Inspirational Quotes by Frida Kahlo (Mexican Painter)

Frida Kahlo (1907–54,) fully Frida Kahlo de Rivera, originally Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, is the most famous and influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century. She is best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that were influenced by Mexican primitive art. She is often identified as a European Surrealist, even though she denied the association. Kahlo was also known for her tumultuous relationship with the painter and muralist Diego Rivera.

Born in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, Kahlo was the daughter of a Jewish-German immigrant photographer and a Catholic Indian-Spanish mother. A severe road collision at the age of 15 destroyed her dreams of becoming a doctor. During her convalescence, she started painting and sent her artwork to Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1928; it was a colorful but tortured marriage. They divorced (1939) but ultimately remarried (1940.)

Kahlo’s art was usually directly autobiographical—many of her pictures are striking self-portraits characterized by vivid imagery. Pain and women’s suffering are recurring themes in her surrealistic and often shocking pictures. She and Rivera mixed in a well-known circle of artists, photographers, and politically controversial figures, including Leon Trotsky.

Kahlo had successful exhibitions in Paris and New York in 1938 and 1939, but her husband overshadowed her during her lifetime. In 1940, she joined the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City, and in 1946 won a prize at the Annual National Exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts. Her house in Coyoacán became the Frida Kahlo Museum in 1958.

Martha Zamora wrote Frida Kahlo: Brush of Anguish (1990.) Art historian Hayden Herrera’s bestselling Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983) was made into the biographical drama film 2002 starring Salma Hayek as Kahlo.

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