Kahlo frida biography self portrait 1940

Christian imagery, especially the theatrically bloody martyrdoms that hang in Mexican churches, pervades Frida's iconography.

Her house in Coyoacan displays a particularly gruesome Road to Calvary, in which the overemphasis on Christ's wounds seizes the spectator on the most primitive physical level.

Kahlo frida biography self portrait 1940

Kahlo frida biography self portrait 1940

Kahlo frida biography self portrait 1940 movie

Self portrait dresses

Frida kahlo self-portrait meaning

Frida kahlo self-portrait

This bloodiness and self-mortification hark back to preconquest times, when the Aztecs tore out human hearts and punctured their own skins to ensure life's continuance. But it was Spanish Catholicism that brought to Mexico the depiction of pain in veristic and human terms, creating images so real and so frightening that the Indians could not help but be awestruck and, of course, converted.

Borrowing the rhetoric of Catholicism, Frida used the same combination of pain and realism to attract devotees to her cause.

In another Self Portrait, Dedicated to Dr Eloesser Frida's necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it dr