In the history of human art, there is such an artist - she has been plagued by illness since she was a child, and when she is about to enter a new chapter of life, she has a sudden accident, causing physical trauma that will accompany pain all her life, but in the face of such a huge pain, the flower of art in her heart finally began to bloom.
She is the famous Mexican female painter Frida Kahlo.
Frida is one of the few painters known for her self-portraits and is recognized as a representative of the 20th-century Mexican avant-garde and modern women artists. Frida's self-portrait makes her famous because of her bumpy and tenacious life experience.
- 《Self-portrait》 Cloth oil painting 65 x 54 cm 1930
Experience in pain
Frida Caro was born in Mexico City in 1907. She contracted polio when she was 6 years old, and since then she has had limited mobility and has been injured by physical injuries as she grows.
Despite the pain of illness in her youth, Frida was a tomboy who was not afraid of heaven and earth, and her cheerful personality and her father's enlightened education made her enter Preparatoria in 1922, becoming one of the first women in Mexico to begin her education.
But the good times were short-lived.
Frida was 18 years old and had the biggest accident of her life: her spine was broken into three pieces, her cervical vertebrae were broken, her right leg was severely fractured, and one foot was crushed. A metal armrest penetrated her abdomen and penetrated her pussy. The accident left her infertile and accompanied her with pain for the rest of her life.
It took her a long time to face it all, and she later portrayed the accident that had infertilized her in typical black humor.
In 1926, during her recovery from illness, she painted her first self-portrait, and since then she has begun to record herself and her life and emotions in painting, and has also begun her artistic path that is destined to be extraordinary.
●Self-portrait in velvet clothes, 79 x 58 cm, 1926
Awakening in art
In 1928, Frida's encounter with Rivera, whose marriage had just broken down, brought pain in addition to love and marriage. She later said: "I have experienced two unexpected fatal blows in my life, one when I knocked down my street car and once when I met Rivera. ”
In 1930, the Rivera couple came to the United States, first to Los Angeles and then to New York to hold a Rivera retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art. At that time Frida was only seen as a charming foil for a great painter, but the situation soon changed.
In 1932, Rivera was commissioned to create murals for the Detroit Museum, during which time Frida miscarried. While recuperating, Frida painted The Abortion of Detroit, the first true and perceptive self-portrait.
●The Abortion of Detroit, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 38 cm, 1932
The artistic style she developed from then on was completely different from that of her husband, drawing mainly from Mexican folk art and small altarpieces, which Rivera expressed understanding and respect.
Since then, Frida has embarked on a series of art forms that have never been seen in history, which solemnly express the true, realistic, cruel and painful qualities of women. No one has ever written such a painful poem on the canvas of an oil painting as Frida did before.
Me and My Parrot, oil on canvas, 82 x 62.8 cm, 1941
She underwent at least 32 major and minor surgeries and spent an entire year lying in bed motionless. During this time, she wore a corset made of leather, plaster and steel wire that supported her spine.
When her life was bleak to the extreme, she found comfort in her artistic creation. She wrote: "My paintings are the most frank expression of myself. ”
●"Two Fridas", oil on canvas, 173.5 x 173 cm, 1939
The painting was created shortly after a heartbroken Frida divorced her husband, when she drank heavily out of despair, adding to her already weak body.
After experiencing various moods in the marriage change, she must re-learn independence before she holds the paintbrush to analyze her innerly divided self: the two Fridas are connected by blood and are part of themselves.
One of them, dressed in traditional Mexican aboriginal costumes, is the love of Rivera, the source of her love and life. Another Frida in a European-style dress has lost her love, a part of herself, and this abandoned European Frida is likely to bleed to death.
Ominous clouds hung over the two Frida Carols, a cold painting that described the warmest love and tribulations of her life.
After learning of her husband's affair with her sister, Frida Kahlo created a series of self-portraits.
Reflections on Death, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 37 cm, 1943
●Self-Portrait with a Necklace of Thorns and a BeeBird, oil on canvas 63.5 x 49.5 cm, 1940
●Self-Portrait with a Monkey, oil on canvas 40.6 x 30.5 cm, 1938
These two Self-Portraits with Monkeys feature Typical of Frida's Self-Portraits: intense coloring, the costumes and backgrounds of the characters are full of Mexican atmosphere.
Although the monkey is a symbol of desire in Mexican mythology, it is a gentle and spiritual animal in Carol's eyes; The person in the painting has plump lips and eyebrows like gulls, and his eyes seem to be somewhat sharp.
Through the spirituality, desire and sharpness of this work, it is conceived how Frida can see herself keenly and almost cruelly in the process of painting, looking at herself in the painting.
●Self-Portrait with Flowers, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 40 cm, 1940
Frida's expressive approach echoes the tradition of Mexican visual art, using symbolic symbols to hint at the subject matter of her work, subtly applying the sense of flat decoration to realistic painting, creating an artistic outlook with both personal temperament and regional characteristics.
When the audience understands Mexican culture and appreciates her works, they will be moved by the true feeling in the works. The pursuit and identification of cultural identity symbols, especially the inheritance and transmission of local and national spirits, is the primary feature of Frida's works.
Frida and feminism
Frida's works use a special perspective of women to carry out personal imagination and self-portraiture, sincerely and boldly expressing her political views and inner feelings in the works.
She painted many portraits of herself, which are her own analysis of herself, but also a portrayal of her life course, in which there are some feminine content, sensitive, vulnerable, hurt, beautiful, etc., showing the thinking of being a woman and the repressed spiritual world.
And in Frida's married life, divorce, remarriage, re-divorce, love-hate feelings caused great harm to her deep inside, Frida Kahlo expressed her independent spirit and resistance through unique body language.
Frida's paintings, political activities, and private life have left a deep impression on future generations, and in her works, she expresses her thinking as a woman about marriage, childbirth, politics, society, family and other issues.
What she is writing about is not only the physical and psychological concern for women, but also the desire to get more people's thinking and attention to the value of women.
Art Market
Diego y yo, oil on canvas, 29.5 x 22.4 cm, 1949
In November, Sotheby's plans to sell Frida Kahlo's self-portrait "Diego y yo" at an evening art auction in New York, which is expected to sell for $30 million and could break this fall's auction record.
In 2016, one of Frida Kahlo's paintings sold for $8 million, the artist's highest on record, while the painting, which is about to be sold this year, is expected to sell for three times as much as it was five years ago.
In 2019, Sotheby's New York auctioned a group of photos taken by the lovers of frida, a famous Mexican female painter.
The subjects included three Mexican painters: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias.
The final transaction price of these auctioned photos is about RMB 235,000.
Two Lovers in the Forest, oil on canvas, 25 x 305 cm, 1939
In the 2016 U.S. auction market, Frida Kahlo's painting Two Lovers in the Forest fetched a hefty $8 million, setting an auction record for a Latin American painter and becoming the world's most expensive female artist.
Regarding Frida and her works, in addition to being labeled feminist by later generations, Frida was the first Mexican artist to enter the Louvre, a female painter admired by Picasso, a person printed on Mexican banknotes, a beautiful female painter who was plagued by lifelong illness, a majority, and a female artist with the highest auction price.
In addition to shouldering such a prestigious reputation in European society at the time, artistically, under the tribulations of her painful experiences, she was invited and affirmed as a Surrealist painter and Byre Breton (the father of Surrealist).
Her work has had a great influence on the promotion and expansion of traditional Mexican culture, and she has integrated local culture into her paintings to form her own unique artistic style and painting language, which are the places that can make her live up to her reputation apart from her feminine identity.
Under the tempering of fate, Frida uses her own willpower and unique creativity to make her life bloom with a unique artistic flower, which will always exist in history and live forever.
*Images and materials are from the Internet
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