Frida Kahlo and The Beauty Myth

How artist Frida Kahlo subverted traditional ideas of feminine beauty

Image by Brett Sayles on Pexels

I am straying a little away from 20th century literature today into one of my favourite artists of the modernist period, Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón on 6th July 1907 in the house owned by her parents and known as ‘La Casa Azul’, (‘The Blue House’), in Coyoacan, Mexico.

Though Kahlo displayed artistic skill at a young age, becoming a short-term apprentice of Fernando Fernandez, a local printmaker and family friend, she did not believe art was a viable career, and intended to study medicine.

Plagued by illness and pain throughout her life, Kahlo first suffered polio as a child, and then a devastating bus crash when she was 18 years old, leading to her being bed-bound and in a body cast for several months, and undergoing over 30 operations throughout her lifetime.  Her damaged body is featured within her painting The Broken Column.

During her time within the cast, Kahlo began to paint in earnest, expressing her pain, as well as celebrating her survival through her work.  Life experience became a common theme within her paintings, which defied categorisation.  For a wonderful introduction to her art, this animated version of Kahlo’s paintings is worth a watch.

Kahlo’s painting style has symbolic and surrealist elements, however she refused to be pigeonholed within a particular artistic movement.  She worked mostly in oils, utilising vibrant colours and fusing surrealist elements and symbolism from Mexican folk art, as well as working with themes of pain, death, infertility, depression, and political statements.  During her lifetime, Kahlo produced around 200 paintings, including 55 self-portraits.

Kahlo’s first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet dress in 1926, painted in the 19th century Mexican style and influenced by European Renaissance masters. She went on to create many more, and became famous for causing controversy regarding her choice to portray her moustache and what became known as her unibrow.  Kahlo’s thick unibrow style eyebrows and dark facial hair became part of her personal and artistic style, making a statement through her art on society’s acceptable female and male beauty standards.  Her husband, painter Diego Rivera, encouraged her with this, and these became symbolic within her famous self-portraits. 

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best”.  Frida Kahlo

Kahlo and Rivera, who was 20 years her senior and whom she married, divorced, and remarried, had a somewhat tumultuous relationship, often affected by infidelity on both sides.  One of Kahlo’s self-portraits Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair shows Kahlo dressed in a man’s suit, holding a pair of scissors, her cut hair around her, representing the way she would cut the long hair Rivera loved following one of his affairs.

“I suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down, the other accident was Diego”.  Frida Kahlo

In the age of the selfie and the homogenous examples of female beauty on our screens and in our social media feeds, Kahlo’s conscious choice to display the reality of her femaleness is invigorating.  Within Naomi Wolf’s 1990 The Beauty Myth, Wolf railed against the patriarchal marketing of beauty ideals within society, which made women feel inferior if they did not buy into the beauty products and looks they had been sold.  Kahlo’s work, decades before Wolf’s writing, showed how art could reveal the true beauty of the female form, without the need to remove or otherwise air-brush out the perceived ‘imperfections’.

Various campaigns have been set up in recent years showing celebrities and other social media users posing for selfies without makeup.  But reports continue to show that sites like Instagram have been shown to negatively affect the body image of young girls, as well as popular shows like Love Island regularly displaying a disturbing trend of homogeny in the appearance of its contestants. Younger women now regularly indulge in cosmetic surgery treatments formally reserved for the Hollywood elite, including a disturbing trend amongst teenagers.

Although Wolf’s book about female beauty was written three decades ago, it can often feel as though our obsession with what is and is not ‘beautiful’, and the constant striving for perfection, has only grown worse. It is easy to blame social media sites and images on popular reality shows for this, but until we see more honest images of ‘real’ women in the media and elsewhere, such as the images Kahlo was trying to show us within her paintings, it is difficult to see how these connections will be broken.

Kahlo has gone on to achieve a somewhat stratospheric celebrity status in the years since her death on 13th July 1954, at the age of 47.  Her paintings have risen to cult status, arguably making her the ultimate queen of the selfie, with her image appearing on everything from mugs and stationery, to, somewhat ironically, mobile phone covers.   

Photo by Youssef Elazazy on Pexels

At the home in which she was born in Mexico City, where she also spent some years with her husband and in which she died, the Frida Kahlo Museum still displays her personal belongings as though she still occupied The Blue House. Her resonance is felt not just in her native Mexico, but around the world, where rare exhibitions of her work continue to attract art lovers looking for a glimpse of the woman behind some of the most iconic self-portraits. Myself included.