The Two Fridas
Two self-portraits sit hand in hand, their hearts joined by a blood vessel. Kahlo painted it after her divorce from Diego Rivera: a European and a Mexican Frida.
One wears a white Victorian dress, the other Tehuana costume – two identities in one body.
Frida Kahlo painted The Two Fridas in 1939, the year she and Diego Rivera divorced. Rivera was Mexico’s most famous muralist, and their relationship was stormy. They remarried the very next year. The painting is one of Kahlo’s largest, almost two metres on each side. It is now in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
Two women sit side by side on a bench, holding hands. Both are Frida. The one on the left wears a white, lace-trimmed dress in European style. The one on the right wears Tehuana costume, traditional Mexican dress from Tehuantepec. Both have their hearts exposed on the outside of their chests. A blood vessel connects the two hearts.
The Frida on the right holds a small portrait of Rivera as a child, and the vessel runs from it to her heart. The Frida on the left holds surgical scissors or forceps clamping the vessel. Even so, blood drips onto her white skirt. Behind them the sky is dark and cloudy.
The composition is strictly symmetrical. The two figures sit facing us and look at the viewer. This creates a sense of gravity and stillness, yet the bleeding hearts introduce tension. The colours are muted, and the sky adds a troubled mood.
Kahlo painted in oil on canvas in a careful, clear style partly inspired by Mexican folk art and religious votive pictures. She was a self-taught painter. After a serious bus accident in 1925 she was bedridden for a long time, and it was then that she began to paint, often self-portraits.
The painting has been interpreted as an image of a divided identity. Kahlo’s father was German and her mother Mexican, and she had both a European and a Mexican background. The European Frida has been seen as the one Rivera no longer loved, and the Mexican one as the one he loved. Kahlo herself wrote about an imaginary friend from her childhood, and some have linked the picture to that.
The Two Fridas was shown in 1940 at an international Surrealist exhibition in Mexico City. Kahlo was counted among the Surrealists but herself rejected the label, saying that she painted her own reality. After her death in 1954 she gradually became world-famous. Today she is one of the best-known artists from Latin America and a symbol of both Mexican identity and feminism. As early as 1938 and 1939 she had exhibited in New York and Paris, and in Paris the French state bought one of her paintings.