The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

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Bakewell, Elizabeth (2001). "Frida Kahlo". In Werner, Michael S. (ed.). The Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico. Routledge. pp.315–318. ISBN 978-1-57958-337-8.

January 2022 onwards Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney. Audio visual exhibition created by the Frida Kahlo Corporation. [315] [316] When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which eventually made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than the left. [149] [b] The illness forced her to be isolated from her peers for months, and she was bullied. [152] While the experience made her reclusive, [145] it made her Guillermo's favorite due to their shared experience of living with disability. [153] Kahlo credited him for making her childhood "marvelous... he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems." He taught her about literature, nature, and philosophy, and encouraged her to play sports to regain her strength, despite the fact that most physical exercise was seen as unsuitable for girls. [154] He also taught her photography, and she began to help him retouch, develop, and color photographs. [155] Although Kahlo featured herself and events from her life in her paintings, they were often ambiguous in meaning. [116] She did not use them only to show her subjective experience but to raise questions about Mexican society and the construction of identity within it, particularly gender, race, and social class. [117] Historian Liza Bakewell has stated that Kahlo "recognized the conflicts brought on by revolutionary ideology": Why a California Artist Is Taking the Frida Kahlo Corporation to Court". KQED. 17 January 2020 . Retrieved 21 July 2020. Galicia, Fernando (22 November 2018). "Frida Kahlo Pinturas, autorretratos y sus significados". La Hoja de Arena . Retrieved 13 May 2019.In 1922, Kahlo was accepted to the elite National Preparatory School, where she focused on natural sciences with the aim of becoming a physician. [159] The institution had only recently begun admitting women, with only 35 girls out of 2,000 students. [160] She performed well academically, [10] was a voracious reader, and became "deeply immersed and seriously committed to Mexican culture, political activism and issues of social justice". [161] The school promoted indigenismo, a new sense of Mexican identity that took pride in the country's indigenous heritage and sought to rid itself of the colonial mindset of Europe as superior to Mexico. [162] Particularly influential to Kahlo at this time were nine of her schoolmates, with whom she formed an informal group called the "Cachuchas"– many of them would become leading figures of the Mexican intellectual elite. [163] They were rebellious and against everything conservative and pulled pranks, staged plays, and debated philosophy and Russian classics. [163] To mask the fact that she was older and to declare herself a "daughter of the revolution", she began saying that she had been born on 7 July 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, which she continued throughout her life. [164] She fell in love with Alejandro Gomez Arias, the leader of the group and her first love. Her parents did not approve of the relationship. Arias and Kahlo were often separated from each other, due to the political instability and violence of the period, so they exchanged passionate love letters. [12] [165] 1925–1930: Bus accident and marriage to Diego Rivera Kahlo photographed by her father in 1926 Similarly to many other contemporary Mexican artists, Kahlo was heavily influenced by Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that had developed in the aftermath of the revolution. [95] [84] The Mexicanidad movement claimed to resist the "mindset of cultural inferiority" created by colonialism, and placed special importance on indigenous cultures. [96] Before the revolution, Mexican folk culture– a mixture of indigenous and European elements– was disparaged by the elite, who claimed to have purely European ancestry and regarded Europe as the definition of civilization which Mexico should imitate. [97] Kahlo's artistic ambition was to paint for the Mexican people, and she stated that she wished "to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me". [92] To enforce this image, she preferred to conceal the education she had received in art from her father and Ferdinand Fernandez and at the preparatory school. Instead, she cultivated an image of herself as a "self-taught and naive artist". [98] Castro-Sethness 2004–2005, p.21; Barson 2005, p.65; Bakewell 1993, pp.173–174; Cooey 1994, pp.96–97.

Kahlo has also been the subject of several stage performances. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa choreographed a one-act ballet titled Broken Wings for the English National Ballet, which debuted in 2016, Tamara Rojo originated Kahlo in the ballet. [298] Dutch National Ballet then commissioned Lopez Ochoa to create a full-length version of the ballet, Frida, which premiered in 2020, with Maia Makhateli as Kahlo. [299] She also inspired three operas: Robert Xavier Rodriguez's Frida, which premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia in 1991; [300] Kalevi Aho's Frida y Diego, which premiered at the Helsinki Music Centre in Helsinki, Finland in 2014; [301] and Gabriela Lena Frank's El último sueño de Frida y Diego, which premiered at the San Diego Opera in 2022. [302] The Diary is her lifeline to the world. When she saw herself, she painted and she painted because she was alone and she was the subject she knew best. But when she saw the world, she wrote, paradoxically, her Diary, a painted Diary which makes us realize that no matter how interior her work was, it was always uncannily close to the proximate, material world of animals, fruits, plants, earths, skies.What emerges are stories that sometimes reveal the mundane in an artist's life. For instance, that the painting Ixcuhintli Dog with Me (Self-portrait with Xoloitzcuintli Dog)that she painted around 1938, had been painted over a previous picture. Barson, Tanya (2005). " 'All Art is At Once Surface and Symbol': A Frida Kahlo Glossary". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5. Panzer 2004, pp.40–41, mentions 1931 letter from Kahlo to Muray, but not entirely sure if this was the beginning of affair; Marnham 1998, pp.234–235, interprets letter as evidence of the beginning of affair. First of all,who was she as an artist? What did she think of her own work? What did she want to achieve as an artist? And what do these paintings mean by themselves?" Lozano said about the focus of his book in an interview with the BBC. Frida Kahlo Could Barely Walk. In This Ballet, She Dances". The New York Times. 17 January 2020. Archived from the original on 17 January 2020.

O'Sullivan, Michael (2 December 1996). "Putting the Best Face on Frida Kahlo". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved 21 July 2020.Castro's Rainbow Honor Walk Dedicated Today: SFist". SFist – San Francisco News, Restaurants, Events, & Sports. 2 September 2014. Archived from the original on 10 August 2019 . Retrieved 13 August 2019. Alice O'Keeffe (8 November 2009). "The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (book review)". The Guardian. theguardian.com . Retrieved 4 June 2015. Famous paintings come to life in these quarantine works of art". PBS NewsHour. 15 April 2020 . Retrieved 21 July 2020. Lindauer, Margaret A. (1999). Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. University Press of New England. Anderson, Corrine (Fall 2009). "Remembrance of an Open Wound: Frida Kahlo and Post-revolutionary Mexican Identity" (PDF). South Atlantic Review. 74 (4): 119–130. JSTOR 41337719. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2019.

Crawford, Caroline (20 June 2023). "Review: San Francisco Opera's 'El Último Sueño De Frida Y Diego' A Riveting New Spanish Language Work". SFGate . Retrieved 22 June 2023.Kahlo tried to conceal her heterosexual liaisons from Rivera—not so difficult after they moved into his-and-hers houses, adjacent residences connected by a bridge. Once detected, these dalliances, such as her mid-1930s fling with the dapper Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, usually ended. (In contrast, Rivera boasted to anyone who would listen of her flings with women.) Her brief liaison with Leon Trotsky—whom Rivera, with his potent political pull, had helped bring to Mexico in 1937—infuriated him most. (Kahlo also did not miss the opportunity to seduce Trotsky’s secretary, Jean van Heijenoort.) Friends recall that long after Trotsky’s assassination Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist. The Kahlo-Rivera duet was, a friend says, “heightened torture and heroism.” Small, Zachary (8 November 2022). "Setting a Kahlo Drawing Aflame in Search of an NFT Spark". The New York Times . Retrieved 8 November 2022.