Huiqi Pan

Her iconic brows and portraits are on items such as shirts, magnets, mugs, and tote bags. Frida Kahlo knocked down all societal norms placed upon females, even today, and will go down as one of the most influential surrealistic artist in history. She inspires the current feminist movements birth and teaches us that “taboo subjects” such as miscarriages, abortions, sexuality and divorces should not be hidden.

Mexican artist Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, known as Frida Kahlo, was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocán, Mexico City, Mexico. When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted poliomyelitis disease which meant that her body would become very fragile. She even enrolled in premedical studies to understand the human body better.

In 1925, at the age of eighteen, Kahlo was robbed of her health and dream of entering medical school when an electric train crashed into the brightly drawn bus which was suppose to take her home to Coyoacán. The accident killed many people instantly and in her case, an iron rod protruded from one side of her pelvis to the other side.

On her road to recovery, many doctors predicted that she would not make it. As she was confined in bed, she began to paint many self portraits and it was during this long recovery that she improved her art. Since she was always with herself, she delved deeper into her own looks and even hung a mirror overhead in the canopy of her bed.

Also, she had to endure more than 30 surgeries to help regain her movement and spent her life after that in pain. One of her most famous paintings about her struggles is Broken Column (1940) which consist of her bare body with a cut-out where we are able to see her steel corset that helps support her spine. Nails pierce all throughout her body while streams of tears run down her face. These surgeries led to several miscarriages and abortions since her pelvis was unable to carry a child.

Abortion and miscarriages were very taboo subjects at the time but society never stopped Kahlo from painting her pain. She continued to express herself, taboo or not, and engaged in sexual relations with both men and women. She also once dressed in men’s clothing and even cut her hair “like a man” and painted her experience. She loved to drink, smoke and speak countless profanities. Ideas of what a female was suppose to look like did not faze her.

Another reason she is iconic even today is her fight for all past, present and future feminine beauty ideals. In all of her self-portraits, many can recognize her as the women with the unibrow and faint mustache. Her response to others telling her to shave them off would be to darken those hairs to prove them wrong.

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) portrays her beauty and pain. As Kahlo stares directly at you in the painting, the artist wears Christ’s unraveled crown of thorns that cuts into the flesh of her neck. This can show her enduring the pain from her failed marriage to Diego Rivera whom she divorced but remarried a year later.

The dead hummingbird is symbolic for falling in love in Mexican folkloric tradition which is a lucky charm, a black cat, symbolic for bad luck, and her spider monkey Fulang Chang gifted from Rivera, symbolic for evil.

Blogger of Solidarity US, Meadows writes, “Her art deals with conception, pregnancy, abortion and gender roles in an unusually frank and open manner, thus making them political statements because women have not generally felt free to address such personal subjects so publicly.” Frida Kahlo went on to become an icon and influence for the feminist movement. Frida Kahlo shows us that taboo subjects from women’s periods to abortion rights should not be embarrassing topics but to be discussed loud and clear today and to be taken on head on. She knew who she was and what she wanted. She was unafraid to embrace herself and everything about the female body.