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Two Frida Kahlo

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Frida Kahlo can be called the 'Mexican Salvador Dali' in a long skirt like her counterpart that the artist often introduced in her artworks with elements of surrealism. The difficult fate of Frida Kahlo, the author of the painting Two Fridas, left an imprint on her art. Reality appears to us on her canvases painful, refracted and surreal. Kahlo creates her own reality, fleeing into it from real life and experiences, hiding from adversity and numerous diseases. Perhaps, painting was for her a healing tool, helping her to splash out what was accumulating in her soul. To some extent, Kahlo from her own paintings was herself an imaginary friend. Her double in her opinion was her, but not a complete identity just a reflection of what she wanted …show more content…

Sometimes she wrote herself hidden and simultaneous messages, and more often-in several hypostases like text or imagery. As, for example, in the painting Two Fridas. The first thing seen in this painting is a double self-portrait, where the two Fridas are sitting on a straw bench, and the heart of ‘original’ Frida revealed over clothing, and connected by the vein/artery to the half heart of the second Frida, also they are holding hands. Specifically, the woman on the right is dressed in a traditional Tehuana dress and the second one in a festive European presumably Victorian wedding dress. Moreover, two figures of Frida represent different colour scheme as Tehuana Frida is warmer than Frida in the white dress. Each of them is the personified sides of the soul of Frida Kahlo. Despite the external difference, Frida’s hearts intentionally exposed to the viewer and one of them is half-open. A woman on the right holds a medallion with a portrait of her husband in childhood and her double holds a surgical clamp. In addition, two women united through their joint hands in the center of the painting as this composition is very centered like any surrealists art and relatively symmetrical. In fact, Frida's hearts joined by a common artery, which starts from the red frame of the portrait of Diego in childhood and goes up the hand of Mexican Frida towards her heart that after stretches to European Frida …show more content…

It is very personal and full of symbolism, which perceived in a variety of ways as to emphasize Kahlo’s duality in everything. “'I never painted dreams. I paint my own reality.'” (Kahlo Haynes). As Kahlo was the only person whom she knew the best, she uses self-portraits to explore the hidden feelings of her existence and experiences. The double portrait became a creation of her experiences about the crisis in the family, which ended with a divorce with Diego Rivera. Therefore, the painting depicts two identities of Frida - the one that Diego loved in the traditional Mexican costume, and the one he rejected dressed up in a Victorian wedding dress. Therefore, woman on the right has a full heart and another one is the heartbroken. Both of them are at risk of dying because only the tiny portrait of Diego feeds one full heart and broken one and the blood flows completely into nowhere, despite Frida's attempts to halt the bleeding with a surgical clamp. However, despite of the difference in clothes two Fridas represent the past and present of Frida Kahlo, which she has to deal with. In addition, the representation of hearts, clothing, facial expressions and colour palette may emphasize her duality as if it is the heart and mind. Since Mexican Frida is more traditional, nature like because of her evident moustache and eyebrow, frivolous manlike pose with a hand on genitals and painted in bright warm tones. “Kahlo

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