Interesting Facts About Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo lied about her birth year, kept a private zoo of monkeys and a fawn, refused to pluck her famous eyebrow, and became the first Mexican artist bought by the Louvre. Behind the icon is a life stranger than the legend.
She is on tote bags and socks now, but the real facts are tougher and weirder than the merchandise.
Here are the ones that surprise people most.
The birth year she rewrote
She faked her age: born in 1907, she claimed 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began.
A childhood illness: polio at six left one leg thinner than the other.
A private menagerie: monkeys, parrots, an eagle, Xolo dogs and a pet fawn.
The eyebrow: she refused to hide the brow that met in the middle.
A Louvre first: the first Mexican artist whose work the Louvre bought.
She moved her own birthday
Frida was born in 1907, but she told people she was born in 1910.
That was the year the Mexican Revolution broke out, and she wanted her life to begin with the new Mexico she believed in. Even her own age was a statement.
Her body, and the accident
Polio at six was only the start. At eighteen a streetcar crash shattered her spine, pelvis and leg, and she endured around thirty operations across her life.
Stuck in bed for long stretches, she began to paint herself in a mirror, which is why so much of her work looks back at you. The full story is here: what happened to Frida Kahlo.
The house full of animals
Frida and Diego could not have children, a grief tied to her injuries. She filled the gap with animals.
Her Blue House held spider monkeys, parrots, an eagle, hairless Xolo dogs and a little fawn named Granizo, many of whom turn up in her paintings. That house is now her museum, told room by room.
She owned her face
Frida refused to pluck the eyebrow that ran in a single line across her face, or to hide the faint hair on her lip.
She even darkened them in her self portraits. In an age that wanted women smooth and pretty, she made her own untamed face the whole point.
A Louvre first, and a communist funeral
In 1939 the Louvre bought her self portrait The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to enter its collection.
She was also a lifelong communist who hosted Trotsky, and at her funeral her coffin was draped in the red flag, a last scandal. More on that side of her is here: was Frida Kahlo a communist.
She said she was not a Surrealist
Critics filed Frida under Surrealism, the movement of dreams and the unconscious. She rejected the label flatly, and to me that refusal is the most Frida thing she ever did.
She said she never painted dreams. She painted her own reality, and her reality just happened to include miscarriages, broken spines and her own heart on the outside.
Frida Kahlo facts people keep asking about
What year was she really born? 1907, though she claimed 1910 to match the Revolution.
Did she keep pets? Spider monkeys, an eagle, Xolo dogs and a fawn named Granizo.
Was she in the Louvre? Yes, her self portrait The Frame, bought in 1939.
Was she a Surrealist? She said no. She painted her reality, not dreams.
Why the eyebrow? She refused to hide it and even darkened it in her portraits.
The icon was a real, difficult woman
Strip away the flower crown and Frida is stranger and braver than the brand: a woman who renamed her own birth year, painted her pain without flinching, and made the world accept her exactly as she was.
I lay out that real, difficult life in Frida Kahlo: The Complete Story, told in pictures in 24 rare photos.
