My Love For Frida

I always have an internal battle when I see Frida on murals, t-shirts, and pretty much everywhere. I LOVE HER! However, she was not the type to want her image to be exploited. It also irks me that she is always referred to as in relation to Diego Rivera. Frida is a success on her own.

When digging deeper into her past, I found some self-portraits as well as old family photos. I appreciate her androgynous attire in her family photos. Although she was progressive for her time, she is also from a privileged family, in which gives her the freedom to experiment during a time that others would not dare to.

---These sexual hybrids recapitulate the excesses of gender in Kahlo's self-portraits where her stern masculine expression, characteristic single eyebrow resembling a bird in flight, and fuzz of facial hair are juxtaposed with the exotically feminine dresses, jewels, ribbons and braids with which she adorned her small and shapely body. Interestingly, as a young adult she dressed in men's suits for several family portraits, an image that she returned to in 'Self Portrait with Cropped Hair' after her split with Riviera.In the painting, a musical score with the lyrics 'see, if I loved you it was for your hair; now you're bald, I don't love you anymore,' is inscribed overhead. Frida pictures herself cutting off her 'femininity': an act of resistance that expresses the frustration provoked by feeling valued solely for her original costumes and striking long dark hair. However, in her left hand she holds on to a tress and in her right ear she still wears a dangling earring, and the masculinity she wears in the form of an oversized dark suit is ill-fitting; her tiny feet, hands and head seem lost. The combined strength and vulnerability of this portrait, then, is a rejection of the mutual exclusiveness of masculinity and femininity in favour of a simultaneous co-existence of both---