Six famous paintings by artist Frida Kahlo are evoked in the staging and design of Frida...A Self Portrait. Read more of the story behind these beloved artworks below and see if you can spot all six when you attend the show!
Frieda and Diego Rivera
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Indiana Repertory Theatre in 2024 / Photo by Zach Rosing
Year: 1931
Current Location: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Background:
Painted by Frida while she and Diego Rivera were living in San Francisco, a year and a half after their wedding. He was working on a commission for the California School of Fine Arts, and she meanwhile painted this depiction of her and her husband. Notice the difference in their sizes. Diego was over six feet tall and weighed 300 pounds; Frida was five feet and weighed less than a hundred pounds.
About the Painting:
“Rivera is portrayed as the great artist wielding his palette and brushes; Frida in the role she loved best, the genius’s adoring wife. Diego stands with his feet as solidly planted as the cornerstones of a triumphal arch; her dainty beslippered feet do not look substantial enough to support her, and they appear barely to brush the ground. She floats in the air like a china doll, sustained by the grip of her monumental mate. Yet Frieda’s penetrating gaze has a note of demonic humor and gritty strength, and for all the solicitousness and ‘femininity’ of her pose and dress, she is self-possessed. The portrait depicts a young woman presenting––perhaps with a certain becoming diffidence but also with pride in her ‘catch’––her new mate to the world. It evokes a type familiar in Mexico: the wife who willingly assumes the submissive role but who in fact runs the household and manages her husband with a deft and delicate dominance.” –Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahloi
The Broken Column
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Kansas City Repertory Theatre in 2019 / Photo by Cory Weaver
Year: 1944
Current Location: Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
Background:
Frida’s health was significantly worsening by 1944 and she had to reduce her teaching schedule at La Esmeralda; even conducting her classes at her home was too much of a challenge. A surgeon recommended she wear a steel corset, which briefly helped her be able to sit and stand, which without it she was in too much pain to do. She wrote a doctor friend, “Each day I am worse... In the beginning it was hard for me to get accustomed to [the corset], since it is a hell of a thing to put up with this type of apparatus but you cannot imagine how badly I felt before putting it on. I could no longer really work because no matter how insignificant they were, all movements exhausted me. I got a little better with the corset but now I feel just as sick again, and I am now very desperate because I cannot find anything to improve the condition of my spine.”ii
About the Painting:
“Here Frida’s determined impassivity creates an almost unbearable tension, a feeling of paralysis. Anguish is made vivid by nails driven into her naked body. A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her torso, the two sides of which are held together by the steel orthopedic corset that is a symbol of the invalid’s imprisonment. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida’s feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart. Inside her torso we see a cracked ionic column in the place of her own deteriorating spinal column; life is thus replaced by a crumbling ruin.” –Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahloiii
Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 2022 / Photo by Mikki Schaffner
Year: 1926
Current Location: Private Collection
Background:
The first self-portrait of Frida Kahlo’s, painted as a gift for her boyfriend at the time, Alejandro Gómez Arias. Arias had been with Frida during the bus accident that left her severely injured and him with only minor injuries. In the months that followed, the relationship became strained. However, Frida’s gifting of the self-portrait led to them reconciling for a time.
About the Painting
“It is a dark, melancholy work, in which she has succeeded in painting herself looking beautiful, fragile, and vibrant. She holds out her right hand as if she were asking for it to be held; no one, not even disaffected Alejandro, could resist taking that hand, one thinks. She is wearing a romantic wine-red velvet dress with what looks like a gold brocade collar and cuffs. Eschewing flapper styles, she stresses her femininity: a plunging neckline dramatically sets off her pale flesh, long neck, and breasts with prominent nipples. The tender depiction of her breasts seems a way of hinting at vulnerability without actually admitting it; by contrast, her facial expression remains cool and reserved.” – Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahloiv
Memory, the Heart
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Kansas City Repertory Theatre in 2019 / Photo by Cory Weaver
Year: 1937
Current Location: Private Collection
Background:
Sometime in 1934, after returning to Mexico from the United States, Diego Rivera began an affair with Frida’s sister, Cristina. Frida was deeply hurt by this and separated from Rivera in early 1935 for several months. Rivera wrote in his autobiography, “If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.”v Although the two soon reconciled, Frida would continue to explore the pain of the affair in her work for some time, including Memory, the Heart, painted in 1937.
About the Painting:
“In Frida’s painting, her broken heart has been yanked out of her chest, leaving a gaping hole pierced by a shaft which recalls the handrail that impaled her body during her accident. On the ends of the metal rod sit two tiny cupids, blithely ignoring the agony that each up and down movement of their seesaw causes the human fulcrum. Frida’s huge heart lies at her feet, an imposing monument to the immensity of her pain. Her heart is a fountain; its severed valves pump rivers of blood into the bleak landscape. Blood flows up into the distant mountains and down toward the sea, where a red delta opens into blue water.” – Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahlovi
The Two Fridas
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Pittsburgh Public Theater in 2023 / Photo by Michael Henninger
Year: 1939
Current Location: Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
Background:
Frida and Diego decided to separate and divorce in 1939. This painting was created during the period in which the divorce was being finalized. Frida spent a lot of time alone, staring at herself in a mirror in order to create this double self-portrait, one of her most well-known pieces. The painting was eventually acquired by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1947 for around $1000, the most Frida was ever paid for art during her lifetime.
About the Painting:
“The Two Fridas sit side by side on a bench, their hands joined in a stiff but poignant clasp. The Frida Diego no longer loves wears a white Victorian dress; the other wears a Tehuana skirt and blouse, and her face is perhaps just a shade darker than that of her more Spanish companion, suggesting Frida’s dual heritage––part Mexican Indian and part European. Both Fridas have their hearts exposed––the same unashamedly literal device to show pain in love that Frida used in Memory. The unloved Frida’s lace bodice is torn to reveal her breast and her broken heart. The other Frida’s heart is whole.” – Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahlovii
Self Portrait with Cropped Hair
Credit: Vanessa Severo in Frida...A Self Portrait at Indiana Repertory Theatre in 2024 / Photo by Zach Rosing
Year: 1940
Current Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Background:
Shortly after the divorce, Frida cut her long hair off, which she had also done after Diego’s affair with her sister Cristina (as depicted in Memory, the Heart). Diego preferred Frida with long hair and in traditional Tehuana dress; in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida is shown with short hair and wearing an oversize man’s suit.
About the Painting:
"Here, as in The Two Fridas, anger and pain join forces to sever Frida’s connections with the outside world––and most specifically, with Diego. Frida is utterly alone in a vast, empty plain beneath a sunless sky. At the top of the painting are the words of a song: ‘Look if I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are bald, I don’t love you anymore.’” – Hayden Herrera, Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahloviii
Works Cited
Hererra, Hayden. Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: HarperCollins, 1984.
"Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931 by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/frida-and-diego-rivera.jsp
“The Broken Column, 1944 by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-broken-column.jsp.
“Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, 1926 by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/self-portrait-in-a-velvet-dress.jsp.
“Memory, the Heart, 1937 by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/memory-the-heart.jsp.
“The Two Fridas, 1939 by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp.
“Self Portrait with Cropped Hair – by Frida Kahlo.” FridaKahlo.org. Accessed Jan 16, 2025. https://www.fridakahlo.org/self-portrait-with-cropped-hair.jsp.