Blood imbibes the canvas of Frida Kahlo. The artist’s unsparing works dominate one’s attention with terrific interest. Kahlo’s passion to recount her own history in paint offers the viewer a personalized tour through her often grief stricken life.

Kahlo’s work reveals an overt preoccupation with her autobiography. Frida shares with the viewer her personal struggles with this violence in Mexican society. In her 1935 piece A Few Small Nips. Kahlo voices her outrage at a drunken husband’s murder of his wife. (Lowe p. 85)

A shocking blood spilt canvas houses a naked woman covered with scissor wounds as her half smiling husband admires his handy work. Here the influence of Jose Guadalupe Posada, macabre printmaker of gruesome current events is apparent. Kahlo’s depiction of the murder simply translates the horror of the act without moralizing. The violence of Mexican society was a reality. Kahlo documents the murder of the woman with a chilling aloofness. This detached observation of a common occurrence shocks the viewer.

The 1932 canvas Henry Ford Hospital provides the viewer with an internal gaze into Frida’s most prevalent torment. In 1925, at the age of sixteen, Frida sustained serious injuries as a result of being impaled through the pelvis during a street car accident. As a result of these injuries, Frida suffered many miscarriages and medical abortions. Kahlo, despondent her inability to bear children reworked the trauma of the accident in several paintings. (Mackinley Helm p. 168)

Kahlo’s injuries left her ailing for most of her life. Her deteriorating health dominated the themes of much of her body of work. Perhaps this explains the self absorbed nature of her work. Frida produced a series of self portraits. These introspective works at the same time haunt and mock the viewer, Kahlo’s intense steady gaze from the canvas shields a torrent of chaotic emotion. Amid the body of self portraits, the 1932 work My Birth dares the audience to look on. A dead naked woman, sheet covering her face, gives birth to infant Frida. Kahlo’s fascination with her birth, here shown with the headless Aztec goddess Tlazōlteōtl springs from her desire to align herself with her Mexican heritage. As the daughter of a Jewish German émigré and an Indian [Indigenous] Spanish mother, Kahlo clearly identifies more passionately with her Mexican roots. (Herrera p.10)

Often, Kahlo paints herself wearing traditional Tehuana costume, a high necked dress marking personal and economic strength. (White Chapel p.18)

Mexican folk lore and traditional culture dominated much of Kahlo’s work. Her early works on tin resemble the primitive ex– voto style, a three part work detailing a disastrous event and honoring the saint who performed the healing around the tragedy. Ex–voto paintings hung in Mexican churches signifying a predominant popular form of religious expression.

My Birth follows the ex–voto tradition as it is played out vertically in three parts: the picture of the saint floats above the covered body which births the twisted neck of infant Frida. (Lowe p.45)  The 1939 My Nurse and I continues Kahlo’s trend of self exploration. As a child Kahlo breast fed from an Indian wet nurse, a fact of which she was proud. In the painting, an adult Kahlo suckles from an Indian woman’s breast. References to nature expound as streams of milk fall like rain. Again a longing for Mexican heritage and a far away youth surface in Kahlo’s work. Frida’s inability to carry a child and her adulation for her childhood recur in most of her art. ( Herrera p. 219)

Kahlo possessed a need to give birth. As a young woman, she envisioned herself as the mother of Diego Rivera’s children. Rivera, renowned Mexican leader of the avant garde, encouraged Kahlo to pursue her individuality as an artist. Enamored by the brash young Kahlo, Rivera married her in August 1929.

The Kahlo-Rivera union weathered a series of affairs on both sides. Kahlo rivaled her husbands reputation as a ladies man by engaging in both homosexual and heterosexual trysts. The chaotic nature of the relationship led to the couples divorce in 1939. Kahlo pursued her painting career, which saw little activity during the marriage, with great veracity.

Both despondent and anguished about the split, Kahlo indulged herself in her despair. The obvious result bares itself in her 1939 work The Two Frida’s.

The two seated women whom Frida described as “the Frida that Diego once loved, and the Frida that Diego no longer loves,” ( Lowe p.59)  Kahlo’s adept treatment of anatomy, apparent by the dissected view of the circulatory system, evolved from her premedical study at National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Until her tragic accident, Kahlo intended to pursue a career as a physician. Her painstaking study of anatomy uniquely branded Kahlo’s work. Many of her paintings exposed open hearts and systems of veins, glands, and ducts. (LOWE p.18)

Kahlo remarried Rivera in December 1940. Their union, ostensibly one of companionship, dominated Kahlo’s life. Though the couple lived in separate homes, the intense nature of their relationship provided Kahlo with security and passion. Kahlo idolized Rivera from childhood. Diego stimulated Frida’s intellect. His travels to Europe and political involvement in the Communist Party engaged Kahlo in various aspects of the Mexican Freedom Fighters movement in 1936. (White Chapel p.38)

Known for her revolutionary politics, Kahlo advocated the break down of “high art.” The Mexican Renaissance surged between the 1920’s and 1930’s. Rivera’s trips to Russia reinforced both his Communist alliances and knowledge of the powerful avant garde movement there. Kahlo maintained her incendiary opinions of the Mexican government. Through her art, she challenged the patriarchal mailed fist power structure. (White Chapel p.9)

Kahlo openly supported the Loyalist movement against Franco, the fascist dictator in Spain. Spanish militiamen arrived in Mexico in 1936 seeking support and received economic aid from the organizational efforts of Kahlo. 1936 signaled great political unrest in the world. Kahlo energetically engaged herself in the frenzied political climate in Mexico. In 1936, Soviet dissident Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia found themselves forced from exile in Norway as a result of a Soviet threat of trade embargo.

When no country offered the fallen leader asylum, Kahlo and Rivera convinced the Mexican consulate to harbor Trotsky. Rivera, member of the International Communist League, petitioned for Trotsky’s asylum personally. ( Herrera, p.204)

Trotsky lived with Kahlo in her Coyoacan blue house. During this time, the Dewey Commission held a trial to examine evidence used against the Russian in the Moscow trials. As the political atmosphere heated up, so did the relationship between Trotsky and Kahlo. Not long after his arrival in Mexico, the Russian fell prey to the strong advances of Kahlo. The jealous Rivera, ignorant of the tryst, continued to befriend the exiled leader. (Herrera, p.207) After a botched assassination attempt on Trotsky’s life in May 1940, and a high profile rift between Rivera and the Russian, Rivera exited Mexico for San Francisco.

Frida’s health severally deteriorated after the stressful circumstances of the assassination attempt. Deeply distraught by Diego’s absence, Kahlo sought friendship from Ramon Mercader, who eventually murdered Trotsky with an ice axe. Due to her alliance with Mercader, Kahlo fell under suspicion as a collaborator in the assassination.

After twelve hours of interrogation, Kahlo, drained and embittered, was set free. Kahlo’s health required serious medical care. The grave Mexican diagnosis of tuberculosis threw the painter into a depression. At the behest of a worried Diego, Frida acknowledged Dr. Eloesser’s advice and departed for a San Francisco hospital where she received treatment for a kidney infection.

Dr. Eloesser advised Kahlo to refrain from indulging in alcohol, a habit which she practiced heavily. (Herrera, p. 298)

The San Francisco physician befriended Rivera, joined forces with him in convincing Frida to remarry him. During their separation, Frida’s health markedly deteriorated. Spending great amounts of time painting from her bed, Frida produced a large body of self portrait work. In this work, a considerable amount of introspection surfaces. Many of Frida’s self portraits, painted from the neck up, revel in intricate lush backgrounds.

A self confessed admirer of French painter Henri Rousseau, Kahlo works in a similar primitive style. Both painters work in a non-traditional visual language, refraining from the use of perspective. Labeled by curators as “Modern Primitives,” both Rousseau and Kahlo draw from the work of folk and indigenous cultures. (Lowe p. 89)

Kahlo’s 1940 Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Humming Bird forces both Catholic and Aztec symbolism into one dimension. The background green with vegetation, enshrines the somber Frida. Symbols of Death (the black panther) souls of the dead warriors (hummingbird and butterflies,) and references to the Catholic miracle of St. Veronica (crown of thorns around the neck) reveal that Frida’s paintings simmer in layers of rich symbolism. (Lowe p.57)

Referencing her love of Pre–Colombian artifacts, Kahlo often delves into rites of Aztec culture. In Thorn Necklace, Kahlo recalls Aztec animal lore which believed that ancient Mexican gods possessed the power to take animal form. Another primitive work, Four Inhabitants of Mexico City, 1938, again utilizes icons of popular Mexican culture. Frida nonchalantly acknowledges Mexico’s “culture of death.” The three figures in the frame symbolizes politics, Catholicism, and Aztec culture. Kahlo positions herself, in a child’s form, on the de Chirico stylized landscape. Here obvious Surrealistic tendencies emerge in Kahlo’s work. ( Lowe, p. 91)

The figures in Four Inhabitants each represent interests and concerns of Kahlo. Especially noteworthy, the Pre– Colombian Tarascan clay figure, fertile with pregnancy. Again Kahlo’s remorse at her barrenness plague her with contemplation. This clay statue symbolizes the pondering state of the Indigenous, as well as the rich cultural climate of Mexico. The calavera, a standing skeleton smiling off to the right, signifies the impending death of Mexican heritage.

The Judas figure wrapped in firecrackers, documents the practice of burning effigies; a custom originated in Spain which allows the public to vent their hostilities against the ruling classes. (Lowe p. 91) The landscape portrays a sleepy stucco village in blues and tans, with the metaphysical play of light of de Chirico.

Around 1937 and 1938, a surge in the production of Frida’s work surfaced revealing inarguably Surrealistic qualities. Western European founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, arrogantly bestowed himself with the credit of discovering Kahlo. Apparently desiring to onset a new trend in painting, Breton traveled to Mexico in search of primitive art. Breton reveled in Kahlo’s work,

Citing her as “a point of intersection between the political and the artistic line beyond which we hope that they may unite in a single revolutionary consciousness.” ( Lowe p. 96)

Despite Breton’s accolade, Kahlo maintained the desire to make art accessible to the people, thus separating herself from the Surrealistic movement. Surrealism characteristically represents women in a sexually violent nature, often displaying the uninterrupted consciousness of male artists.

Decapitated female torsos adorned many of the Surrealistic canvases. As a woman, Frida undoubtedly mesmerized the European intellectuals with her penchant for self mutilated representation in her Surrealist work. ( White Chapel Gallery, p. 9) Kahlo charters a voyage through her own subconscious, examining her own realities as a woman and an individual.

Her work, laden with blood soaked imagery and anatomical references, spares no one’s sensitivities. The volatile nature of Kahlo’s work remarks in it’s own macabre sense of humor. Such intrepid introspection of her life and culture pull from Kahlo her most eclectic imagery.

A work classified as Surrealist, the 1938, What the Water Gave Me, packs the canvas with complex fragments of Kahlo’s mind. Images seen repeatedly in Kahlo’s work combine themselves here in a subconscious purge. References to her foot injury, portrait of her parents, white and Indian lovers, Tehuana dress, asphyxiated woman, and references to the decimation of Mexican culture by U.S. technology all rest upon a quiet bath. ( Lowe p. 92)

Though Kahlo rejected the Surrealist manifesto, she continued to produce work in the Surrealistic vein. As she painted her own realities, Kahlo produced a commissioned work for Clare Luce Booth in memoriam of her socialite friend. The 1939, Suicide of Dorothy Hale shocked high society with its graphic account of the fall from the Hampshire House. Leaving nothing to the imagination, Kahlo documents Hale’s fall in three stages of time, painting the lifeless body out of frame to infiltrate the viewers reality. ( Lowe p. 94)

Kahlo’s 1931, Portrait of Luther Burbank reveals her interest of transmutation and metamorphosis. Burbank, a California nursery developer, inspired Kahlo by his work with hybridization of plant species. Kahlo’s portrait of the deceased Burbank, invokes the multiple layers of his life and work by painting the metamorphosis of his body with the earth. The distinguished Burbank rises from the roots of a tree that penetrates his corpse buried beneath the soil. ( Lowe p. 80)

Kahlo continued to explore the idea of metamorphosis through mutation and transformation. The Wounded Deer, 1946, pictures a deer suffering from many arrow wounds, who sports Kahlo’s crying face. A tribute to her personal angst, Kahlo translates the frustration of her chronic illness. Yet another example of transformation surfaces in the 1938,  XOCHTI, FLOWER OF LIFE an obvious remark upon the consummation of plant life in an outwardly sexual manner.

( Lowe, p. 82)

Symbolism finds its way into much of Kahlo’s work. Recurring images of roots and veins emerge in various forms through out her paintings. Frida often associates mythical Aztec importance to assigned colors and symbols, she explains, “Reddish purple signifies old blood and prickly pear. The alive and most oldest. Tlapali. Aztec. Brown represents the color of mole (a rich sauce made from chilies and chocolate,) of the leaf that goes. Earth. Yellow conjures madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and of joy.” Native culture directly influences Kahlo’s color assignments. With color, Kahlo conveys the essence of the land and culture of the natives. These inferences to color coding resemble practices of folk art. (Lowe, p.82)

Roots and branches dominate several canvases. In Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, long tendrils of shorn hair cover the earth around her. The hair, virtually animated, winds its way around Kahlo’s chair. In this portrait, Kahlo, dressed in a mans’ suit, stares unflinchingly from the canvas. Usually, the significance of roots serves to establish a sense of connection to the land. The opposite is true in this work. The random placement of the hair provokes a sense of disturbing detachment; as removed as the gaze of Frida’s eyes. ( Lowe, p. 61)

Frida exposes a vulnerable side in Self Portrait with Loose Hair, 1947. In perhaps the only unselfish protected view of Frida, this work dramatically reveals the emotional anguish of the artist. Frida, openly accounting the trials of her life in paint, kept for herself a privacy awarded by the mask that she blankly stared out of. In Loose Hair, Kahlo forges a direct connection to the viewer with the emotionally charged canvas. ( Lowe, p.61)

As illness ravaged Kahlo’s body of strength and vigor, the artist entered a somber phase of self reflection. Obsessively entertaining the reality of her death, Kahlo produced a Surrealist work entitled The Dream, 1940. Kahlo floats in a bed covered in a yellow ( sickness) blanket. Roots entwine their way over her sleeping body. Above the bed rests the grinning symbol of Death, the calavera. ( Lowe, p. 97)

Kahlo’s preoccupation with death followed a series of crippling surgeries in 1944. From her bed, Frida recounted the anguish of her ailing body. Two paintings, The Broken Column, 1944, and Without Hope, 1945, reveal the frustrating anguish of the artist. The first painting ascribes to Surrealist tradition. The tearing Frida appears broken and tormented by the hundreds of nails protruding into her flesh. A torso brace encircles her opened chest, where a broken Doric column lies. The level of excruciating discomfort screams forth from the canvas in one glance.

Two years later and further despondent, Kahlo painted the aptly titled Without Hope. Here, a prisoner in her bed, Kahlo regurgitates a nauseating horn of plenty. Un-plucked chickens, intestines, a skull, fish heads and a pig exit the wounded Frida. Such testimony to her pain surges from this canvas. ( Lowe p. 101)

The remainder of Frida’s life witnessed only the confines of her bed. A series of still life works emerged from the embittered artist. A sinister and sexual quality oozed from the flowers and fruit that Frida conceived. The 1938, Fruit of the Earth, offers a succulent plate of fruit to the viewer, at closer inspection, both female and male genitalia spring from the plate. Perversely tongue in cheek, Kahlo carries her penchant for shock value to an “innocent” plate of fruit.

Similar erotic handling of the still life occur in Kahlo’s 1943, The Bride Who Becomes Frightened When She Sees Life Open, Still Life with Parrot, 1951 and Naturalize Viva, 1952.

Kahlo’s still lifes mirror her pernicious attitude towards her failing health. Throughout her career, Kahlo sought the realms of her subconscious, often revealing violent truths. Kahlo’s unabashed dissection of Mexican culture, reveals both cultural pride and dismay for the plight of women. The strength and black wit of Frida Kahlo follow her in her work. The many intricate and complicated sides of Frida are painted into canvas, they both fascinate and taunt humanity long after her death.

Kahlo was openly bisexual and enjoyed many passionate relationships with both male and female artists, singers, photographers, painters, and writers of the politically turbulent Surrealist era.  Her volatile relationships with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky was tempered by her close and supportive longstanding relationship with Tina Modotti. Kahlo also had a significant relationship with the American photographer Nickolas Murray, who captured her image on film, but not her heart. Frida’s heart belonged to Diego to the end.

Blood nourishes and gives life. The earth nurtures and buries it’s dead. Frida feared her death. The ominous grin of the calavera haunted her mind for years; finally reaching out for her in July of 1954.

Essay written May 3, 1992, Macaulay Woods, ©Macaulay Woods 2026, All rights reserved.