Frida Kahlo, Paloma Negra.

Frida Kahlo is a painter with great pain inside her. That, I believe, is evident from most of her works. Not only is the piece I chose of hers (Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940) evidence of that, many of her self portraits have her depicted as crying or bleeding. Consider her painting, “The Two Fridas”. She paints two versions of herself, one in a traditional wedding gown, dripping blood, with her heart cut out, with her heart carried in the breast of her other self, holding what looks to be a small picture of her husband, Diego Rivera.
Her pieces are all deeply personal. Many derived their subjects from her miscarriages, her operations, her body (mutilated in a trolley accident when she was 19 in Mexico), and her marriage. To look at them is as if the viewer is reading a journal, viewing an account of her life and trials.
She often painted self portraits in which a monkey is wrapped around her neck or on or looking over her shoulder. In Mexican culture, the monkey is a symbol of lust, but she portrayed them as protective symbols, as evidenced by their places in the portraits. I find that so curious. She was infamous for her many affairs with men and women, such as Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary, and Chavela Vargas, a famous Hispanic singer, and was married to Diego Rivera, a known womanizer. I wonder, does the inclusion of the monkey in her self-portraits, known for its lustful connotations in Mexico and portrayed as a protector by her side, looking over her, mean that she is protected by her lust? Is her heart protected from the pain her body could not be, surrounding herself by lovers? I don’t know, and unfortunately I’ll never be able to ask. To me, it just adds to the mystery of her work, and another angle to her pain.




(all info collected from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo)