recorridosvirtuales.com opened Frida Kahlo – Casa Azul Museum Tour on website. You may travel inside the home with all Frida’s paintings and decors.
Let’s take a quick look at Frida Kahlo’s life:
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954), Mexican painter.
She was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, south of Mexico City. Although she was born on July 6, 1907, she declared his birth date as July 7, 1910, when the Mexican revolution took place, and wanted her life to begin with the birth of modern Mexico.
As a result of his polio, when she was six years old, one leg was disabled and she was called “Wooden Leg Frida”. Knowing how to cope with this disability, Frida studied at the National Preparatory School, which provided the best education of the period in her teenage maidenhood.
This school led him to fields such as art, literature and philosophy. Alejandro Gomez Arias, Jose Gomez Robleda, Alfonso Villa, who will be referred to as important names of Mexican think life, became schoolmates. She joined an anarchist literary group at school; began to build a strong personality. A traffic accident she had at the age of 18 changed his whole life.
On September 17, 1925 on the way back home from school, a bus crashed with a tram, and many people died, and one of the iron bars of the tram entered through the left hip of Frida and left the pelvis. After the accident, all life will pass between corsets, hospitals and doctors; her spine and right leg will live with an unrestrained pain, it will be operated 32 times, and his right leg, which is disabled due to polio, will be cut in gangrene in 1954.
Kahlo, who left the hospital one month after the accident, started painting to escape from boredom and pain with the encouragement of her family. She made self-portraits by looking in the mirror on the ceiling of her bed. Her first self-portrait is “Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress” (1926).
Kahlo, who started walking at the end of 1927, started to get closer to art and politics in this period. She met with Cuban leader Julio Antonio Mella and photographer Tina Modotti and became close friends. Together, they began to participate in the invitations of the artists of the period, and the discussions of the socialists. Kahlo became a member of the Mexican Communist Party in 1929.
Continuing to paint, Kahlo met and renowned the famous painter Diego Rivera, known as Mexican Michalangelo, through her friend Tina Modotti. Two painters, who had a romantic relationship between them, got married on August 21, 1929. Frida became Rivera’s third wife. Their marriage was compared to “the marriage of an elephant and a pigeon”.
The artist made his second self-portrait in the year of his marriage (Eser was bought in 2000 by an American collector for 5 million USD [5]). The same year, Frida Kahlo left the party after Rivera was expelled from the Communist Party.
She went to the USA with his wife in 1930 and lived there with his wife until she finished the wall painting orders that Rivera received in 1933. Based on a wedding photo two years after their marriage, she made his painting “Frieda and Diego Rivera” (1931). This work, which was exhibited in the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Women Painters, was her first painting in an exhibition.
The couple had a tumultuous marriage life. Frida, who took a child due to health problems and made two miscarriages, left her in 1939 due to her husband’s infidelity, but they remarried after 1 year and settled in “Blue House” where Frida spent her childhood.
Frida also had relationships with various men during their marriage. One of them was Lev Trotsky, one of the leading figures of the Russian revolution. Trotsky came to Mexico in 1937 with the special permission of Rivera from the President of Mexico and settled in Frida’s house.
When Trotsky’s husband realized the relationship between them, Frida left Trotsky. After questioning the assassin painter Siqueiros after the assassination to Trotsky, Frida found it appropriate to leave Mexico for a while; At that time she went to his ex-wife Rivera in San Francisco and the couple remarried there.
Frida, whose health often deteriorates, painted with all his might to deal with unbearable pain; He has exhibited not only in his country but also in America and France. The exhibition she opened in New York in 1938 brought him great fame, and she was praised for his Paris exhibition in 1939.
Frida, who started teaching at a new art school called La Esmeralda in 1943, continued to teach for ten years despite her poor health. She was teaching at home because she couldn’t go to Mexico City because of his health conditions. His students were called “Los Fridos” (Frida students).
In 1948 she applied again to join the Communist Party of Mexico and his application was accepted. In 1950 she was hospitalized due to problems in his backbone and stayed in the hospital for 9 months. She opened a solo exhibition in Mexico City in April 1953; In July, his right leg was cut.
When Frida Kahlo breathed her last breath on July 13, 1954 with the diagnosis of lung embolism; the last painting she left behind; It was a still life called Long Live. Her funeral was burned the next day. Her ashes are kept in the Blue House. The Blue House was donated to the state by Rivera in 1955.
Frida Kahlo has 143 paintings; 55 of them are self-portraits. She has always drawn self-portraits because she spent most of his life looking in a mirror on his bed, which she described as “hangman of day and night”. Even the mastery of his paintings made Pablo Picasso say, “We don’t know how to draw human faces like him.”
Frida, who always keeps pets, has two portraits of the animals she feeds: “I and My Parrots” in 1941 and “Self-Portrait with Monkeys” in 1943. Although her paintings were considered “surrealist”, she refused surrealism. His paintings actually reflected painful and precise reality. In the paintings of Frida, Mexican culture and revolutionary national identity were transferred to the canvas.
Kahlo opened an exhibition in New York in 1938 with the support of friend Andre Breton, one of the leading names in the surrealist painting, and this exhibition brought him international fame. She sold his 4 paintings to the famous actor Edward G. Robinson and made his first big sale, half of his paintings were sold.
Upon this success, she opened an exhibition in Paris in 1939. Although she wasn’t sold very officially in the Paris exhibition, his works received great attention; She won the praise of artists like Picasso and Kandinsky; The Louvre Museum bought the artist’s painting called ‘The Frame’.
The artist opened his first solo exhibition in his country at his gallery in Mexico in 1953. Her doctor was taken to the opening of the exhibition in her cot because she forbade her to get out of bed.
If you already travel “Frida Kahlo – Casa Azul Museum Tour”, You want to learn more by watching the movie “Frida” or reading her biographies.