Artist: Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954)
Collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, United States
Actively reinventing herself throughout her career, Frida Kahlo created potent representations of her identity, her native Mexico, and the historical epoch in which she lived. She explored these subjects in a deceptively naive manner, often drawing on folk art traditions. Many of her paintings merge depictions of the cosmos, the earth, and the body with the artist's immediate reality, permitting shockingly personal depictions of her physical and psychological pain to bleed into the iconography of Mexico's Aztec, colonial, and revolutionary history.
Through her relationships with Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Kahlo was intimately familiar with Mexican mural painting and its grand ambitions, but she chose to follow a different artistic path. Her paintings form an organic and realist alternative to the austerity of Modernism and the more detached, dreamlike quality of Surrealism. Although she was called a Surrealist by André Breton, Kahlo culled her imagery from her own reality, a strategy that separated her paintings from those of the Surrealists. In an interview she once proclaimed, "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
