Frida Kahlo By: Jim Lane The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo 68"x68" oil on canvas, 1939 Museo del Arte Moderno, Instituto National de Bellas Artes, Mexico City Click on picture for more of Frida's work.

The surrealist movement of the 1920s was mostly a male oriented phenomena. Names like Salvadore Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Joan Miro were exploring the male psyche and the only feminine elements were sexual in nature as related to Freudian oedipal feelings and the liberation of the male imagination. Any women displaying in Surrealist exhibitions were usually those romantically involved with the men in the group. Women like Lenora Carrington, who painted eerie dreamlike self-portraits regarding her May-December relationship with Max Ernst, were at best peripheral to the movement--an interesting side show to their male counterparts.

One who was NOT was Frida Kahlo. Born in 1910 near Mexico City, a nearly fatal trolley accident when she was fifteen destined her to a crippled life of almost constant pain. In 1929, at the age of 18, she married Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whom she later called her "second accident." It was a stormy marriage. They were divorced, married again, and finally divorced again in 1939. However unlike the painting wives and lovers of many famous artists, she was in no way a shadow of her husband, who was not, after all, a Surrealist. Her work stands beside the best the Surrealists had to offer, her style distinctive, her paintings as powerful and personal as any Freudian nightmare of Dali or Andre Masson. In spite of this, Kahlo never embraced the Surrealist label, claiming to be painting not dreams, but her own reality.

While waiting for the final papers making official her second divorce, Frida Kahlo painted her most famous work, a vivid exploration of the reality of her painful existence. It's a double self-portrait, The Two Fridas, painted in 1939 for a Mexican Surrealist Exhibition. The painting pictures one Frida, dressed in a Victorian white gown representing her German heritage, holding the hand of the other Frida in traditional Mexican dress. (Her mother was Mexican.) In both figures, her heart is exposed and her circulatory systems are intertwined. An artery begins with a cameo of Diego Rivera the Mexican Frida holds, and ends in the lap of the German Frida holding forceps but unable to stem the flow of blood as it stains her pristine skirt. A stormy photographer's backdrop echoes both her father's occupation and her marriage to Rivera.

Kahlo's 1943 painting, Roots (Raices) is a good example of her post-Rivera work.
Like her earlier work, this too is a self-portrait in a surrealist mode, not in the sense of making the unreal appear real as might be the case with her male peers in the movement, but in probing that which she was emotionally and drawing it out for herself and the rest of the world to see and understand. Seemingly having resolved her tortured, dual existence, this self-portrait explores the sprouting of the new woman within her, tendrils leading from her heart put down roots in the parched Mexican soil while verdant vines splay out from her inner being, reaching maturity, in search of light, life, and emotional well-being. Shortly after her marriage ended, through Rivera, she met Andre Breton, the French writer who founded the Surrealist Movement, and who later adopted her as one of his own. He was instrumental in arranging shows for her in New York and Paris. She died in 1954. Today she is regarded as the preeminent female painter in Mexican art history.

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowledgable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for almost 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html