Table Of ContentFrida Kahlo
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of
the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher
or architect in question and relates it to their major works.
In the same series
Georges Bataille Stuart Kendall• Charles Baudelaire Rosemary Lloyd• Simone de
Beauvoir Ursula Tidd• Samuel Beckett Andrew Gibson• Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie
John Berger Andy Merrifield• Jorge Luis Borges Jason Wilson• Constantin Brancusi
Sanda Miller• Charles Bukowski David Stephen Calonne• William S. Burroughs
Phil Baker • John Cage Rob Haskins• Fidel Castro Nick Caistor• Coco Chanel Linda
Simon• Noam Chomsky Wolfgang B. Sperlich• Jean Cocteau James S. Williams
Salvador Dalí Mary Ann Caws• Guy Debord Andy Merrifield• Claude Debussy David J.
Code• Fyodr Dostoevsky Robert Bird• Marcel Duchamp Caroline Cros• Sergei Eisenstein
Mike O’Mahony •Michel Foucault David Macey• Mahatma Gandhi Douglas Allen
Jean Genet Stephen Barber• Allen Ginsberg Steve Finbow• Derek Jarman Michael
Charlesworth• Alfred Jarry Jill Fell• James Joyce Andrew Gibson• Franz Kafka
Sander L. Gilman• Frida Kahlo Gannit Ankori• Lenin Lars T. Lih• Stéphane Mallarmé
Roger Pearson • Gabriel García Márquez Stephen M. Hart• Karl Marx Paul Thomas
Edweard Muybridge Marta Braun• Vladimir Nabokov Barbara Wyllie• Pablo Neruda
Dominic Moran• Octavio Paz Nick Caistor• Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws
Edgar Allan PoeKevin J. Hayes• Ezra Pound Alec Marsh • Marcel Proust Adam Watt
Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak• Erik Satie Mary E. Davis• Arthur Schopenhauer
Peter B. Lewis• Gertrude Stein Lucy Daniel• Richard Wagner Raymond Furness
Simone Weil Palle Yourgrau• Ludwig Wittgenstein Edward Kanterian• Frank Lloyd
Wright Robert McCarter
Frida Kahlo
Gannit Ankori
reaktion books
For my father, Zvi, and my mother, Ora, who took me to Mexico when I was a
little girl and taught me to passionately embrace love, life and art.
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Gannit Ankori2013
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 198 3
Contents
Introduction: The Artist as Mythmaker;
Fissured Tales of Artand Life 7
1 Family Tree: ‘My Grandparents, My Parents and I’ 21
2 Childhood Traumas: The Broken Body, the Doubled Self 44
3 On the Cusp of Womanhood 58
4 Coming of Age 68
5 ‘The Lost Desire’: Relinquishing Maternity 86
6 ‘Double Sorrow’: Losing and Finding Love 99
7 ‘Where is the “I”?’: Losing and Finding her Selves 124
8 ‘Everything is All and One’: Losing and Finding Faith 137
9 ‘I am the Disintegration’: The Waning of Life 150
10 Ofher Time; Ahead of her Time 162
Postscript: Frida Kahlo’s Art, Life and Legacy 187
References 194
Select Bibliography 233
Acknowledgements 237
Photo Acknowledgements 240
Frida Kahlo in San Francisco, photo by Peter Juley, 1931.
Introduction: The Artist as
Mythmaker; Fissured Tales
of Art and Life
Who knows anything of life?
Frida Kahlo1
In a series of interviews that Frida Kahlo dictated to Olga
Campos in the autumn of 1950, the tired and disillusioned
artist professed:
I do not like to influence others.
I would not like to become famous.
I have done nothing deserving of acknowledgment in my life.2
When Kahlo made this statement she had already produced virtu-
ally all the iconic paintings for which she is well known – indeed,
venerated – today.
Ten years earlier, when still in her prime, Kahlo had expressed
a comparable sense of worthlessness in a heart-rending letter to
her then estranged husband, Diego Rivera. In a brutally self-critical
epistle, she offered a succinct summary of her life as a series of
personal and professional disappointments and utter failures:
The conclusion I’ve drawn is that all I’ve done is fail. When
I was a little girl I wanted to be a doctor and a bus squashed
me. I live with you for ten years without doing anything in
short but causing you problems and annoying you. I began
7
to paint and my painting is useless but for me and for you
to buy it, knowing that no one else will . . . 3
Given Kahlo’s immense posthumous influence, the cult-like adulation
and critical acclaim she inspires, and the current insatiable and
passionate demand for her (by now priceless) paintings, such
negative self-assessments regarding her own accomplishments
ring not merely incorrect, but also ironic and tragic.
The chasm that separates our contemporary admiration and
high regard for Kahlo and her achievements from the artist’s own
scathing self-denigration is but one of numerous gaps and contra-
dictions that riddle the story –indeed stories –of Frida Kahlo.
This book is informed by the acute realization of the existence
and persistence of such discrepancies.
There is an important distinction, as well as a strong reciprocal
relationship, between Frida Kahlo’s art and her life. For those who
are fascinated by the dramatic highlights of her biography – a
near-fatal bus accident at the age of eighteen; a stormy, on-again
off-again relationship with the celebrity artist Diego Rivera; and
her untimely death, after years of illness, at the age of 47– her art
is merely one of many facets of this woman’s extraordinary existence,
a useful key for understanding the story of her life. For those
who are driven by a desire to decipher the meaning of Kahlo’s
paintings, her biography provides a crucial, though not exclusive,
iconographical key.
The proliferation of biographical (some would say hagiographical)
studies on Kahlo and the bellowing rise of ‘Fridamania’ prompted
the art historian Lynne Cooke to lament that, in the case of Kahlo
(like that of Van Gogh before her), a ‘(con)fusion between the art
and the life’ is likely to continue to dominate both the research
literature and the popular imagination.4The relationship between
Kahlo’s life and her paintings is much more complex, Cooke infers.
Beyond this, a long historical view of the entanglement of Kahlo’s
8
