Description
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo: her passion, her devotion. Her vulnerability, her drive. Her vision, her fire. Her flower crowns, her unibrow eyebrows. There are infinite reasons to love the famous Mexican surrealist painter.
Frida Kahlo Quotes:
- I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
- I want to be inside your darkest everything.
- Feet, what do I need you for, when I have wings to fly?
- My painting carries with it the message of pain.
- I paint flowers so that they do not die.
- I love you more than my own skin.
- I don’t paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
- I was born a bitch. I was born a painter.
Open the Frida Kahlo birthday card to a lush scene based upon her 1939 painting “The Two Fridas,” a double self-portrait representing her happy and sad life. This painting was completed shortly after the artist’s turbulent marriage and divorce from Diego Rivera and shows her two different personalities. One wears a traditional costume from the Tehuana region of Mexico, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a white European dress as the woman who Diego betrayed and rejected. The surrounding vegetation, thorny necklace of bougainvillea, monkey and stalking panther are taken from her 1940 painting “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.”
The circular decoration on the left features symbols of the pain the artist endured all her life stemming from the bus accident in 1922. The nails are featured in her 1944 painting “The Broken Column” that features a cracked column representing her broken spine. In 1946 Frida portrayed herself as a hunted deer in her painting “The Wounded Deer.”
Frida loved flowers and collecting Pre-Colombian artifacts and jewelry. The flowers, artifacts and Mexican jewelry are represented in the decoration on the circle on the right.
This is a card for an art lover, an artist, historian, survivor, feminist, for a young woman, for every woman, for men who respect women, for courage, for her birthday, for self-discovery, for marriage, divorce, for celebration, for mother, daughter, wife, marriage, divorce, renewal, passion.
Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion.
She suffered from polio as a child then nearly died in a horrific bus accident as a teenager. Her body was mangled in the accident, causing multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.
This Frida Kahlo birthday card is a blend of iconography taken from her paintings. The blue background refers to the cobalt color of her home, Casa Azul, in the Colonia del Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacán in Mexico City.
The front cover features Frida depicted in the style of the Mexican art of papel picado, or cut paper. The post is based upon a photograph in French Vogue magazine in 1938. The caption was “Frida Kahlo de Rivera’s paintings look like D. H. Lawrence on canvas, all fertility and gore.”
André Breton described Kahlo’s art as “a ribbon around a bomb” and claimed it for the Surrealists. But her intensely personal work was sui generis: unique.
The Two Fridas, 1939 by Frida Kahlo
This self-portrait shows Frida’s two different personalities after her divorce from Diego Rivera. . One is the traditional Frida in Tehuana costume, with a broken heart, sitting next to an independent, modern dressed Frida in a white European dress. In her dairy, she wrote that this painting originated from her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. Later she admitted it expressed her desperation and loneliness after the separation from Diego.
In this painting, the two Fridas are holding hands. They both have visible hearts but the heart of the traditional Frida is cut and torn open. The main artery, which comes from the torn heart down to the right hand is cut off by the scissors she holds in her lap. Blood drips on her white dress.
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In 1947, this painting was acquired by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts) in Mexico City. The purchase price was 4,000 Pesos (about $1,000) at that time and an additional 36 Pesos for the frame. That was the highest price that Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was ever paid for a painting during her lifetime.
A reproduction of this painting is on display in the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan, Mexico.
See also La Catrina, iconic skeleton of Day of the Dead.
