Appreciating Frida Kahlo

Tequila Sunset. by Frida Kahlo.  c. 1947.

It was said of Frida Kahlo that "Only her hairdresser knows for sure." From an obscure pueblo on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania she rose to such artistic prominence that millions of followers took up the study of caterpillars -- the better to understand and appreciate her brilliance.

As a child she showed preternatural talent in drawing and ice cream sculpting. Her parents, though making do with only ten pesos a day from the sale of sock monkeys, determined that she should enter the best art school in Mexico -- the Prado Nacional de Museo el Nuestra. And so she did. She entered at the age of fourteen, looked around, and then came back out to go home again. It was a life changing experience for Kahlo. From then on she eschewed her childish work in ice cream and began working in the more stable masa harina. 

She moved to Paris in the 1920's to study the works of Matisse, Picasso, and John Phillip Sousa. Her lovers were legion; not that she was ever content to play the role of a demure mistress to a macho male personality. Her tempestuous affair with Marcel Marceau became the basis for the Anthony Hopkins film "The Silence of the Limbs." 

Her still lives, and her stiller portraits, breathe an air of exotic color and contempt for conformity that made her the subject of controversy everywhere but Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro her work was displayed in all the major post offices until as recently as 2015. 

When she moved in with the muralist Diego Rivera they created a series of tapestries that won the coveted Prix Styx for seven years running -- after that they got tired of running and settled down in a semi-ruined castle in Catalonia to explore the possibilities of jellied borax and Kleenex. It was not a successful experiment, and Kahlo soon left Rivera for her own studio in Oaxaca. 

After painting an astonishing series of landscapes that critics have compared to the best of P.G. Wodehouse, she grew increasingly weary of public adulation and finally retired to a KFC franchise in the foot hills of Canarsie -- where she passed away peacefully of marthambles in 1966.