Updated on November 7, 2024
Frida Kahlo, a unique woman, with her uni-brows, faint moustache, and striking self-portraits, is easily one of the most recognizable and engaging artists of all time. After her death, she became a life sensation to women across the world. Although she had a reputation for being a tortured artist, she had a strong conviction for the revolutionary, gender-defying nature of her work.
Here are some interesting facts about Frida Kahlo.
1. Frida Kahlo lied about her birth date because she wanted it to coincide with the Mexican Revolution. She was born on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, but lied that she was born 3 years after (1910) so that people would directly refer her to the Mexican Revolution that started in 1910.
2. Frida’s face is on the 500 Mexican peso bill. On the two sides of the bill is the face of Frida Kahlo and her famous husband Diego Rivera, one of the country’s most celebrated artists and personalities at the time.
3. She had 55 portraits of herself out of the 143 paintings she painted in her lifetime. When asked why, she said, “Because I am so often alone because I am the subject I know best.”
4. Frida Kahlo often groomed her busy brows by herself, as she never plucked them. Instead, she groomed them with special tools. She often filled them to make them darker.
5. Frida contracted Polio when she was six years of age, and this stunted the growth of her right legs which she then started to hide under her long indigenous Mexican skirts.
6. At the age of 18, she was involved in a ghastly motor accident that left her bedridden for months. Although she survived, the result of this accident left her childless throughout her years.
7. Frida Kahlo gave out her very first self-portrait Self-Portrait in a Red Velvet Dress, (1926) to her then-boyfriend Alejandro Gomez Ariasher in high hopes, that it would “restore her lover’s affection.”
8. Kahlo was surrounded by mirrors all her life. Even while she was bedridden, she would paint portraits of herself, using the mirrors that were attached to her canopy bed. She had a mirror in front of her wardrobe, by her dressing table, and even inside the stucco wall of her outdoor patio.
9. Frida Kahlo had first approached her to-be husband when he painted a mural in her school. He was the most admired artist at the time, and she asked him for advice on how to make it as an artist.
10. Frida Kahlo was an active communist, alongside her husband Diego Rivera. They befriended Leon Trotsky, who had fled to Mexico seeking political asylum from Joseph Stalin’s regime.
11. Frida Kahlo was bisexual and slept with both men and women, including French dancer/singer/actress Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky. Although Diego was okay with her affairs with women, he wasn’t at all comfortable with the one with men.
12. Frida’s husband cheated on her with her younger sister Christina and while the couple was set to get a divorce in 1939, they remarried in 1940, and the second marriage wasn’t any better.
13. Frida Kahlo was recognized as a surrealist painter and was seen as an instrumental figure in spreading the movement internationally. Her work began to receive recognition in the 1930s.
14. Frida Kahlo had German Origins. Born Magdelena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon. She dropped the “e” in her name around 1935 and subsequently became known as “Frida.”
15. Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera was considered to be very large and ugly looking. They were popularly known as the “Elephant and The Dove” because of the difference in their size.
16. Frida Kahlo’s painting is the first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist to be purchased by an internationally renowned Museum.
17. She became famous after her death. She died 20 days after her 47th birthday on July 26, 1954. A few days before her death, she wrote in her diary “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope to never return – Frida.”
18. After Frida’s death, movies, documentation, and articles, have been made about her life, and her artworks, including the best seller: The Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983) by Hayden Herrera. “Frida, Naturaleza Viva” was released in 1983 and was a hit, and in 2002, another biographical film “Frida”, in which Salma Hayek plays her role, grossed over $US 50 million and won two Academy Awards.
19. Frida Kahlo’s work “Roots” set the record for a Latin American piece of Art, which emerged in the 1970s, and it sold for $5.6 million.
20. Kahlo had only one major solo exhibition in the United States during her lifetime. During which Julien Levy Gallery, one of New York’s few galleries at the time, hosted the 15-day exhibition which included Kahlo’s Fulang-Chang, and I a MoMA curator wrote.
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