1. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Borderbetween Mexico Andthe
1. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, 1932 . New York, Manuel Reyero(Christie's). 22 CULTURE, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY IN THE PAINTINGS OF FRIDA KAHLO JANICE HELLAND Frida Kahlo used the often traumatic and harrow- public protest opposed to American intervention ing iconography of her Mexican heritage to paint in Guatemala. On 14 July 1954, her body lay in herself and the pain which had become an integral state in the magnificent foyer of the Palace of part of her life after, at age eighteen, a streetcar Fine Arts in Mexico City. Much to the chagrin of accident left her crippled. From then on she un- Mexican officials, her coffin was draped with a derwent a series of operations and, because of her large flag bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle severely injured pelvis, a number of miscarriages superimposed upon a star. With her love of the and abortions. Her physical disability never inhib- unconventional and her talent for black humor, ited Kahlo's flair for theatrics, and this, combined Kahlo, in all likelihood, would have enjoyed the with a tempestuous relationship with her philan- uproar caused by this spectacle.' dering husband, the mural painter Diego Rivera, Kahlo, like many other educated young people established her as a tragically romantic and exotic during the tumultuous era between the world figure. As a result, Kahlo's works have been ex- wars, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. haustively psychoanalyzed and thereby white- In the early part of the century, the intellectual washed of their bloody, brutal, and overtly politi- atmosphere in Mexico was charged with cosmo- cal content.
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