We took a VonLane bus to Houston to see the Freda Kahlo exhibit on Friday, April 24th. We stayed at the Hotel Zaza, which is quite near the Art Museum.
I am one of the many who thinks that Selma Hayak did a good job of portraying Frida, but Selma was far prettier than the actual artist. I will post a picture of the real Freda and the cinema Freda for you to judge for yourself. (below).
The real Frida was born in 2007 and had infantile paralysis (polio) as a child, which left her with one leg that was far shorter than the other. She also was involved in a serious bus accident in 2025 at the age of 18 when a pole pierced her body and left her with even more serious injuries, and, as a result, she had back pain and problems and had to wear metal corsets that accounted for her short leg and her painful pelvis. She often wore floor-length dresses to conceal her condition. Some of these contraptions were on display and they looked like torture instruments from the Middle Ages.Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream (The Bed) holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned at $54.7 million.[5]
Freda’s love life with the more well-known (at the time) painter Diego Rivera was explored and the guide headphones said that she did not want to have children with him, because he had already impregnated two previous women and left them when they bore him children. At first, when she learned she was pregnant, she tried to abort the child, but when that didn’t work, she was going to go forth with the pregnancy, except that she had a miscarriage.Kahlo’s interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927,[1] through which she once again met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera (who had first met her when painting a mural at her school). The couple married in 1929 and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling together in Mexico and the United States.
I have appended some of her work below.
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
