Frida Kahlo: When trauma shapes artistic creation

well as her inner strength, perseverance, and resilience. My guest today is Celia Starr, a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she specializes in modern American and contemporary art with an emphasis on feminist art and gender studies, and she is the author of the new book Frieda

in America, The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist. Magdalena Carmen Frieda Carlo E Calderon was born in July nineteen o seven, though she often told other people that she was born in nineteen ten, the same year as the start of the Mexican Revolution, a movement that Frieda strongly identified with. Born in Mexico City to a father from Germany and a Mexican mother, they were in a typical

couple and unusual parents for the time. She was born in July of nineteen oh seven, though that doesn't seem to be what she referred to as her birthdate to the world, interestingly, which also has to do with her character and her character formation. Her parents were in Mexico at the time, but her father's origin is really German and her mother was from the area. They were somewhat of an unusual couple, somewhat of unusual parents. He was German,

she was from Mexico. Her mother, Matilde, was born in Oahaka. They met actually at a jewelry store. They worked in the same jewelry store in Mexico City. It's really after her father. His name when he was born as Wilhelm, but he changes it when he moved to Mexico and he becomes Guillermo. They actually knew each other, but when Guillermo's first wife died, he really turned to Matilde and her family for support, and then they're close, they get married.

They really forged this relationship, with Guillermo taking an interest in photography and Matilde really encouraging him to seek that as a profession, and so he does quite well. He becomes a professional photographer. Her family is involved with photography, is that right? Her family of origin, Yes, her father was a photographer. It was in the family, and she was like, yes, this is a good thing to do.

And it's also really interesting that what you point out that when he came to Mexico himself, right, he really reinvented himself, including his name, all sort of his likes and propensities and so on, and just interesting for people to keep in mind in terms of what kind of model might Freed have had for reinventing herself, which becomes important later in her life exactly. And because he was a photographer, he also did portraits, although that was not

his favorite genre. He typically photographed buildings, but he did photograph his wife, Matilda when they were first married. He did a lot of photographs of her. He did a lot of self portraits, and it does show in both

of these examples taking on various personas. And so I think that definitely influenced Frieda as well, influenced her not only in the freedom to take on different personas, but also he at times photographed his family and including Frieda and she as we'll talk about, I guess in a bit, but you know, took on different personas even in these photographs,

and that was more than acceptable to him. In the words another father might have said, why my daughter, are you dressing in a suit and looking like a man, and I'm not taking that picture. But that did not happen at all. He was completely accepting and interested, if anything,

in photographing her in whatever persona she presented at that time. Yeah, and I would even say I think he encouraged it because on one of the photographs of Frieda, where she is dressed in a man's suit, it says she looks like Frieda wrote on there that it was her father's suit that she was wearing, so he had to lend her the suit. Therefore, I would say he encouraged it, which, as you point out, seems pretty highly unusual in this context of you know, at this point it's like nineteen

twenties Mexico. But they are in a suburb of Mexico City, so they do have a lot of contact with you know, the urban modern society. But nevertheless, yeah, that was highly unusual for a father to do. But I will say this, when you look at the history of women artists, typically what you find is that um, women who were able to venture out and become artists and you know, be educated and even sometimes forge careers. They almost always have a father who is supporting this, and so in that way,

Frieda is no different. In addition to his supporting ultimately her choosing art as a career, he really, as you said, he has this. Maybe it's urban liberal, unusual certainly for the nineteen twenties, but the issue of let's say, sexuality, what is acceptable to do, what is acceptable to show, what is acceptable to be? He not so much her mother, but he has an attitude of acceptance and encouragement. The

relationship with the mother is somewhat different. It sounds we don't know as much about her relationship with her mother, particularly early on. I mean, we do have a lot of information that comes out in the twenties when she's writing letters to her boyfriend at the time, Alejandro. Of course, there's this tension that's there because of various factors. But I will say this, I think typically in the literature we've seen a more of a strained relationship between Freed

and her mother, and I think that's true overall. However, what I found in my research was actually much more

of a loving, supportive relationship than I ever realized. One thing I think that's important for people to understand is that when Frieda was really starting out as an artist, and we haven't talked yet about, you know, she had this terrible accident when she was a teenager, but when she is forging her out into sort of taking on art for herself, it's her mother who suggests they make some kind of an easel for her to have in

her bed while she's convalescing. And also she suggests putting a mirror in the top of her canopy bed so that she can look at herself and do self portraits. And I think that's really significant that she's right there supporting that. And when you look at letters that they wrote to each other when Frieda was living in the United States in her early twenties and she's writing to her mother, a very tender relationship emerges. So I think that there was a lot there that was positive as

well as some of the tensions. At the age of six, she contracts polio, which sadly was not that unusual in that time period, and relative to how many children did she fared reasonably well. But it did affect her leg, particularly neurologically, and she had this shorter and more withered lower limb, which is something that she always felt or subsequently felt I guess uncomfortable about children would tease her or bully her about she would think of ways to

cover it up. And also importantly, she had this unusual interaction with the teacher who examined her, already unusual to say, you know, you should not basically engage in sports because you have this situation with your leg, but I fear not, you can basically hang out and spend time with me, with some of these other girls who were also spending time with me, it sounds as though there was some sort of impropriety in terms of perhaps a lesbian relationship

or I mean, you can't really say a relationship, you'd have to say this is a child, you have to say a lesbian predatory situation. And Frieda was removed essentially from school as a result. Yeah, I think this is a very obviously important event that happens in her life for many reasons. And it is really complicated, as you're pointing out, because on the one hand, this teacher was acting inappropriately as far as we can tell. You know, again, we don't have all the details. It's hard to know

exactly what happened from what we do know. She examines freedom says, oh, you can't participate in pe. You're not physically able to do this, which is seems ridiculous because her father had really trained her to be an athlete. She was actually quite good at you know pe. But the teacher says, no, you can't do this. So right away Frieda feels that she singled out. Doesn't like this. But then when she starts going to the teacher's room instead to help her out, the teacher is really nice

to her. She has her sit on her lap, and Frieda says, as an adult, I fell in love with her, and yet this improper relationship is developing with the teacher. And apparently there were two other girls who also were in a similar situation. I think that has this impact on Frieda on the one hand, of having this teacher say, oh, you can't do physical activity, but yet come to my room and I will have you sit on my lap. I'll, you know, maybe caress your shoulders kind of thing. And

so this interesting duality that happens here. So the objective position of excluding her in ways that are painful and also insinuate that she doesn't have the resilience that in fact she has had, but paired with this seduction, you would call it her being very very nurturing, very caretaking,

and very over involved. And that is interesting inasmuch as again later as we will see in terms of the conflict for her about you know, to be taken care of, is that at odds with being capable and being strong and being resilient, and these two sides that seemed to be at least early on set up as mutually exclusive but obviously something most people would want both and and

and she clearly strongly wants both. So it's interesting to see this early experience that she had sort of setting it up somewhat at odds with each other, and also of course at being noted to her as something bad being done. What the teacher did was wrong, and in some ways her participation in it was wrong. But these are all formative experiences as she's moving along, and she

is clearly a very bright girl. That's obvious, right. She she was a very good student, but again in the more conservative vein that she was with her family following originally she thought she wanted to go to medical school. She wanted to be a doctor, and she's doing very well. She goes to a school that actually has very few girls.

It is mostly male school. Already an intellectual in in terms of really liking to dig into ideas and share them with others and debate and discuss, and starts to have a romantic life with a boyfriend before she has this terrible accident. You don't see at that time in her young life, as you often do with other artists, a lot of involvement with artistic endeavor. Then she did have a lot of encounters with art, but it wasn't her main focus. Partly this happens because her father is

a photographer and she was his assistant. She would go out with him when he would photograph buildings, and she would a be there to make sure he had epilepsy, and so if he had an epileptic seizure, she would be there to take care of him, but also to watch out that nobody stole his photographic equipment. She also, though, was his assistant in the sense that he taught her about how to retouch photographs, and so she worked also

with him. He also did some painting on the weekends and also would paint with him, so she had that from early on. And then she also you know, had studied some art in school. Her father actually got her a kind of internship with a printmaker, and you really see her having a knack for naturalism, you know, in her teen years. So she did have this background in art before the accident. Her goal was to go to medical school to be a doctor, not to be an artist.

And was that because that was a reputable thing to do or a way to I don't know, make a good living, or was it that she had felt a drive to the science, to the interest in the science of that, or being a helper. Here she has this father who in some ways is being kind of an artist in certain ways. What does she describe as, you know, why a doctor and which obviously didn't work out. But what is it that draws her to that? Do we know? I don't think we really know explicitly. But she definitely

was very interested in the body. She was interested in how the body worked. There are people who have talked about who knew her in her later years when she was in and out of hospitals and they were trying

to help her with her her health. There are assistants who say that Frieda understood medicine in a way that sometimes it seemed like she knew more than the doctors did, so sort of a sublimation of this difficulty that she had first with polio and the loss of you know, the full function of her leg, and then later this terrible accident where you know, she had to be submerged

in so many ways in medical care. But a father who has epilepsy and a mother who it's not clear what she had, but it does sound like she often felt that she was sickly at least. But then on this track of being this great student, she's with this boyfriend, Alejandro on this alley bus situation, and and there's a terrible accident and she is very badly hurt. She breaks multiple bones. Later they discover, in fact, even vertebrae in

her spine have been moved out of position. But she also was impaled by the steel rod in her pelvis, which they pull out at the scene, has caused her to have a pelvic fracture, but probably also impacted perhaps her reproductive organs. This just completely derails her life. At that point, she's in a wheel chair, she's bedbound, and her mother says, hey, let's put up this mirror and get you these paints and set up this easel in this way. This is sort of the time when she

first really involves herself in painting herself. You have to imagine that before she's bedridden, she's going to this National Preparatory School, which was a very prestigious school in Mexico City. It was hard to get into. Freda was one of thirty five girls who went there, and the students who are going there were seen as up and coming leaders of this new Mexican ulture after the revolution. Freda was a part of that. She was going to be a doctor, you know, a lot of her friends were going to

be lawyers. She was a very active person. She called herself a street wanderer. She loved roaming around Mexico City. And now she's had this terrible accident and right she's in her bed, and it was so difficult for her to deal with on so many different levels. But yes, she starts creating art because she's what else is she going to do? Right she's in bed, she's working on walking again. Because one thing that's important to understand too is that she was told she would probably never walk again,

but she was determined that she would walk again. So she is working on trying to take small steps to walk again, but she's also creating and a number of things happen. One is, as she is starting to walk again finally and she's working on her art more and more, she realizes a couple of things. One is that all of her friends have moved on, because she was at a point where she was about to graduate from the National Preparatory School and she would have gone on to

medical school. Her friends have gone on, and so what is she going to do? And also she wants to help her family financially because due to the revolution, her father really lost his lucrative job because it was the government under Porphyrio Diaz who had hired him. After the revolution, he loses that job. They're struggling financially. She wants to

help her family out financially. This is when right she becomes very bold and she decided she's going to go see Diego Rivera, one of the most if not the most famous artists at that time in Mexico. And she shows him, you know her work and says, what do you think. I want to know what you think. I don't want you to flirt with me. I just want you to tell me what you think of my art, which was quite a thing to tell Diego Rivera because apparently flirted with everybody and it didn't matter what your

age or your age difference was. He was. He was this big womanizer. Had she made him previously, Yes, he had come to her school, she had met him, but it hadn't been a very exciting interaction. It was just sort of there. Well, she used to tease him. So when she was going to school, he was paid Antina mural at the National Preparatory School, and so she would tease him and pull these pranks on him and things. But she was just like a schoolgirl, you might say,

at that point. But now she's coming to him as a woman who wants to make a living as an artist, so it's a very different kind of context. And he gives her a very positive response. He's impressed with her work. He sees she has this unique i this unique vision. He felt that typically you see in a beginner, certain style, certain subjects that maybe are common, but he sees something unique in her early work. And yeah, he encourages her to keep going, and that was obviously an important turning

point for her. This seems like a good time for a short break. We'll be right back. Frieda had impressed a great painter, Diego Rivera, and Diego recognized an intriguing creativity in Frieda's paintings. In choosing her subject matter, there's this combination of her internal emotional content and a use of interesting symbolism, which seems to be again some combination of emotionally what's happening inside of her, but also politically.

She joins the communist group that is there, and she developed some very intense political feelings, but it's also culturally what's happening, at least in the group that she's choosing to be part of. But it really seemed like this unique mix that came from inside it is coming out of her culture. Frieda was from a culture that really understood that there was another reality, one that lives side by side with the physical world, an invisible reality, one

place where we can see. This comes out of a lot of mes American cultures, but specifically I talk about the Aztecs. They had this concept, certainly of the invisible or this spiritual realm. Also, of course Catholicism does, and so she grows up in this culture and understands this

what we might call invisible reality. And I think also what I've found in really looking closely at the impact of this accident on her at age eighteen, and then later a miscarriage that she has in Detroit, and then also the death of her mother around that same time, in two all of these are incidents that I feel take her into this realm of these experiences with death on a very powerful level. In two cases, I would

say near death experiences for her. In the case of her mother, of course, it's just experiencing this profound death of her mother. And she comes through this, I believe, with a new sense of reality. And what does that mean, Well, it's a reality again that is connected to the invisible. I think she uses that in her artwork. Many of her paintings contain these symbols that are to be read,

decrypted and understood. A lot of her paintings do contain references to death or the concern about mortality in the living or losses and emotionally you can understand where that comes from. But this use of symbols and sort of the need to read almost the painting, where does that come from? Well, I think it comes probably from different places. But two that I think are really important are a Catholicism. Again, she went to church probably every Sunday for most of

her life. Her mother even had a special bench for her family at the church in Coyokon where she grew up. San Juan Batista. I went to this church and it's powerful. It's a really beautiful, powerful church. And some of the images that you're looking at, you know, of Christ, for example, are very painful to look at, the blood dripping down him, the anguish in his face, and I think, you know,

these were images that were made to be read. And then again, I think if we look at as tech art, you know, when she's coming of age, she's coming of age at the same time that that, in a sense, Mexico is coming of age in the nineteen twenties, right rediscovering what it means to be Mexican in terms of going back to a time prior to the Spanish invasion.

And so I think just to be able to incorporate symbolism into her work and layers into her work was probably natural for her, and it was just how her mind worked. She is a woman in search of or uncovering. I guess I'll say her many potential identities. You're saying that, you know, one of them was being very nationalistic. But the identity of you know, to be Mexican is also

to be as tech, and that seemed very important. Another identity seemed to be the fluidity of her sexuality, which is interesting because obviously that would be somewhat at odds with the Catholic Church and its teachings. I mean, it's hard to imagine that would have been considered acceptable, nor might it have been acceptable to be the third wife of an artist who is known to commit repeated infidelity

during marriage. Anyway, And in fact, her mother seems to have not been too thrilled that she chose to marry Diego Rivera. No, she was not thrilled. She wouldn't even attend the wedding. She wouldn't attend the wedding, which is quite a statement. The father came and sounds like he was happy that there was a man who would marry

his daughter and support her. He was a successful artist, but the mother felt that he was not a good enough man for her daughter, and certainly his morals were not consistent with the mother's correct I mean, he's a communist he's an atheist. He was like twenty years older. She didn't approve it. However, I will say over time she did grow to love and appreciate him. I mean, she does discuss that in letters later on. She recovers enough.

She's walking, She's demonstrated an incredible drive and resilience about herself. She's painting and marries Diego Rivera. She's painting somewhat, but really Diego is the big artist, so to speak. And they go to the United States together, and it's really in the years there in San Francisco and Detroit and her experiences and her exposure to other artists in the community and what goes on with her relationship with Diego

that further shape her artistic expression most definitely. By the time she comes to the United States, in n she's a novice artist. She's certainly working on her style, but she really hasn't developed her own voice yet. So in many ways, she was working on this what we might call folk art style and wanting to really see herself as a painter for the people of Mexico. So when she comes to the United States, she's kind of, you know, has all these different ideas in her mind. She's trying

to work through these ideas. We see her development really pick up speed. She creates the portrait of Luther Burbank, and that's her first I would say, sort of breakthrough to a new style while she's in the United States. It's a very interesting portrait of this man who was a horticulturist who put forward the idea of hybrid fruits and vegetables. He was able to create successfully these hybrids, and so she makes him a hybrid part tree, part man.

And then underneath the tree man is his skeleton, because he had died a few years before she came to the United States. Interestingly, even though Diego is this in some ways larger than life man, he is very ambitious himself and very charismatic and needed a lot of the attention focused on himself. He was nonetheless quite supportive of her and her art. He was, I mean, to his credit,

he was very supportive and he recognized her genius. We know that she had relationships with men and women during the marriage outside when they were not married, and we know that she toyed with the question of gender identity. She would want to be photographed in her father's suit or she would emphasize more traditionally masculine features and paintings, or even in herself in terms of her eyebrows and coming together and facial hair. Is there evidence that she

internally felt gender fluid. I think she felt androgynous. She was fascinated by androgyny, saw it as about a balance between male and female in some ways. You know, she was raised like a boy because the way her father treated her was really like the son he never had.

And interestingly, they did have a son who was born a year before Freedom, but he died from pneumonia and then of course contracting polio, as we talked about earlier, brought on her father saying Okay, I'm going to train you to box, to wrestle, to swim, so that she could build up her strength, but also so she could defend herself physically if she needed to from people teasing her. So, yeah, in a lot of ways, she's raised as a boy,

but at the same time as a girl. And so I think in a sense you see that combination of the male and female throughout her life, and she seemed to really identify as androgynous, and she carries that through her art. Often emphasizing the facial hair, the unibrow. My sense is that she really saw herself as inderrogynous. She

had really quite an appetite for the sexual world. She appreciated the beauty of feminine things and masculine things and vivid and uh and touching, and she just expresses with all her senses. And what do we know of Diego's acceptance of that? Was he similar to what did he like about that? In her? I think he was similar

in a lot of ways. You know. The way that he's described also is that even though he's known as this womanizer, etcetera very macho, but he also is described as very quote unquote feminine, you know when Frieda describes him somewhat as a child too, but like, you know, having almost like breath, you know, because he was overweight and his body was soft, you know, kind of like

a woman's and a baby's. At the same time, he was known to be able to really supposedly like listen to women in a way that most men didn't in that period. So they both seem to accept each other as androgynous in many ways. And I think that that was one of the probably the positive aspects of their relationship. It's later, actually, even after the period in San Francisco. I mean, she she goes to Detroit. She sounds like she's very unhappy there. She doesn't feel as in tune

with the artistic community there. It sounds like she also misses being in Mexico quite a bit. It's sort of after this period that she paints some of her most important paintings. What do we understand comes together there at that point that enables her to do that. I guess I would first preface this by saying, I think creative breakthroughs are mysterious. We can't necessarily know exactly why an

artist has a creative breakthrough. However, certainly in this case, there are these events that are leading up to it. Part of it, again is all of the experimentation she's done prior to her breakthrough paintings in Detroit. But the other part, of course, is that she discovers she's pregnant and she's very ambivalent about having this child. One of the things I detail in the book is, you know, kind of what she's going through, right, She's this ambivalence

about it. She goes to the doctor and she's thinking maybe she should have an abortion, and the doctor has her take quinine and castor oil, which I guess at that time was something that typically women would try in order to have a miscarriage. And so she tries it, but it doesn't work, and then she ends up a couple of months later hemorrhaging. She's, you know, hemorrhaging at home. She's rushed to henry Ford Hospital. You know, it's described by Lucian Bloch, who was a friend of hers at

the time, and her journal and things. As you know, this was quite dramatic that she was bleeding so much that it made it sound like, you know, if she could have perhaps died. Even so, she goes through a lot while she's in the hospital. It takes a while for the miscarriage. She's bleeding, and then finally she sort of expels the fetis and she's distraught. But I think it's also important that people understand when a person is ambivalent about an event and then something happens to end it.

In this case, it's actually harder than if you feel uniformly one way or the other way, because so in this case, you know, she lost the baby, you could say, well, she'd come to accept, okay, maybe this is a good thing, but it's unlikely that she resolved this ambivalence at all. So then what happens is the guilt about whatever part of you might have wished for this to happen because you felt ambivalent from the get go is usually the

most difficult emotion to struggle with. To feel responsible in some way even though obviously you know you weren't actually responsible. That your emotions make you feel like, you know, in some way you may have caused this, and you feel terrible. So she's in the hospital and then she starts to create. She starts doing some drawings in the hospital, and one of the drawings really becomes the foundation for one of

her breakthrough paintings called henry Ford Hospital. So when she gets out of the hospital, she's still devastating, I mean, she's she's described really as is depressed and irritable, just struggling. But she does start to paint again, and when she creates henry Ford Hospital, you know, she's showing herself in the bed hemorrhaging. And then she has these objects, you know, floating above and below her that are attached to these red artery like the lines. One of them is her child,

but she's in this landscape that's barren. She's not in a hospital room, she's out in this barren landscape. But then in the background you see Henry Ford's river rouge plant, and so it's also industry there. It's an amazing painting for many reasons. Just first off, the subject itself. It's this taboo subject. I don't know of any other artists who had depicted themselves having a miscarriage hemorrhage in bed like that. People didn't even talk about miscarriages in that

period for the most part. They wouldn't They wouldn't talk about, well, how does it feel, how are you feeling now that you had a miscarriage? They just weren't even talking about it, right, And so to put it on canvas like that was highly unusual. But she's paints it on metal, and so she is taking on again the style of the retablo from Mexico. She is painting it then in this way to make it look like an untrained artist with painted but it also has this other worldly quality to it

as well. Her ability to paint. What it meant really to her to be a woman with all of the strengths, but all of the difficulties and the tragedies and the terror. Her ability to do that actually repeatedly, she's sort of gone down in history really as in many ways of feminist artist. Even though as you say, she had this androgyny about her, she really embraced and investigated and earthed and demonstrated what it felt to her, certainly to be a woman. I think with Freda, it's personal, but it's

not just about her personal experiences. It's also personal in terms of her culture, always bringing in her culture and bringing in these different layers. I think the other thing that's important to understand two about freed To taking on these taboo subjects is that she was somebody who was very honest and blunt in the way she spoke, and I think she often incorporated that into her art as well.

Even you could have layers of symbolism that could be you know, uncovered at the same time, you know, just sort of putting it out there, like Okay, here I am on this bed bleeding something that we don't typically see. She's putting it out there because on some level that was the kind of person she was. She wasn't afraid in many ways to just state what she really felt this seems like a good time for a short break.

We'll be right back. Fleeta's health continued to deteriorate. She has suffered pain since her childhood polio and then accident, both back pain and leg pain. But now she had to have toes amputated, and eventually by she had to have her leg amputated due to gang green. After that

she fell into a deep depression. One of her friends said that after the accident, you know, at eighteen, she was quite aware of death all the time, you know, I mean, I think she said herself, Freeda wrote something about death dances, you know, around my bed, something like that when she was recovering. So, yeah, she was always aware of death. And of course again that's an important aspect of Mexican culture, to a celebration of you know,

life and death. And so her latest paintings after her health declines, freed to how how would you describe the changes there? The paintings of the nineteen forties definitely start to focus more and more out in nature with animals.

I think she becomes more powerful in a sense. It's kind of this duality again though she's powerful, but there's often also a look of maybe sadness too in her eyes, but her gaze was so powerful in itself that that's why I say, you know, when you look at them, you're kind of grabbed by her, but you can't sense a sadness as well, And then you know, you do start to see. In ninety three she does one where she says thinking about death, and she's got an image

of death on her forehead. Then she's got one in forty nine called Diego and I with Diego on her forehead, And I just feel like when you get to this later period, there is more of this emphasis maybe on this image of death suffering, like the Broken Column of forty four shows her spinal column broken open. There's a painting in forty five called Without Hope certainly sounds like an sad awareness of impending mortality. It does seem like

there's more of that in the self portraits. There's sort of this open question as to how her life really ended. As she was bedridden, she was not doing well, taking pain medications and saying that you know, this is sort of an unbearable and untenable situation. She gives Diego his anniversary gift a month before their anniversary. Her last diary

entrance sounds like a goodbye. I mean, it's reported that she dies in the middle of the night, which wouldn't be shocking to anyone given how infirmed she was at that point. There seems to be a question as to whether, in fact, this was a suicide. Well, of course, it's hard to know, right. My sense is that she probably was given an overdose of medication to help her so she could die peacefully. I mean, there's been speculation that even Diego requested it, but again it's hard to know.

I don't find it hard to believe that somebody, somebody could have been free to herself. I suppose gave her an overdose, essentially knowing that it could kill her. It just sounds like she was probably ready. Like you say, in terms of her last entry into her journal, you know, she says, I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to come back. When you look at the things that were happening right up to that point, it does seem like she's preparing for death, preparing to say goodbye. Right.

She is clearly in a lot of pain, and all the things that they've tried to do for her to help her be mobile and recover seemed to not have worked. A lot of people say once she had her leg amputated, that that was it. She just went downhill, medically downhill. But it also sounds like psychologically, psychologically yeah, Unlike some

great artists. She certainly had success in her lifetime. I mean, she was well recognized and admired and had shows and had her paintings purchased and purchased by places where artists can only hope to have their work shown. But then, sadly, actually often the case, after her death and the number of paintings is finite, she is even more recognized. But it took a while. I mean, it wasn't immediate. Wasn't like she died and then suddenly was known as a

great artist. I think a lot of it comes about in the seventies, in particular due to the interest on the part of art historians who really start looking at, well, where are all the women artists? Are there great women artists or are they buried somewhere we just have to

recover them, or do they just not exist? And so you see the beginnings of what we call the feminist art movement, and then also art historians really looking at the cannon in particular, especially the Western art canon, and starting to question this history that we've been told and free to Carlo is one of the artists who is brought back to the surface and gets looked at more critically. And then, of course Hayden Herrera writes this significant biography

of her. She's working on it in the seventies, it comes out in and so there are all these different factors that really bring Frieda to the forefront, particularly outside

of Mexico. Do you think that there's also something about the way she lived her life in terms of not just overcoming so much difficulty, but her being openly bisexual, openly embracing of her androgyny, and her being openly embracing of her strong political coal views and weaving those together in her art that later made us recognize her as such an important female artist. Yes, I think the cliche probably fits Frieda, which is that she was ahead of

her time. Therefore it took a later time period to really understand her more fully and to to recognize her importance both as a person and as an artist. Also, I would add to your list that in terms of how she dealt with her disability, the problems that she had with walking and and the chronic pain. I mean, on one level, she originally in her in her art she sort of hides it in some ways, you could say she hit it in her way she dressed. But at the same time, in her art she becomes very

open about it too. She shows her wounds, she shows her pain again, being very open and honest. And I think that's refreshing to people. And I think today we live in this culture where people are much more open about their personal lives. So she resonates because she was always a pretty open and honest person. She was a champion of reducing stigma before we acknowledge that stigma was a problem. Right. And I want to just add one

thing that I haven't addressed. Something that I find kind of amazing about Freedo Callo, is that in everything that I've looked at, you know, read about, you know, things that she's written, works that she's created, her attitude towards sexuality seems particularly ahead of her time. She seemed to love sex with men and women. She says, homosexuality is good, you know, it's natural. She just embraced the sexuality as

a part of life, the great aspects of life. And again that's phenomenal considering the time period and the culture in which she grew up. In Yes, her demonstration of the appetite for life in this non judgmental way is undoubtedly something that so unusual for the times, but something we can admire and appreciate that perhaps she, in her own way moved the needle for people. Part of great art, right is how it speaks to the viewer and whether

it changes, makes change acceptable for the viewer. Certainly we would have to put Rita Collo in that place. As I say at the end of the book, I think one of the reasons why she has risen to the top and she's still there is that she was able to transform the personal into something universal. Because when you look at her popularity, not just as a personality but her art, she's always breaking records in terms of attendance,

and her exhibits are around the world. She crosses cultures and obviously time periods, because she's really been on this trajectory since the nineties of her you might say star rising, and that it speaks to all of us. There's obviously something they're fascinating fascinating. Well, that wraps things up for this episode. Thanks Cecilia Starr for joining me. Check out her book Frieda in America, The Creative Awakening of a

Great Artist. If you're interested in more information about the people we discussed on the show, you can check out my book The Power of Different and you can follow me on Twitter at doctor Gayale salt or at person Ology m D until next time. Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing

by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.