Les deux Fridas

Resumen

The two Fridas.

Facing the global fashion of Fridomania, this stereotyped media hype is confronted with a careful consideration of biographical, esthetic and psychological conditions. The physical suffering and the numerous chirurgical interventions endured by the artist offered her a leit motiv, and every one of her painting merits a symbolic analysis on the mutilated body and on art as an exorcism to physical pain. Her other theme is amorous passion, not only with Diego Rivera. Her biographies have recounted the who's and how's of her erotic objects. All along, her political activism was lived more with vehemence than ideological conviction. Kalho's clinical history is surprising; an iatrogenic development of analgesics addiction impaired with a probable Münchausen syndrome. Besides her artwork, Kalho built another creation: her public self, her life as a spectacle. Her actions, political and sexual preferences, sometimes her themes, were instruments to challenge the bourgeoisie esthetic and moral values. Still, her political message, her defense of native heritage and her cult to popular art has been assimilated by the market laws divesting us of its primal force to become shallow and somehow folkloric. Her famous “ Las dos Fridas,” an extremely complex painting, is the expression of the author's artistic enterprise: the objective representation of the double and the progressive metamorphosis of the body as a free creation by the artist, where the canvas becomes a symbolic mirror.

Key words: Frida Kalho, Fridomania, Psychobiography, heterodox loves, political militancy, narcissism, therapeutic obsession, pictorial metamorphosis, defiance to bourgeoisie morals, metamorphic duality.