Frida Kahlo as the Most Famous Mexican Painter - Essay Example

Frida Kahlo al Affiliation Frida Kahlo The Mexican art traditions are not as popular as American or European ones, however, it possesses a number of names which made a great contribution to the development of the art in general. One of such names is Frida Kahlo. She was known to be born in in the first part of the twentieth century, in1907, to be more precise (Bauml & Field, 2012). She is currently acknowledged as the most famous Mexican painter and graphic artist. The artistic tradition was determined by the very important fact of her biography: she was a wife of Diego Rivera, who also was an artist and used to perform his artworks in the style of surrealism. Her parents used t belong to various nations. Her father was German, however, his true nationality was Jewish. While his life he was a photographer. Her mother used to be an America originated Spaniard (Petersen, 2013). At the age of six years old, the artist used to suffer from polio. This determined the reason why since then the right leg became shorter and thinner than the left one. At the age of eighteen, Kahlo survived in a car accident: a broken iron rod collector tram stuck in the stomach and left groin, shattering the hipbone. The still painful months of inactivity began. It was that time when Kahlo asked her father for a brush and paint. There was a special frame made for Frida in order to allow her to paint lying (Petersen, 2013). 1929 was an important year for the artist. She enters the National Institute of Mexico (Petersen, 2013). For the year, held in almost total immobility, Kahlo obtained a serious passion for painting. Again, start walking, she attended art school and in 1928 joined the Communist Party (Lindauer, 2011). Her work has been praised by the time by the famous artist Diego Rivera of Communist era. When Frida was twenty-two years old, she married him (Lindauer, 2011). Their family life is seething passions. They could not always be together, but never – apart. They tied relationship which could be characterized as passionate, obsessive, and sometimes painful. In 1953, Mexico City is hosting the first solo exhibition of Frida Kahlo. None of self-portrait of Frida Kahlo smiles: serious, even mournful face, bushy eyebrows grown together, faint tendrils of sensual lips tightly compressed. All these features show the uneasy fate of an artist. The main concepts and ideas which had been laid into the paintings by Kahlo have been encrypted in details, and manifested in the background and characters which used to occur being next to the artists herself. Kahlos symbols in the painting works were believed to be drown on national traditions and have been closely connected with the Indian mythology of pre-Hispanic period. Frida Kahlo was a brilliant history figure of her homeland (Bauml & Field, 2012). At her paintings, she often had to be separated from herself: a great number of her paintings show her and another her. The artist who had been suffering for all of her life aimed at pour out the worries and troubles in the form of the painting. In public, she had always been cheerful infectiously, swearing loudly, drank, laughed and smoked. Her behavior style was as if she had been the happiest person in the world (Bauml & Field, 2012). Her interior emotions and senses along with the feelings she used to experience can be found out only from the paintings and diary she used to keep and write everything she perceived in. Despite her excruciating physical pain, she sparkled with humor, she could laugh to a point of exhaustion, to poke fun at themselves, and entertain the soul carouse. Only by taking a brush, she allowed herself to think about all inevitable things which used to behold her way. She dreamed of a child, but a terrible injury did not allow her to have children (Arellano, 2012). Three pregnancies – and it was quite a feat in her position – ended tragically. Frida Kahlo had been keeping a diary for the last ten years of her life – and managed to fill 170 pages, which are now represent a part of her heritage (Deffebach, 2015). They had to have forty years spent in the closed document archive of the Mexican government, before being published. One hundred seventy pages with watercolors and collages, childhood memories, records of illness and agonizing love for her husband (Arellano, 2012). Frida and her husband used to collect the a wide range of the authentic monuments of ancient culture. They are currently kept in the garden of "Blue House". It is known that Frida Kahlo died of pneumonia a week after celebrating her forty seventh anniversary. Her death occurred on July 13, 1954. Her funeral was held in "Bellas Artes" - the Palace of Fine Arts. Undoubtedly, the topic of suffering which had beaten Frida more often than any other person, left an imprint upon her feeling of pain, her loneliness, her superhuman strength of spirit and thirst for life. It is impossible to understand her works and penetrate further layer of paint knowing nothing about her life and events which took place in it (Deffebach, 2015). Undoubtedly, Rivera had an impact on the work of his wife – they were married, he was already a mature master, and he was, in addition to this, acknowledged as the novice artist. However, the personality he had not robbed. On the contrary, he has protected from imitation and helped to find her own style in art, which was different from the art of her time and environment. The talent of Frida Kahlo bloomed in the shadow of her husbands powerful talent, but without the threat to remain in the shadow forever. The contribution the artists had made to the art and its development is impossible to underestimate. First and foremost, Frida has given the birth to a number of details which are likely to result in the further development of surrealism. The symbols which had been put into her paintings are of a magnificent nature and have a tendency to depict not only the personal outlooks of the author, but the particularities of the time an artist used to live in. The works Frida Kahlo show the magnificent power of talent and lust for life of the artist who happened to go through a number of challenges. The artistic particularities of the Fridas artwork represent the greatest heritage of the Mexican art in general. The concepts and outlooks the artist implemented in to the paintings produced an incredibly great impact upon the art traditions which, in the course of time, had manifested throughout the other painters works. References Arellano, C. (2012). The importance of the Xoloitzcuintli in Mexican history and in the works of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (Doctoral dissertation). Bauml, M., & Field, S. L. (2012). The Aztec, Frida Kahlo, and Cinco de Mayo: Mexico in Childrens Literature. The Social Studies, 103(2), 90-95. Deffebach, N. (2015). María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo: Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art. University of Texas Press. Lindauer, M. A. (2011). Devouring Frida: The art history and popular celebrity of Frida Kahlo. Wesleyan University Press. Petersen, A. L. (2013). Women in Mexican Folk Art: Of Promises, Betrayals, Monsters and Celebrities by Eli Bartra (review). Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 31(1), 201-202. Read More