How do you know you have arrived? How about if google celebrates your birthday with a special google logo in honor of your birthday?
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If you can look past the unibrow and the mustache, Frida Kahlo was one heck of an attractive woman exactly because she exudes confidence and willful neglect for rules of all sorts. She swore all the time, hosted wild parties, sang loudly and told dirty jokes at those parties. By all accounts, she was vibrant, magnetic, despite the pains she lived with, not some metaphysical angst that artists are often plagued with (though I suspect that she experienced that too), but real, physical pains.
She was in a catastrophic bus accident and the damages she suffered included, the worst part, an iron handrail piercing her abdomen, breaking her spinal column in three places and then exiting through her pelvis.
Thus started her tumultuous and fascinating life as an artist who became one of the most prolific painters of her lifetime.
It is ironic that she seemed to be one of the most liberated people, one of the very few who were truly free, when all her life she was plagued with physical pain and suffering.
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Guess which one is the young Frida Kahlo?
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Her own words on why and how she painted are especially resonating as she is remembered today. On her 103rd birthday.
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
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And in all honesty, the following is my favorite. God, you’ve got to love this woman!
They are so damn “intellectual” and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore… I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those “artistic” bitches of Paris.
– on the European surrealists and specifically Andre Breton in a letter to Nickolas Muray (1939)
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