Long before her fabulous face lent its luminosity to tote bags and refrigerator magnets, the artist Frida Kahlo captivated with her arresting beauty, her prodigious talent, her outsize personality.
The painter, who was born in Mexico City in 1907, is currently being celebrated with the New York Botanical Garden’s “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life.” The exhibit features a re-creation of her garden and studio, reimagining Kahlo’s Casa Azul, the artist’s home in Mexico City, which she transformed with traditional Mexican folk-art objects, colonial-era art, religious ex-voto paintings, and native Mexican plants.
Kahlo had an extraordinary life of pleasures and pain. She suffered from polio as a child and experienced a horrific bus accident when she was a teenager (her fabulous peasant ensembles with their ankle-length hems were at least partially intended to hide her damaged legs.) She married her mentor, the Communist muralist Diego Rivera, of whom she said, “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.” (Nevertheless, she wed the guy twice.) She fought depression, commenting wryly, “I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”
But she had her fun too! She had affairs with Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky (imagine the pillow talk!). And her wonderful gardens were surely a source of solace. “I paint flowers so they will not die,” she once explained. She also painted herself, in many moving self-portraits, insuring that she, and her inimitable style, will not die either.
