When Frida Kahlo was 18, she seemed poised to claim the life she had imagined. Daughter of a German artist father and a Mexican mother, Kahlo wanted to be a doctor since childhood. She was pursuing that dream through her studies at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, about an hour’s drive from her hometown of Coyoacan. Although she was clearly a talented artist, art remained on the periphery of her life.
On September 17, 1925, everything changed. After a day of classes, Kahlo and her friend Alejandro Gomez Arias boarded a bus headed for Coyoacan. Minutes after they sat down on a wooden bench, the bus turned a corner and slammed into a speeding electric tram. “The tram smashed the bus into the corner,” Kahlo told author Raquel Tibol in Frida Kahlo: an open life. “It was a strange crash, not violent but annoying and slow, and it hurt everyone, me much more seriously.”
After the accident, Kahlo felt that everything she had known had fallen apart. But as her body healed – a process that took several months – her outlook on life and art changed dramatically. While confined to bed, seeing very few visitors, she began to paint more and more. “The loneliness made her express herself in a way that she hadn’t done before,” explains interpreter Vanessa Severo, creator of the piece. Frida… A self-portrait. “She was telling her story by painting it.”
As Kahlo’s career progressed, themes of pain and recovery emerged central to her work. “She overcame the pain and didn’t hide it,” Severo says. “She expressed it.”
This uncompromising honesty has become one of his signature artistic qualities.
Crash Stranded Kahlo on a “painful planet”
When the bus Kahlo was driving hit a streetcar, she suffered serious internal injuries when a long metal rod ripped through her abdomen. At the scene of the accident, a bystander attempted to remove the metal rod from Kahlo’s body. “When he pulled it,” Arias recalls, “Frida screamed so loudly that no one heard the Red Cross ambulance siren.”
Kahlo’s injuries were so severe that she had to be encased in a full-body cast. The carefree years of her childhood, when she relished exploring the mysteries of life, came to an abrupt end. “After the accident, everything changed,” says art historian Celia Stahr, author of Frida in America. “She describes it as lightning.” In a letter, Kahlo wrote to Arias that she now lives on “a painful planet, transparent as ice.”
What sustained Kahlo through endless days in bed was her painting. Her parents gave her an easel so she could paint while she recovered, and they mounted a mirror in the canopy of her bed to help her paint her own face.
As Kahlo slowly recovered, she started venturing outside again, but “it’s not the life she knew before,” Stahr says. After being so immersed in the joys of creating art, Kahlo put aside her dream of becoming a doctor and devoted herself to art.
Kahlo’s Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926), which she painted during her convalescence, reveals the major changes she was going through. The turbulent seascape in the background signified the upheaval of her life, and for the first time she depicted herself on canvas with a prominent single eyebrow. “What we’re seeing happening is she’s going through this whole rebirth process,” Stahr says. “She said later in life that she was the one who bore her.”
Kahlo’s commitment to radical honesty about pain
As Kahlo grew in confidence and self-assurance as a painter, she began to allude to a series of traumas she had endured. In The bus (1929), a young woman who resembles Kahlo sits on the wooden seat of a public bus – a scene that evokes the final moments before Kahlo’s fateful accident.
Later, Kahlo described her physical and psychological pain in clearer terms. In Henry Ford Hospital (1932), Kahlo depicts herself in a hospital bed bleeding after a miscarriage, tears streaming down her face. And in The two Fridas (1939) – painted after Kahlo’s divorce from muralist Diego Rivera – a version of Kahlo with her torn heart sits holding the hand of another healed version of herself.
“I’ve had two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran me over,” Kahlo said. “The other accident was Diego.”
Kahlo’s description of her suffering was groundbreaking in its candor. At the start of the 20th century, “there were no female artists putting their own personal trauma into their art,” says Stahr. “It’s very personal, but it’s also political, because of how women are perceived, how marginalized they are.”
This honesty, radical for its time, is what so many relate to in Kahlo’s work decades later. “Instead of hiding what is painful and hard, she shared it openly,” says Severo, herself an artist living with a disability. “She taught me that I could just stand up and be exactly who I am.”