Zbigniew Bialas / Hasan Aslan / Mehmet Ali Icbay / Hasan Arslan

84
 
Tugba Batuhan 
 
never disregarded or an unchangeable figure in Frida’s life, and just like him, nationalistic 
elements were extremely important to her. Consequently, in this paper, I will discuss what the 
parallelism is between nationalism and Rivera’s effects on Frida and how they influenced her 
self-portraits.    
 
Each self-portrait is different explanation of Frida without repetition. The self-portraits 
show an identity of entirely herself with each point of her face. Kahlo made herself as an art 
object in her art works such as in front of the camera. Frida Kahlo, who painted her first self-
portrait in 1926, and continued painting them until she died in 1954, produced more than one 
hundred images. Frida Kahlo’s own self-images point out an interconnection between herself 
and political messages. Furthermore, two turning points changed Frida’s life and that is the 
car accident and Rivera. Mexican cultural context is placed between these two turning points. 
 
2. Mexican Nationalism and Frida’s Early Works 
In 1921, the Movimiento Muralista Mexicano (Mexican Muralist Movement) and the 
improvement of the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura (Mexican School of Painting) brought 
Mexican nationalist culture to Frida’s artwork. The new style of the cultural landscape of the 
post-revolutionary Mexico was also prevalent in her work ( Matuta, 2013). Frida Kahlo began 
the National Preparatory School in 1922 in Mexico. The school is one reason for her 
nationalist artistic aspect in her works. The National Preparatory School’s teachers were 
prominent as well as students, both being the best of Mexico’s young people. The school also 
provided the best education and was a heart of ideological and political ferment in the post-
revolutionary years in Mexico (Herrara, 1991). Teachers of the National Preparatory School 
not only encouraged the students to see Mexico’s traditions, history and culture but also to 
draw these elements into their paintings. 
 
Mexican arts and crafts became a source of national pride in public education 
programmers. Progressive magazines committed to Mexican arts and crafts during the post-
revolutionary cultural renaissance, searched for Mexicanidad. Aztec, Olmec, and Toltec 
imagery and myth was used as political acts, part of the movement of Mexicanidad, in 
Kahlo’s paintings to deconstruct attitudes of mind of the cultural weakness that was the 
tradition of colonialism (Dexter, 2005). Frida personalized the images with in a wide range of 
Mexican, European, and North American cultures within narrow aspect of her paintings. 
 Italian Renaissance painting had an effect on Frida’s self-portraits especially 
Botticelli and Bronzino whose portrait, Elenora di Toledo, is seen in Frida’s first self-portrait 
from 1926 in which a hint of the line clarification of the English Pre-Raphaelites and of 
Modigliani. Additionally, she was impressed by the Mexican painter Adolfo Best Maugard 
based on pre-Columbian design which was adopted in Mexico in the 1920s (Herrara, 1991). 
Frida’s early works are perceived as being from European and Western tradition. She and the 
other students in the National Preparatory School saw Europe as a cultural leader in the art 
world because of its cultural history and avant-garde. As well as Europe, the students tried to 
draw Mexico’s past (Dexter, 2005). Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress, 1926, is a good 
example to represent the influence of a Renaissance and near-Mannerist style (Dexter, 2005). 
These descriptions render the Mexican Cultural Revolution as a mixing of European 
enlightenment traditions and pre-Columbian cultural motifs between all class, race, elite, and 
economic problems.  
 
At the beginning of the 1930’s, Frida Kahlo started to use the language of popular 
Mexican naïve painting instead of her earlier European style figuration influence (Dexter, 

---

85
 
Self Portraits of Frida: Mexican Cultural Context Between the Accident and Diego 
 
 
2005). She used the naïve painting style in The Bus, 1929, to show an epigrammatic picture of 
Mexican society from a countryside to a modern industrial future. Kahlo also almost hints 
towards her accident in this painting as well (Dexter, 2005). In The Bus, Frida Kahlo tries to 
give a sense of modernism and capitalist development in the New Mexico from city to rural 
side.  
 
3. Frida Steps into National Identity 
Kahlo represents her self-examination and self-definition paintings after the revolution in two 
aspects. The first is Mexican cultural context. This context includes and strengthens the 
elements of the developing state with its institutions. Institutions aim to accomplish the 
intended union power. The second aspect is the female victim or sufferer. Self-portraits do not 
only show her power but also clarify herself discouragement. Sexuality and death out of the 
consciousness pressured on Frida’s paintings. In Frida’s self-portraits, her historical memory 
and cultural background are demonstrated piece by piece. She defied the borders between the 
personal self and the artistic self through the historical individual that used both the brush and 
the fictional individual in her paintings (Høholt, 2013). Political meaning and symbols began 
to appear in Kahlo’s works in the 1930’s. During this period, Mexico and the U.S. possessed a 
problematic relationship. After the Mexican – American war between 1846 and 1848, 
Mexican territory decreased by 50 percent due to the victory of the U.S. In addition, 
American participation in the sudden and hard modernization of the country, as well as 
outside ownership of mineral sources of the country effected Kahlo’s paintings. Even though 
Frida Kahlo was in the United States between 1930 and 1933, which was a personally 
traumatic period for her, she still represented neo-colonialist brutality in her culture such as 
Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, 1932 (Høholt, 2013). 
 
In 1937, Frida drew Memory as an expression of her unhappiness of Rivera and her 
sister Christina’s love affair. In this painting, Frida is in the middle of a love triangle. Her 
dress is European style, which is her favorite after the divorce (Herrara, 1991). Her 
right-hand on her Tehuana
6
 cloth and her left-hand is on her school-girl dress. Frida is 
standing without arms or a heart. Instead, her heart is bleeding into lands next to her feet. 
Tears are on her face she is without a facial expression. One of her feet is in the sea and 
resembles a sail boat which refers to her recent foot operation (Herrara, 1991). In this 
painting, Frida demonstrates her mental and physical pain. A stick is in her heart and two 
angels sit on its two sides, and they probably Rivera and Cristina. The angel sitting close to 
the schoolgirl outfit is most likely represent Christina and another angel near to the Tehuana 
costume is Rivera because he is the one who encouraged her to wear this costume and he is a 
nativist. Rivera and Christina are presumably represented as angels because they are the 
dearest sister to her, and husband in her life, even though they deceived Frida. This painting 
also shows that nationalist thought disappear in Frida’s art works without Rivera. Nativism 
only becomes clear by Rivera’s influence on her works. 
  
Frida Kahlo represents national identity and indigenous spirit with her manner of 
dressing and its exhibition in the paintings. She does not only wear the traditional costumes to 
camouflage her orthopedic shoes and enfeebled leg, she also wears it to straighten recover her 
spine with corsets. The Tehuana costume exhibits her love of revolution and politically coded 
forms. This dress code is the sign of Mexican identity and downtrodden Mexico (Dexter, 
2005). Frida pointed out how she started to wear Tehuana, “In another era of my life I dressed 
                                                           
6
 Tehuana is a region in the southwest Mexico. 

---