‘Frida Kahlo: Her Photos’ at Artisphere

Exhibit of 240 of the artist Frida Kahlo’s personal photos, first unsealed in 2007, runs through March 25.

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Frida, 1932, by Guillermo Kahlo, framed in the show as an image in “Frida at four stages of her life.” This photo was taken seven years after a devastating crash that would partly define her life. The bus in which she was riding collided with a trolley car, breaking her spinal column, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, putting her in a full body cast for three months. She began to paint shortly after the 1925 accident to fill her time.

Guillermo Kahlo /

Frida Kahlo with Fulang-Chang, circa 1938, by Florence Arquin. The rare color snapshot in the collection, in which the red of her coat matches the blooms in the flowers around her, also features one of the several spider monkeys that she kept as pets. Fulang-Chang was a famous one, though — appearing in another photograph in the show and featured most prominently in her own self-portrait, the 1937 “Fulang-Chang and I.”

Florence Arquin

Frida in traction, 1940, Mexico City. Nickolas Muray. One of the most bleak portraits of Kahlo in the exhibit is by Nickolas Muray, a Hungarian photographer who had a 10-year affair with the artist, remaining friends with her after their affair stopped in 1941. Kahlo underwent 30 operations in her lifetime, mostly on her spine.

Nickolas Muray

Courtesy Artisphere / Frida painting on her bed with Miguel Covarrubias at her side, 1940, Mexico City. Photographer unknown. The artist found a way to work, even while in traction. She used a device that allowed her to look up and draw and paint, and affixed a strong light to help her do so. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter and influential caricaturist, was a longtime friend of Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Frida Kahlo, circa 1944, by Lola Alvarez Bravo. A portrait of the artist at the Casa Azul alongside one of her xoloescuintle dogs, the rare, hairless breed tied to the Aztec culture. The portrait shows off the Blue House, as it was also known, which was built by her father the year she was born, 1907. When Diego Rivera paid up the mortgage after the two married, the couple remade the French neoclassical design into more of a stucco look, filling it with Mexican artifacts and figurines. They lived there the rest of their lives, and Rivera donated it to the Mexican government, which opened it as Museo Frida Kahlo in 1958.

Lola Alvarez Bravo

Frida Kahlo after an operation, 1946, by Antonio Kahlo. The lingering pain from her Sept. 1, 1925, bus accident led to a series of operations throughout her life. Though she often dressed up in colorful traditional Mexican patterns and jewelry, with her hair up, she appears in this small image, taken by her nephew, looking quite different in monochrome pajamas and her hair down. On the rear of the photo is written: “Frida right after surgery in 1946 — Coyoacan — she is now worse than ever, the pain is unimaginably intense.”

Antonio Kahlo

Frida painting a portrait of her father, circa 1951, by Gisele Freund. Dozens of images of her stern, mustachioed father appear in the show. Her portrait of him done late in her life might indicate that she was keeping some of them as a visual reference for her eventual painting. The number of photos of her father and their consistent, direct, unsmiling gaze of resolve into the camera are thought to have influenced the painter, both in her tendency to do self-portraits and in her serious unblinking approach to the viewer.

Gisele Freund

Doctor Juan Farill and Frida in her Casa Azul studio, 1951, by Gisele Freund. In another remarkable photograph of art and artist, Kahlo poses in a wheelchair, with palette and brushes, with the doctor who performed her seven spinal operations the year before. In the painting next to them, she uses a heart as a palette, her blood as paint. And the doctor exhibits the same gloomy scowl in both images. It was her last signed self-portrait. She died in 1954 at age 47.

Gisele Freund

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