Frida Kahlo: Painting Through the Pain
An iron handrail pierced a teenage girl's body on a Mexico City street — and out of that wreckage came one of the most searingly honest artists of the twentieth century.
On 17 September 1925, an eighteen-year-old student named Frida Kahlo boarded a bus home from school. The bus collided with a streetcar, and in the chaos a metal handrail impaled her, entering her hip and exiting through her pelvis. Many aboard died. Kahlo survived, but the accident shattered her spine and leg and left her with pain that would never fully leave her; over her lifetime she endured thirty-two surgeries, and in 1954 her right leg, already weakened by childhood polio, was amputated due to gangrene.
Before the crash, Kahlo had been a promising student at Mexico City's National Preparatory School, drawn toward medicine. She had also enjoyed drawing since childhood, filling notebooks with sketches. Bedridden for three months after the accident, she turned to painting almost by necessity. Her mother had a special easel built so she could paint lying down, her father lent her his oil paints, and a mirror was fixed above her bed so she could study her own reflection. 'I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best,' she later explained. Her first self-portrait, in 1926, marked the beginning of a body of work built almost entirely from her own image and experience.
It was only in 1925, after the accident, that Kahlo began working outside of school to help support her family — briefly as a stenographer, and then as a paid engraving apprentice under the printmaker Fernando Fernández, a friend of her father, who was impressed by her talent. Yet it was the accident and its long, isolating recovery that pushed her fully toward art, and toward a desire, as she put it, 'to begin again, painting things just as I saw them with my own eyes and nothing more.'
Her early paintings — portraits of herself, her sisters, and classmates — drew on European influences: Renaissance masters like Botticelli and Bronzino, and modern movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit and Cubism. That changed after 1929, when she married the muralist Diego Rivera and moved with him to Cuernavaca. There, she absorbed the color and symbolism of Mexican folk art, blending pre-Columbian and Catholic imagery into a naïve, deeply personal style.
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