Frida Kahlo’s family tree

Frida Kahlo was an artist born in Mexico in 1907. In 1925, she was seriously injured in a bus collision where a steel handrail went into her hip and came out the other side. Her raw self portraits often depicted a hurting Kahlo. However, her painting tilted My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, on display at the Museum of Modern Art, does not.

This painting features a young Kahlo holding a red ribbon that encompasses, as the title suggests, her father and mother, as well as their own parents. Young Kahlo is standing in her family home, the “Blue House,” among water, mountains, and cacti in the desert. Her paternal grandparents’ portraits lie over the ocean, presumably because her father was born in Germany. Her maternal grandparents’ sit atop mountains in the Mexican landscape. The setting for My Grandparents represents home, far and away, for Kahlo.

Symbols of birth lay on the maternal side of the painting. For example, a fetus lays over her mother’s stomach. Underneath this, fertilization is about to occur as the sperm reaches the egg. Similarly, the flower next to the egg seems to be ejecting pollen, as little cacti lay behind it. I believe Kahlo is depicting herself as a fetus in her mother’s womb, while also remembering her ancestors.

One can easily point out the genetic similarities between Kahlo and her ancestors. Quite obviously, you see Kahlo’s distinctive unibrow that seems to have come from her paternal grandmother. It is also worth noting that her mother and father are dressed in wedding clothes. The colors in this painting are very earthy in the landscape, while Kahlo ensured to maintain the bright color of the house and her mother’s wedding dress. The red ribbon also stands out from the landscape colors.

The focus on childhood in this piece is reminiscent of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that helped shape the Modernism era. Essentially, the treatment Frida received from her parents shaped who she became as an adult. Accordingly, the people her parents became were shaped by those that raised them, and so on. This consciousness of the self is vital in modernism and can be evidently seen in Kahlo’s painting.

Frida Kahlo was an important female artist at a time when the work of her artist husband, Diego Rivera, overshadowed much of her own work. Her many self-portraits are so fraught with hurt that it is hard not to imagine the physical pain she endured for much of her life. Yet, the perseverance she embodied by continuing her artwork is an inspiration. I have seen this painting once before, so when I found out the MoMA had a work of Kahlo’s, I set out to find it. It took me two tries around the fifth floor galleries to find this small painting. Set next to Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, Kahlo’s work remains a beautiful rendition of her family tree that fully encapsulates the beginning of her life.