BSA203, ProPrac, Artist model Frida Kahlo, 10 May, 2016

The Two Fridas (1939), oil on canvas, 68 1/4" x 68".Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon was born 6 July, 1907 and died 13 July, 1954 in Coyoacan, Mexico.  She studied medicine as a young woman but took up painting when she became immobilized for three months after a bus accident.  She focused on self-portraiture because "...I am often alone and I am the subject I know best."  She drew on personal experiences including marriage, miscarriages and numerous operations.  Her work is often characterized by stark portrayals of pain.  Of her 143 paitings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portraits of physic and psychological wounds.  Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture and her work reflects this in the use of bright colours and dramatic symbolism.  

http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/biography.html

Shortly after her divorce from Diego Rivera, Frida completed this self-portrait of two different personalities. In her diary, Frida writes that this painting originated from her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. Later she admitted it records the emotions surrounding her separation and martial crisis. On the right, the part of her person which was respected and loved by Diego, is the Mexican Frida in Tehuana costume. In her hand she holds an amulet bearing the portrait of Diego as a child. On the left, a more rather European Frida in a lacy white Victorian wedding dress, the Frida that Diego abandoned. The hearts of the two women lie exposed, a device Frida often used to express her pain. The unloved Frida's heart is broken while the other Frida's heart is whole. From the amulet that Frida is holding springs a vein that travels through both women's hearts and is finally cut off by the surgical pincers held in the lap of the rejected Frida. In despair, Frida tries to stop the flow of blood from Diego but it keeps dripping…she is in danger of bleeding to death. The stormy sky filled with agitated clouds may reflect Frida's inner turmoil. Holding her own hand, she is her only companion.
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http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0290.htm

Frida Kahlo's work has been a model for my own work in self-portraiture for most of my career.  She is an active participant in whatever life event she is chronicling rather than a passive viewer looking in from the outside.  In The Two Fridas, both sides of herself stare straight back at the viewer: whatever you may be thinking, she was thinking (and painting) it first.  Her use of anatomically correct hearts, attention to costume detail, and the unflinching gaze keep the subject, her heartbreak, from becoming sentimental or small.

Kahlo painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) shortly after she divorced her unfaithful husband, the artist Diego Rivera. As a painter of many self- portraits, she had often shown herself wearing a Mexican woman's traditional dresses and flowing hair; now, in a renunciation of Rivera, she painted herself short haired and in a man's shirt, shoes, and oversized suit (presumably her former husband's).

MoMA collection