https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Frida_Kahlo%2C_by_Guillermo_Kahlo.jpg/220px-Frida_Kahlo%2C_by_Guillermo_Kahlo.jpg
I am sure everyone of you has heard about one of the greatest female artist of South America, Frida Kahlo. But how much do you really know about the Feminist and Communist icon that probably has more merchandise than every YouTuber or Influencer there is. As you might know Frida Kahlo is an Mexican artist that painted mostly self portraits. But there are many informations about her that you might not know as they are not the first things you read when you do research about her . I collected a few of them:
Frida Kahlo has a German father that is why her name was originally written Frieda as it is the common way to do it in Germany. She changed it after the second world war started in Germany. Because she didn’t want to be seen as one of the fascist Germans as she . She also was born 1907 but regularly said it was 1910 because that’s the year of the Mexican revolution which she was a big supporter of.
Her husband Diego Rivera is also an Artist. He also is much older than her by 21 years. And they were married twice as she divorced him one for one year. He was one of the most important persons in her live even though their relationship might seem toxic to others. As both of them often did adultery.
She was an active member of the Mexican communist party. Even though she left it once because her husband, Diego Rivera, got kicked out but in the last days of her life she went to a protest even though the doctors told her that she should stay home as her health was very bad.
As a child she got poliomyelitis which is the reason one of her legs was shorter and less strong than her other one. And if hat was not bad enough at the age of 18 on her way back home from school to Coyoacan, the city where she lived, she had a tragic bus accident where one of the support bars of the bus pierced her body and led to her having multiple broken bones and other damages. Because of that incident she had to spend a lot of time in bed and till the end of her life had health issues.
As you might already know Frida Kahlo, with a few exemptions, painted exclusively self portraits. You might ask yourself why. She once said about it that she felt lonely and that she paints what she knows the best. And because she had to spend a lot of time at home in bed because of her health herself is the thing she knows best.
I hope that you now have learned more about one of the greatest South American Artists and that if you see a artwork of her the next time you have some background information so you know better why her image depicts that.