Frida Kahlo, Keeping it Real… & Surreal?
Considering ‘The Two Fridas’ and ‘The Wounded Table’ — key works by the Mexican painter of emotion and imagination.
‘I never knew I was a Surrealist till André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration.’
— Frida Kahlo
In 1940, the International Exhibition of Surrealism was held in Mexico City, and local artist Frida Kahlo provided two important paintings for it. Her double-self-portrait of 1939, The Two Fridas, is a large oil on canvas — over five-foot square — showing Kahlo dressed in a European-style white wedding dress, on the left, opposite herself in the traditional colourful Tehuana style which came to be associated with her.
The hearts of each version of Frida are exposed — the heart on the left is broken and bloody, yet it is linked by blood vessels to the healthy heart on the right. In the wedding dress portrait, Kahlo holds forceps to stem blood leaking onto the white material while in the Tehuana-dressed portrait she holds in her left hand a miniature portrait of her husband and fellow artist, Diego Rivera as a child. These two Fridas clasp hands, and stare resolutely out…
