Frida Kahlo: Iconic Mexican Artist is More Popular Than Ever

A mythic artist and enduring legend, Frida Kahlo is more famous now than when she was alive.

At Pueblo Bonito Resorts, Frida Kahlo’s enduring influence lives on through immersive dining experiences that celebrate her artistry, spirit and unmistakable style. Among the standout Pueblo Bonito restaurants is LaFrida Restaurant, an elegant, award-winning fine dining venue at Pueblo Bonito Sunset Beach Golf & Spa Resort where guests dine surrounded an atmosphere inspired by Kahlo’s bold creative vision, including reproductions of her artwork, her signature Tehuana dresses, and rich Mexican design details. The recently opened Pueblo Bonito Vantage San Miguel de Allende also features a LaFrida location with an intimate dining room characterized by vibrant swirls of color.

Born in 1907 in Casa Azul, her family’s cobalt-blue house in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City (now a museum), Kahlo contracted what her parents said was polio (more likely spina bifida) when she was six, which left her right leg thinner than the other.

Worse was to follow. On September 17, 1925, a wooden bus carrying Frida collided with a streetcar. The bus split apart. Frida was impaled by a metal handrail and left with a fractured pelvis, broken spine, and shattered ribs, among other injuries. These wounds would leave her in chronic pain for the rest of her life. She was just 18 years old.

Kahlo spent a month in the hospital and several more bedridden at home. Her mother rigged a mirror above her bed and had a special easel built. Her father gave her his brushes and paints. Despite the pain, she began her first canvases. Her early works bore the mark of her training in photography and her exposure to Renaissance art.

In the late 1920s, she met Diego Rivera, a towering figure already considered Mexico’s national painter. One of the most tempestuous relationships in modern art followed. Diego was 21 years older, twice her size, already married twice, and a notorious womanizer.

The marriage was punctuated by infidelities, reconciliations, and creative symbiosis. Frida once confessed, “I suffered two accidents in my life. The first occurred when a streetcar ran me over. The other accident is Diego.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) their turbulence, the couple thrived artistically. Their home became a meeting point for artists, exiles and revolutionaries. And while Diego painted huge public murals, Frida turned inward, into the canvas of her own body and soul. Painting became a way for her way to explore questions of identity and existence. She explained, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best."

“What makes Kahlo’s art remarkable is not just its technical finesse but its brutal honesty,” said Maria Melendez, an art historian. “She transformed her own body into a landscape of suffering, desire and endurance. Her canvases are intimate confessions, coded diaries in oil. Frida painted herself over and over again. Yet they were not exercises in vanity. They were acts of survival.”

In “The Broken Column” (1944), her torso is split open, her spine replaced with a cracked Ionic column, her body strapped in a steel corset, her skin punctured with nails. In “Without Hope” (1945), she lies in bed, gagging as a funnel force-feeds her meat, fish and entrails, a reference to her medically prescribed diets.

But her art wasn’t only about pain. It was also about defiance. Frida’s paintings gave form to what was otherwise unbearable: miscarriages, surgeries, Diego’s infidelities, her bisexual affairs and her fragile health. She made art out of the raw material of her existence.

Over time, her health deteriorated. Months after the first solo exhibition of her work in Mexico in 1953, her leg was amputated. She wrote in her diary: “Feet, what do I need you for, when I have wings to fly?” She died in July 1954, at age 47.

As for her legacy, Frida gave form to what women of her generation were not supposed to voice: the realities of illness, infidelity, sexuality and political opinion. Her genius was to turn private wounds into collective mirrors.

Her symbolic vocabulary—fruit, flowers, roots, monkeys, Catholic saints, Mexican folklore, pre-Columbian idols--is both autobiographical and mythic. Her style may repel classical tastes, but her force is undeniable.

Melendez pointed out that with Kahlo’s image printed on mugs, tote bags, candles, notebooks, tequila bottles and toys, “I am troubled by what she has become. And yet, I am proud that she has become a global reference point and, in many ways, an emblem of Mexican identity.

“To me, she is not… a kitschy mash-up of her portrait and Day of the Dead imagery. She is a complex, sophisticated artist who has been exoticized, over interpreted, poorly explained and too often stripped of the world in which she lived. Whether this constitutes cultural trivialization or widespread homage is debatable. What is clear is her global relevance.”

Then there’s the market value of her art. In 1979, a Kahlo painting sold for US $85,000. Last year, her 1940 self-portrait titled “The Dream (The Bed)” established the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned. The price was US $54.7 million.

As Frida-mania continues to grow, that record is likely to be broken. And while commercial culture will incessantly market Kahlo, Frida’s persona and her art transcend it.

Plan your next Los Cabos or San Miguel de Allende visit today and be sure to include an evening at LaFrida Restaurant in your itinerary.