Frida Kahlo by Dr Gail-Nina Anderson

Since her 'rediscovery' via the feminist art history of the 1980's Kahlo's paintings, life and image have become increasingly familiar but continue to repay closer examination.

Kahlo’s painting “Self-portrait with a Thorn Necklace” provides a title that could stand as a description for the artist’s career. She was an unlikely mixture, a well-educated middle-class girl from Mexico City who identified with indigenous traditions of folk art and native culture. Her ardent personality overcame illness and a crippling accident and she emerged as a unique and unclassifiable painter whose main subject-matter was herself. From a series of hypnotic, emblematic self-portraits her intense gaze has become iconic, the Mona Lisa of Mexican art. Along with her husband Diego Rivera she moved within avant-garde circles, associating at one point with the Surrealists, but her work remained direct and compelling in its capacity to communicate her inner life.

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