Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 and died in 1954. Thus, she lived through the Great Depression and two world wars. The inter-war period was a time when communism was seen as the most reliable safeguard against Hitler. She is widely respected as an artist in the Mexican modernist movement.
She married Diego Rivera, divorced him and then remarried him.
Her husband Diego Rivera wrote to an American critic in 1938, “I recommend her to you, not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.”
Frida Kahlo painted only one canvas of in her time in New York, a sardonic statement of her disdain for what she disliked in the culture of the United States. The painting is called “My Dress Hangs There.” In it we see her dress floating on a clothesline over the city. Frida My Love reconstructs a scene which might have taken place to explain the detail of the dress. To share in the joke, check out the painting of the dress before or after seeing the show.
