold for $8 million. A park named for her was dedicated in Coyoacán in 1985 and features a bronze statue of her. Frida was even the first Hispanic woman honored with a US postage stamp in 2001. Frida has been the subject of many films, novels, albums, visual arts, ballets, operas, and plays. One of the most famous is the 2002 movie Frida starring Salma Hayek (currently available on Paramount Plus or Amazon Prime Video).

In a 1953 journal entry, following the amputation of her leg, Frida wrote: "I have achieved a lot. Confidence in walking. Confidence in painting. I love Diego more than myself. My will is strong. My will remains." Her last words in her journal were, "I hope the leaving is joyful - and I hope never to return - FRIDA."

Most sincerely,

Christina

Further Reading

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
Frida Kahlo at Home by Suzanne Barbezat
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Harden Herrera
Frida Kahlo: Una Biografía by María Hesse (Spanish)
Frida Kahlo by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara (ages 4-7)
I am Frida Kahlo by Brad Meltzer (ages 5-8)
The Story of Frida Kahlo by Susan B. Katz (ages 6-8)
Who Was Frida Kahlo? by Sarah Fabiny (ages 8-12)

Works Consulted

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Courtney, C. A., O'Hearn, M. A., & Franck, C. C. (2017). Frida Kahlo: Portrait of Chronic Pain. Physical Therapy, 97(1), 90–96. https://doi.org/10.2522/ptj.20160036

DH Media Group. (2015, December 17). Disabled Icons: Painter Frida Kahlo and Pushing Boundaries. Disability Horizons. http://disabilityhorizons.com/2015/12/disabled-icons-painter-frida-kahlo-and-pushing-boundaries/.

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Healy, C. M. (2018, June 7). What Frida Kahlo's Clothing Tells Us About Fashion's Disability Frontier. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/40240/1/frida-kahlo-disability-fashion-mexico.

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Krista. (2021, May 1). Why My Disability Made Me Rethink Frida Kahlo. My Upright Life. https://myuprightlife.com/index.php/2021/05/01/why-my-disability-made-me-rethink-frida-kahlo/.

Meredith Corporation. (2018, July 6). I found my passion after becoming disabled, and I thank Frida Kahlo for teaching me the beauty of second chances. HelloGiggles. https://hellogiggles.com/lifestyle/my-passion-disabled-frida-kahlo/.

Munoz, G. (2012, May 3). Understanding Frida Kahlo's Fertility Problems. Science Illustrated. https://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/science/news/understanding-frida-kahlos-fertility-problems/.

Shelley. (2021, May 24). Disabled Women in History: Frida Kahlo and Life with Chronic Pain. Chronic Mom. https://www.chronicmom.com/2021/05/disabled-women-in-history-frida-kahlo-and-life-with-chronic-pain.html/.

Toll, A. (2015, October 23). Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo. Plain Magazine. https://plainmagazine.com/rare-photos-frida-kahlo/.

Townes, K. (2017, October 15). Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Painter, Showcases Disability in Her Art. Respect Ability. https://www.respectability.org/2017/10/frida-kahlo-self-portrait-painter-showcases-disability-art/.

WETA. (2005). The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/weta/fridakahlo/.

Last Updated: 22 Sept. 2023

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