The 5 most important WORKS of FRIDA KHALO

Frida Kahlo (Coyoacán, July 6, 1907- Coyoacán, July 13, 1954), Mexican painter, is one of the most creative, imaginative and groundbreaking artists of the avant-garde of the twentieth century. An unclassifiable artist for the freshness and originality of her artistic language. Her life and her work were marked by the pain that she suffered due to a serious traffic accident that occurred in her youth and of her who kept her bedridden for long periods of time, as well as an intense and passionate love life.

In this lesson from a TEACHER we offer you a selection of the most important works of Frida Khalo so you can get closer to the work of one of the best artists of the 20th century.

Index

1. Characteristics of Frida Khalo's paintings
2. Frida and Diego Rivera (1931), an outstanding work by Frida
3. Henry Ford Hospital (1932): Frida and Motherhood
4. My birth (1932): death and motherhood
5. Las dos Fridas (1939), the most important work of Frida Khalo
6. The broken column (1944), one of Frida's most iconic works

Before discovering the most important works of Frida Khalo, it is essential that we know better who Frida is and what her style of painting is like. Here we leave you a review with the features highlights of this avant-garde artist and that is included in the naive art.

• Frida Khalo has a personal style in which she shows her pain and her own body, often broken, bleeding and fragile, cof her turning her face and her figure into an icon. And it is that Frida also created a universe of her own in which she dumped so many aspects of traditional culture Mexican, such as her obsessions and concerns about sexuality, motherhood, illness, death and love.
• Frida Khalo also showed all that female universe shamelessly, questioning all aspects of female identity. Thus, like many other surrealists, Frida tried to find answers to her life and her femininity through the unconscious and the dreamlike, filling their canvases with symbols in which motherhood or love are the protagonists.
• Her fear of loneliness and the isolation to which the disease condemned her was also reflected in her obsession with the self-portrait. Some portraits in which she showed her strong personality and her image as an artist, lover, wife. As she herself pointed out: ‘I paint self-portraits because I am alone very often and because I am the person I know the best’ .
• Another characteristic of Frida Khalo's work is the religious symbolism. Thus, she is also portrayed as the Virgin Mary, as a martyred Christ or as Saint Sebastian.
• Frida Khalo cannot be framed in a specific style, considering that the artist moved between the surrealism and realism, also appreciating elements of expressionism. Some experts consider it representative the magical realism.
• The popular elements mexican art They are also part of Frida Khalo's artistic language, the artist being inspired by her knowledge of the history, art and anthropological richness of her country. A cultural richness that made it universal by adopting the typical costumes of the country as one of its most iconic and recognizable signs of identity: the typical Tehuana costume and the flowers in the hair.

For Frida, painting was her salvation and a means of expression through which she showed her own reality, denying surrealism by pointing out that she did not paint dreams or nightmares, only reality. Of her Among her more important works she is Frida and Diego Rivera.

In this work she appears next to one of the great loves of her life, the painter Diego Rivera. In this portrait, she is painted alongside Rivera to mark the celebration of her marriage, focusing on her role as her wife, hand in hand with her then famous and acclaimed husband. She then lived in the shadow of Rivera, later achieving international recognition.

Thus, only he appears with a palette and brushes in hand, as a symbol of her artistic mastery, while she is portrayed with the typical costume of Mexican women and in the traditional way of portraits of married couples in Mexico.

She is located to the left of Rivera, a traditional symbol of the lower status of women in marriage. Frida and Rivera had married in 1929 in Coyoacán, he being 21 years older than her and having a reputation as a womanizer that did not presage a happy future for the couple. Thus, the artist's mother always said that the marriage had been like that of ‘An elephant and a dove’.

Frida Khalo's paintings from the early 1930s are characterized by being type votive offer, a type of religious painting that used to reflect religious episodes or miracles, being offerings that used to be dedicated to the gods or the saints since ancient times.

Rivera had a large collection of ancient votive offerings and Frida adopts this model to portray herself showing the scent of him in the hospital bed as if asking God why her suffering. She appears on a bed, bleeding after a miscarriage.

Six ribbons in the shape of veins emerge from her naked body, like umbilical cords that unite Frida with various objects or beings, including a fetus, a snail or a flower.

This is one of Frida's most disturbing works when both the mother and the newborn child appear dead. At the time the artist painted the picture, her mother had just passed away, her baby being her death. of herself, noting that she died when her mother died, but also pointing to the recent death of her own child.

The table shows the pain and suffering of motherhood to which is added that of death, but it also constitutes a kind of force exercise to recover from the trauma. It is also thought to be inspired by Thiazolteotl, the goddess of fertility and midwives.

The two Fridas is a large canvas and one of the compositions best known of the Mexican painter. A double self portrait which is a symbol of the sentimental pain that the artist experienced during her divorce from Rivera. On the left side of the canvas she represents herself dressed in the modern European style and on the right side in traditional Mexican dress. The Frida in the portrait on the right holds a locket with Rivera's image.

At the bottom of the work we find symbols like a stormy sky and a bleeding heart that show the physical and metaphysical pain that she feels, in addition to pointing out the ambivalence that she feels towards femininity and love. Thus, while the European Frida shows her heart dissected from her with the artery cut and bleeding, the Mexican remains with her heart intact and connected to the photograph of Diego Rivera when he was a child.

At 37, Frida was forced to change her already painful plaster corsets for a steel one. The years also weigh heavily and Frida begins to notice the passage of time and the decline of strength. The artist shows us all her pain and her suffering in her open body. Her spine crumbles and sharp metal nails fix her body. There are christian symbolism on the fabric that wraps the artist's hip, an imitation of the crucified Christ, like the tears that dot the artist's face and are also reminiscent of representations of the Virgin in Mexico.

Khalo shows herself as a martyr, identifying with San Sebastián in that combination of physical pain, nudity and sexuality. This work has been connected with the magical realism than with surrealism since more than the subconscious or irrationality, Khalo shows us a magical and fantastic interpretation of the reality that he had to live.

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• VVAA (2010) Frida Khalo: Encyclopedia of Art, Tikal
• Martínez, Noemi (2009) Frida Khalo. Art as expression, Aeneid