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Frida Kahlo Painted 143 Pictures and 55 Were Self-Portraits
Frida Kahlo produced about 143 paintings in a working life of twenty-eight years. Fifty-five of them were self-portraits. The proportion is unusual for a painter who could draw anything. Kahlo painted herself repeatedly because she had a working model permanently available (herself), because she was almost continuously injured and could not always travel to other sitters, and because the figure she most wanted to investigate was the one she could not stop being. The story of Kahlo has been compressed in popular culture into a few large events: the streetcar accident at eighteen, the marriage to Diego Rivera, the affairs, the surgeries, the unibrow. The compression is accurate to the headlines and misleading about the work. What Kahlo actually did, day by day for twenty-eight years, was sit in front of a small mirror and paint herself. The Accident On 17 September 1925, Kahlo was eighteen and a student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. She was travelling home on a wooden bus that collided with an electric streetcar at the corner of Cuauhtemoctzin and Calzada de Tlalpan. The streetcar drove the bus forward; the bus collapsed; an iron handrail entered her body through her left hip and exited through her vagina. Her spine was fractured in three places. Her right leg was broken in eleven places. Her right foot was crushed. Her collarbone was broken. Two of her ribs were broken. Her pelvis was broken in three places. She survived. The medical care she received in 1925 Mexico City was unable to fully repair any of these injuries. She underwent more than thirty surgeries across her remaining twenty-eight years, was repeatedly placed in plaster body casts and metal corsets, and lived with continuous physical pain. The accident is the single fact from which the rest of her biography unfolds. The Studio That Was a Bed She began painting during the long convalescence. Her mother had a special easel made that allowed her to work lying down. A mirror was set into the canopy of the bed so that she could see her own face while immobile. The first self-portrait was made in 1926, in the year following the accident. Kahlo painted in oil. Her early canvases are small, often less than fifty centimetres on a side. The smallness was practical: she was working from a bed and could not handle large supports. The smallness also fits the kind of attention she was paying. A small painting forces the viewer close enough to read every detail. Kahlo's self-portraits ask to be read at the distance she painted them, which was the distance from her own face to her own mirror. Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City. Painted after a spinal surgery that fused several of her vertebrae. The Marriage Kahlo met Diego Rivera in 1928. He was twenty-one years older, already a famous muralist, and married twice before. They were married in August 1929. Rivera weighed roughly twice what Kahlo did; Kahlo's mother described the wedding photographs as "the marriage of an elephant and a dove." The marriage produced two extended separations and one divorce-and-remarriage. Rivera had affairs with Kahlo's sister Cristina in 1934 and with multiple other women across the marriage. Kahlo had affairs in response, including with the photographer Nickolas Muray and (briefly) with Leon Trotsky in 1937 when the Trotskys were sheltering at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. The marriage worked in spite of all this. Rivera was the most respected painter in Mexico during the period; Kahlo's reputation was secondary to his, both publicly and (somewhat) in her own self-presentation. They lived next door to each other in twin houses connected by a bridge after their 1940 remarriage. He died in 1957, three years after she did. The Subject She Made Her Own Kahlo's self-portraits are not a sequence of likenesses. They are a sequence of arguments. Each painting takes the same face (heavy brow, full mouth, severe parted hair, often with elaborate hairstyles or floral arrangements) and uses it as the centre of a composition that argues for something specific: a political position, a medical fact, a marital crisis, a relationship to her ancestry. The 1939 painting The Two Fridas shows her in two costumes (one Tehuana, one European), seated side by side, holding hands, with their exposed hearts joined by a single artery. The painting was made during the months Rivera was suing for divorce. The double-figure is Kahlo arguing publicly that she contained both identities (Mexican peasant heritage on her mother's side, European bourgeois on her father's) and that the loss of Rivera would not collapse either. The 1944 painting The Broken Column shows her in a metal medical corset, her body split open vertically to reveal a crumbling Ionic column where her spine should be. The painting was made after a spinal surgery that had fused several of her vertebrae. The argument is direct: this is what is wrong with me. What the Self-Portraits Are For The conventional reading of Kahlo's self-portraits is that they are confessional, that they document her life directly, and that her work is therefore a form of autobiography. This reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The self-portraits are also, more importantly, a discipline. They are a daily exercise in looking at the same subject and finding something new in it. The same face, painted fifty-five times, becomes a kind of laboratory. Kahlo varies the costume, the background, the colour palette, the symbolism. The face itself is the constant. The variables are everything else. The painter who emerges from this discipline is more rigorous than the confessional reading suggests. Kahlo was not unloading her trauma onto canvas. She was building, painting by painting, a way of using the self-portrait as a structural form. The form was Mexican Catholic devotional painting (the small ex-voto pictures hung in churches across Mexico), the materials were European oil-on-canvas, and the subject was a woman who had been almost destroyed at eighteen and was working out, methodically, what could be salvaged. The End Kahlo's right leg was amputated at the knee in August 1953. Gangrene had developed from the original 1925 injuries. She lived less than a year afterwards. The last self-portrait, painted in 1953 or 1954, shows her in a brace and corset, on the front porch of the Casa Azul, with a small dog at her feet. She died on 13 July 1954, aged forty-seven. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism. Her diary, found after her death, ended with the line, "I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return." The 143 paintings, including the 55 self-portraits, were spread across several Mexican museums, private collections, and (a small number) international institutions. The Casa Azul became a museum dedicated to her in 1958. The reputation that had been secondary to Rivera's during her lifetime became, by the 1980s, larger than his. She is now the most famous Mexican artist of the twentieth century and one of the most reproduced female painters in any tradition. What survives is not the biography. The biography has been retold often enough to dull. What survives is the discipline. Fifty-five times, in front of the same mirror, painting the same face with absolute attention.
Sargent Painted Madame X With a Falling Strap and Had to Repaint It
John Singer Sargent was twenty-six when he began Madame X in summer 1883. He was already a successful portrait painter in Paris, and he wanted a picture that would do for him at the 1884 Salon what Manet's Olympia had done for Manet in 1865: provide a single sensational image that would settle his reputation as an artist of the modern moment. The sitter was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans-born American who had married a French banker, Pierre Gautreau, and become a fixture of Paris society. She was famously beautiful, famously vain, and famously available for portrait commissions only on her own terms. Sargent had to negotiate access through a mutual acquaintance and was eventually granted thirty sittings over the summer at the Gautreau family château in Brittany. The First Version The portrait Sargent submitted to the 1884 Salon showed Gautreau standing in profile, one hand resting on a small table, the other holding the back of her dress in a half-turn toward the viewer. She wore a black satin gown with a sharply cut décolletage. The right shoulder strap, jewelled and thin, had fallen off her shoulder and lay against her upper arm. Her skin, painted in cool blue-white pigment that intensified the effect, was the most exposed thing in the picture. Sargent submitted the picture with the title Portrait de Mme. The Salon catalogue printed it as Madame ***. He had asked for anonymity, on the assumption that anonymity would protect the sitter from any controversy the painting might cause. The protection did not hold. Within an hour of the Salon's opening, Paris society had identified the sitter. The Reaction The reception was hostile. Reviewers attacked the painting's colour (the sitter's skin was described as cadaverous), its composition (her shoulder was held at an anatomically impossible angle), and its subject (the falling strap). Madame Gautreau's mother visited Sargent at his studio in tears and asked him to withdraw the picture. He refused. The painting hung in the Salon for the full run. The Gautreau family considered the portrait socially ruinous. The marriage, already troubled, did not recover. Madame Gautreau never sat for another portrait by Sargent and never publicly acknowledged the painting again. The Repaint Sometime in the weeks after the Salon closed, Sargent took the picture back to his studio and repainted the right shoulder strap so that it lay properly across the shoulder rather than fallen against the arm. He did not repaint anything else. The visible alteration is the only structural change to the painting in its history. The repaint did not rescue the picture's standing. The portrait remained in Sargent's possession, rolled up in his studio. He moved it from Paris to London when he relocated in 1886. He did not exhibit it publicly again for almost twenty years. John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting Sargent showed at the 1883 Salon to good reviews — the year before Madame X destroyed his Paris career. What Sargent Painted Next The Madame X scandal pushed Sargent out of Paris and into London. He arrived in 1886 with very few commissions and no settled studio. Within two years he had built a portrait practice serving the British upper class, the wealthy Americans who passed through London, and a smaller circle of aesthetes and writers. By 1890 he was painting forty or fifty portraits a year at fees that made him the highest-paid portraitist in Europe. The portraits from this period are now what Sargent is most famous for: Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, the Wertheimer family series, Madame Edouard Pailleron, dozens of others. The painting style had not changed fundamentally from Madame X. The same fluency in cloth, the same icy palette, the same understanding of how a single piece of jewellery could anchor a composition. What had changed was the cultural context. London society wanted to be painted by Sargent. Paris society had decided in 1884 that he was dangerous. The Resurrection Sargent kept Madame X for thirty-two years. He showed it occasionally at private studio viewings, lent it to one or two exhibitions, but did not sell it. In 1905 the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director, Roger Fry, approached him about acquiring it. Sargent refused. By 1915, the painting's reputation had begun to rebuild. Sargent told a friend that Madame X was "the best thing I have done." Madame Gautreau had died in 1915, and the social scandal that the painting represented was now a story about a vanished Belle Époque rather than a current society scandal. In 1916, the Metropolitan Museum approached him again. This time he agreed. He sold the picture for $1,000 — far less than he was paid for ordinary portraits during the same period — on the condition that the sitter be identified only as Madame X. The Met paid in cash. The picture has hung in the museum since. What the Painting Shows The painting now reads differently than it read in 1884. Audiences are no longer scandalised by an exposed shoulder, and the question of whether the falling strap was lewd has stopped being an interesting question. What the picture shows now is a painter at the height of his technical capacities working out a problem in cool tones and sharp profile. The chemistry of the skin is what stays surprising. Sargent built it from layers of underpaint with a final wash of zinc white tinted slightly blue. The effect, on a sitter who was famously powdered with rice powder and lavender water, is a kind of luminescence that no other portraitist of the period managed. The painting's claim to greatness rests on this technical achievement more than on the controversy that defined it for thirty years. Sargent never painted another portrait at that pitch. After 1884 he settled into a more conservative manner that delivered for his sitters what they expected: flattering likeness, technical fluency, and propriety. The portrait that destroyed his Paris career was also the last one in which he was willing to risk anything.
Whistler Won His Libel Trial Against Ruskin and Was Awarded One Farthing
In July 1877, the Grosvenor Gallery in London opened with a show that included eight paintings by James McNeill Whistler. One of them was a small dark canvas called Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. It depicted the night sky over the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in Chelsea during a fireworks display, the falling sparks rendered as small dots of light against an almost-black ground. The critic John Ruskin, then the most influential art writer in Britain, reviewed the show for his monthly publication Fors Clavigera. He compared the Falling Rocket unfavourably to coxcomb impudence and concluded with the sentence that became famous: "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued for libel. The trial took place over two days in November 1878 in the Court of Queen's Bench. The jury found for Whistler. They awarded him one farthing in damages, and split the costs between the parties. What Whistler Was Doing Whistler was an American painter who had moved to Paris in 1855 and then to London in 1859. He had studied with Charles Gleyre in Paris, fallen in with the Realist circle around Courbet, and developed an art that fused Realist observation with the formal seriousness he had picked up from Japanese woodblock prints. By the 1870s he was painting what he called Nocturnes: small dark studies of the Thames at night, of the Cremorne Gardens, of Chelsea. The paintings were thinly applied, almost monochrome, and refused the narrative content Victorian audiences expected from a finished picture. Whistler claimed they were "an arrangement of line, form, and colour first" and "an anecdote second or not at all." James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1875. Detroit Institute of Arts. The painting Ruskin attacked. Ruskin John Ruskin in 1877 was sixty-three. He had been the leading defender of the Pre-Raphaelites a generation earlier, but his moral framework for art was anchored in patient observation of nature and what he called "the duty of truth." A painter who finished a canvas in two days and called it Nocturne in Black and Gold offended every principle Ruskin held about labour, attention, and the worth of finished work. The "pot of paint" line was not a slip. Ruskin's review was a deliberate attempt to use the moral authority of his critical position to drive Whistler out of the Grosvenor Gallery's roster and, by extension, out of the serious British art market. The Trial The case was heard by Baron Huddleston with a special jury of four. Whistler's counsel called him as the first witness. Under cross-examination by Sir John Holker, the Attorney-General, Whistler was asked whether the price he charged (two hundred guineas) reflected "the labour of two days." Whistler replied with what became the trial's most-quoted exchange: "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime." Ruskin did not appear. He was unwell and his counsel argued the case on his behalf. The witnesses called for Ruskin included the artists Edward Burne-Jones and W. P. Frith, both of whom testified that the Falling Rocket was not a finished work. The jury retired and returned with a verdict for Whistler. The damages they awarded — one farthing, the smallest coin in circulation — were a clear signal: yes, Ruskin had libelled him; no, the painting itself was not worth defending. Each side was to pay its own costs. The Bankruptcy Whistler's legal fees came to nearly £400 (the equivalent of around £40,000 today). He had no income reserves. Within seven months of the verdict he had filed for bankruptcy. His house on Tite Street in Chelsea, the White House, was sold along with his etching plates, his furniture, and most of his collection of Japanese prints. The collapse forced him out of London. He went to Venice on a commission from the Fine Art Society to produce twelve etchings of the city. He stayed fourteen months, made fifty etchings and around a hundred pastels, and returned in 1880 with the work that would re-establish his financial position over the next decade. What the Trial Decided The legal point was small. Ruskin had committed libel, but the painting at issue was held by the jury to be of minimal worth. The cultural point was larger. The trial publicly tested the question of whether a critic's moral authority could be used to suppress a kind of painting the critic disliked. The verdict was ambiguous, but the principle the trial established (that artists could sue critics, that critics could be made to answer for their attacks) shifted the balance of power between artists and the press for the rest of the nineteenth century. The other thing the trial established, which mattered to Whistler more, was the term Aestheticism. The defence Whistler ran (that a painting could be valued for its formal arrangement of line, form, and colour, independent of any narrative or moral content) became the founding argument of the movement. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the Symbolists who followed in the 1880s all drew on the framework Whistler had defended in court. Ten O'Clock In February 1885, Whistler delivered a public lecture at Prince's Hall in Piccadilly. It began at ten in the evening, an unusually late hour, and was called Ten O'Clock. It was his formal statement of the Aestheticist position. Art, he argued, is "selfishly occupied with her own perfection only" and "the master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs." Beauty was not a function of moral worth, or of social usefulness, or of careful labour. It was a thing the artist made and the audience either saw or did not see. The lecture was a culmination of the argument Whistler had spent the previous decade defending against Ruskin. It was attacked at the time. It is now considered one of the founding texts of modernist aesthetics. What the Farthing Bought Whistler wore the farthing on his watch chain for the rest of his life. He died in 1903, having spent his last twenty years rebuilding the position the bankruptcy had cost him. He had become a kind of patron saint to the Aesthetes, was elected president of the Society of British Artists, and saw his paintings enter major museum collections. Ruskin died in 1900, mentally ill in the last decade of his life and having largely withdrawn from public writing. The pot-of-paint review was not what he wanted to be remembered for. It is what he is mostly remembered for. The trial cost both men. The painting Ruskin attacked is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts and is reproduced in every history of nineteenth-century art. The farthing is in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow with the rest of Whistler's effects. The argument Whistler defended in court won in the long run. The argument Ruskin made about labour and seriousness still wins on most days at most easels, but it lost in 1878 and never quite recovered the authority it had before.