10 lessons from Frida Kahlo that the world needs more than ever before
Despite having been dead for nearly 70 years now, Frida Kahlo’s words still resonate.
Born in Mexico City’s Coyoacán borough in 1907, Kahlo contracted polio at age six years. She was bedridden for nine months, leaving her right foot to grow thinner than the left and causing a limp—hence her frequently adorning long skirts that covered her legs.
A brutal bus accident at age 18 resulted in several fractures and a lifetime of health-related complications. Between the time of the accident and her death in 1954, Kahlo underwent over 30 surgical procedures. In the last years of her life, following a failed bone graft surgery for her spinal issues that caused gangrene, Kahlo had her leg amputated. Only a year later, at 47, she died.
What was a profound set of medical misfortunes became the source of her artistic work, from painting to sketching and drawing over 200 pieces. Out of 143 paintings, 55 were self-portraits. Kahlo used her art to explore themes of reconciling with her physical pain, the suffering she felt as well as the resilience she had—so much so that her boot for her prosthetic leg was also a canvas. On her iconic red boots, she painted Chinese designs.
“Even [her] prosthetic leg is a work of art,” the New York Post noted of her 2019 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum titled “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” which included her prosthetic leg.
Painting was a medium of solace for Kahlo, who was often bedridden while always wearing a plaster corset body cast to supplement her lack of spinal support. This was most strongly depicted in her self-portrait titled “The Broken Column,” where Kahlo is depicted nearly naked, her torso split down the middle with a broken decorative column for a spine. Additionally, her skin is dotted with nails while she wears her surgical brace.
Her iconic influence went beyond her paintings. For many, she would become a luminary in Mexican culture, not to mention her unwavering artistic commitment to female pain and strength that resonated with the masses, undoubtedly blazing a path for future disabled, queer and women artists. Posthumously, her beauty—the infamous unibrow, braided up-do with flower crowns—also cemented her as an iconic figure in art history.
In her romantic life, Kahlo was strongly tied to Diego Rivera, also a Mexican painter and muralist. And although their love life was tumultuous, the couple eventually divorcing and remarrying, Kahlo was also bisexual and had colorful relations with other women, including singer Chavela Vargas and Josephine Baker.
Like many public figures, despite her acclaim, Kahlo did not go without criticism. While many of garments she wore were usually worn by Tehuana women from the Oaxacan region of Mexico, only her mother had indigenous Mexican heritage. Even then, Kahlo was criticized because she herself was from Mexico City, nearly 300 miles away from Oaxaca.
However, scholars like Alberto McKelligan Hernández, an assistant professor of art history at Portland State University, explained in a 2022 Oregon Public Broadcasting radio show that Kahlo was one of several artists using Tehuana garments to honor the region’s unique matriarchal and female-driven culture.
“There was this idea of how the Tehuana embodied everything that was powerful, important, even magical or mystical about traditional Mexican culture,” Hernández said on the show.
Above all, during the last ten years of her life, Kahlo journaled in her diary, leaving behind an intimate perspective into her experiences of pain, joy, depression, hope and love. In honor of her birthday tomorrow, here are ten crucial quotes from Kahlo—translated into English—that remain powerful even today.