Frida Kahlo and Surrealism

"The art of Frida Kahlo,"André Breton wrote in 1938, "is a ribbon around a bomb." Scarecely known outside surrealist circles for many years, Kahlo is today the most renowned of all the women who have been involved in the movement. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, of a Hungarian-Jewish faher and a Spanish-Mexican mother, she was stricken with polio as a child; a later streetcar accident, and its attendant operations, left her an invalid for life. She took up painting in the mid-1920s, met Diego Rivera in 1928, and married him a year later. Her own course as an artist, however, was very different from that of her muralist husband.

In recent years, with the rise of a lucrative Frida Kahlo industry, it has become the fashion to belittle her association with surrealism. The facts remain: Not only did Breton arrange her first exhibition in Paris (1938) and write the first important (and often reprinted) text about her work, but Kahlo herself took part in the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, frequented in surrealist exiles' milieu in Mexico during the war, and for a time used the term surrealist as a self-description. The fact that she made some abrasive comments about Breton in letters counts for little, for it is well known that Kahlo made abrasive comments regarding practically everyone she knew.

However, well before her final capitulation to Stalinism in 1948, Kahlo had distanced herself from surrealism. Her last works include portraits of Stalin and other works "to serve the Party." After her death in 1954, her home in Coyoacán became the Museo Frida Kahlo.

Excerpted from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (1998) edited with introductions by Penelope Rosemont.