Frida Kahlo
In a horrendous bus accident, Frida Kahlo should have died 30 years earlier, but her pierced wrecked body held together long enough for her to create a legend and a collection of her work which reemerged 30 years after she had passed away. Frida turned one of the most tragic incidents in her life into something beautiful. She transformed her life by painting herself. Frida was the extraordinary beauty of the truth. In this essay you will learn about the major influences Frida had during her life span that made her become the painter she is today. These events and people influenced. This essay examines Frida Kahlo’s life as a whole specifically the people and the tragedies that severed as her inspiration for her paintings.
Frida’s childhood adolescence helped her determine who the real Frida was, that severed as her inspiration for her paintings in her older years. Frida was born in Mexico City in 1907. She was one of four children, she being her father’s favorite. He said “Frida is the most intelligent and most like him” (Bauer). Her father Wilhelm Kahlo, born in Baden-Baden, Germany, was a Jew of Hungarian extraction. Her mother was from a strong Catholic background. Frida and her sister Christina rebelled against her catholic upbringing and disrupted the family with pranks and mischief. Christina her sister remained her closest friend and also her most bitter rival.
In Frida’s early childhood she lacked the motherly attention. Her father made up for it through his affection. Frida’s father was a photographer who documented agriculture in Mexico for the government, he refused to take pictures of people because he said he wished to not improve what god had made ugly. Her father suffered from epilepsy, a lot of the times Frida helped work with her father and took care of him as he needed.
One of the life hurdles that made Frida who she is, wasn’t till the age six. This incident severed as the start of inspiration, which lead her to artistic path. She was diagnosed with polio. This tragic disease left Frida stuck in her house for nine long months, surviving with a limp in her leg. It was her father who showed her how to overcome the teasing and loneliness, which back then was considered unladylike behavior. With his encouragement Frida swam, boxed and wrestled. She returned to school, to only make it harder for her Frida was teased by kids, they offend called her “gammy leg” and made her miserable. Frida, was always too proud and defiant to show people they hurt her. Instead Frida sought refuge in her imagination. As a women Frida only grew stronger. She was someone who was very original and heroic. Frida made the decision herself as a young girl that she wanted to be like a boy, she started to dress like one, wearing suits and ties and slicking her hair back. Having such a traditional Mexican family this was a bold statement to make. Her life was a big enormous risk and she was willing to live it that way.
This event made Frida who she became at the age of fifteen Frida’s parents decided to let her go to a small co-ed high school, she was the first girl to attend. There Frida learned to read in three different languages and had the hopes of one day becoming a doctor. This event made Frida realize want she didn’t want to become, which made her one step closer to her painting career. It wasn’t until the age of seventeen Frida was involved in a tragic event, which later turned out to be one of her biggest motivations for the start of her paintings. Frida came to be sitting on a fateful bus that was to leave its mark forever on her life. The bus crashed into a tram. Before the bus collapsed, it buckled so ominously that the knees of each passenger sitting across from one another touched. “There she lay like a broken china doll, covered with blood and gold dust which apparently another passenger been carrying” (Alcántara). She was found to have eleven fractures of the right leg, her right foot and left