Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on July 6, 2010

The birthday of legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) is honored today on Google’s homepage. The logo on the search engine’s home page captures the folk art-surreal style of the controversial artist who has become a cult figure. Today is her 103rd birthday.

Biography from FridaKahlo.com:

From 1926 until her death, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life. Kahlo was one of four daughters born to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán.

She did not originally plan to become an artist. A polio survivor, at 15 Kahlo entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. However, this training ended three years later when Kahlo was gravely hurt in a bus accident. She spent over a year in bed, recovering from fractures of her back, collarbone, and ribs, as well as a shattered pelvis and shoulder and foot injuries. Despite more than 30 subsequent operations, Kahlo spent the rest of her life in constant pain, finally succumbing to related complications at age 47.

During her convalescence Kahlo had begun to paint with oils. Her pictures, mostly self-portraits and still lifes, were deliberately naive, filled with the bright colors and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she loved. At 21, Kahlo fell in love with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose approach to art and politics suited her own. Although he was 20 years her senior, they were married in 1929; this stormy, passionate relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of Rivera’s career, a divorce and remarriage, and Kahlo’s poor health. The couple traveled to the United States and France, where Kahlo met luminaries from the worlds of art and politics; she had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938. Kahlo enjoyed considerable success during the 1940s, but her reputation soared posthumously, beginning in the 1980s with the publication of numerous books about her work by feminist art historians and others. In the last two decades an explosion of Kahlo-inspired films, plays, calendars, and jewelry has transformed the artist into a veritable cult figure.

Actress Salma Hayek was cast in the title role in the 2002 film about Frida Kahlo’s life. The video below contains movie clips and an interview with Hayek about the making of the film “Frida.”

Salma Hayek in 2002 – “Frida” Interview

Synopsis of film “Frida” from IMDb.com:

“Frida” chronicles the life Frida Kahlo shared unflinchingly and openly with Diego Rivera, as the young couple took the art world by storm. From her complex and enduring relationship with her mentor and husband to her illicit and controversial affair with Leon Trotsky, to her provocative and romantic entanglements with women, Frida Kahlo lived a bold and uncompromising life as a political, artistic, and sexual revolutionary.

From AOL News:

Though art lovers may have figured out what’s going on with Google’s doodle this morning, non-connoisseurs could be left in the dark. The doodle (Google’s word for the rendering of its name on its homepage) today is a tribute to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who was born on July 6, 1907.

Kahlo’s biography was the stuff of Hollywood. She began painting in 1926, after a bus accident resulted in a broken spine, leg, collarbone, ribs and pelvis. While bedridden for a year, Kahlo picked up a paint brush to stave off boredom. From then until her death in 1954, she painted 200 works, many of them self-portraits that proudly displayed her feminine mustache and abundant eyebrows.

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