Surrealism and Mexico Frida Kahlo

Grimberg, Salomon. "Frida Kahlo, The Self as an End" in Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, edited by Whitney Chadwick Explored in the book: issues of identity through self-representation.

Foreword: "Women artists associated with the Surrealist movement during the 1930's and 1940's produced a body of self-portraits that are unique in twentieth- century modernism and have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male Surrealists rooted the disruptive and creative potential of erotic desire in the masculine libido and exalted woman as muse in fetishized images that celebrate her as Other, women artists turned to their own reality. They located the sources of Surrealism's disruption of rational boundaries within their own subjectivity, and gave it concrete form in works that explore the female body as a site of conflicting desires and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions."
These artists explored: constructions of gender, sexuality, nature and culture.

Some strategies: Displacement, doubling, fragmentation, and fetishizing the body or its parts.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Rejected the label Surrealist. However, her works display many of the elements present in Surrealist works, such as the juxtaposition and/or fusing of opposites or opposing forces, fragmentation, mythical elements and portrayal of the inner/psychological world.

1) What do you know already about Frida? (ancestry, cultural heritage, childhood)

2) What kinds of physical trauma did she suffer in her life? (accident with streetcar)

3) What do you know about her relationship with Diego Rivera? (marriage, adultery, miscarriages, divorce, remarriage)

4) What new information did you learn from the article about Frida's relationship with her mother? What influence did nannies play in her childhood?

5) What new information did you learn about her relationship with Diego Rivera?

6) In what ways do these physical and psychological events/experiences manifest in her work? Give examples.

7) Which of the following pieces to you like the most? Please note its title, year and medium here, and explain some of the imagery that you find striking. How do you interpret it?