Heritage

Diary of Frida Kahlo paints portrait of triumph despite pain

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The Diary of Frida Kahlo : An Intimate Self-Portrait with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes and an essay by Susan Lowe in this image dated July 21, 2016. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA

On July 13, the 62nd death anniversary of famed Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo was marked with a showcase of her self-portraits at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Even in death, Frida has managed to inspire a near cultic following.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self Portrait with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes, is an amalgamation of her work as a painter, revolutionary thinker feminist, ardent writer of a private journal but at the time just a woman trying to be different but often dressed in traditional regalia hiding the dissonance she carried in her body.

Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Calderón to a Catholic mother and photographer father of European Jewish descent, Frida lived the first seven years happy as children do until she contracted polio.

Eleven years later, a streetcar crashed into a bus she was in. The accident caused eleven fractures among them her spinal column, collar bone, ribs and pelvis, for which she would have to endure more than 30 surgeries in subsequent years. This left her in chronic pain and later lost her leg to gangrene.

Pain and art

It was during her convalescence after the accident she found her voice in art. Frida’s art was born of pain.

“Frida Kahlo, as no other artist of our tortured century, translated her pain into art.”

Of this Fuentes wonders can pain be shared? Virginia Wolf, another celebrated journal intime great, referred to pain as indescribable. You cannot describe a headache, “for pain destroys a language.” Perhaps this is why Kahlo took to express hers through art.

“Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas...For what she lives she paints.”

Her pain is achieved through a visibly emotional texture in the form of self-portraits which have blood clots, cut veins, broken bones, supportive braces, black tears and blank stares.

The diary is about her journey of transforming her pain and love for Diego Rivera. her husband, into art.

The book contains 55 self-portraits, a third of her more than one hundred paintings.

Socrates was famous for his ugliness. Kahlo on the other hand, her beauty. This is the irony. Kahlo took to painstakingly work her public image, of elaborate dressing and maintain an aura of star quality as seen in most of the curated works.

However, her focus on beauty was more than skin deep. It was a beauty that referenced introspection, truth and deep self knowledge. “Only beauty has the privilege of looking at the soul without being blinded.” This was Kahlo’s privilege as underscored in the introduction by renowned Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, who saw her once at a theatre.

Fuentes gives a great historical and contextual introduction of Mexican art. The first two lines set the tempo and then morphs into a combination of intellectualism, observation and history of Mexico, South America and Mexico, it’s cultural place in the world and how Kahlo fit into it all. There’s the mention of Kahlo meeting Picasso in Paris in 1939.

Her injuries didn’t stop her travel, cross-continental gallery showcasing and teaching art to a few dedicated students.

Frida’s diary shows her fantastic imagination as well as surrealist art. Her humour streak, tumultuous love affair with Diego Rivera, whom she was married to but divorced in 1939 and later remarried to the year after. She describes their relationship as an “accident”.

Her self-reflections, in the day before selfies show humans have a need to craft the way the world see them. She is well known and celebrated for that.

Sarah Lowe who also writes an essay about Kahlo’s diary as ‘journal in time’, how does such a body of work change once published? “Her journal is a deeply private expression of her feelings”. There is shock value, immediacy and represent an artist unmasked.

With a timeless appeal, inspiration for generations, Kahlo’s body of work continues to draw admiration and commentary decades after her paint brush strokes went dry.