Frida Kahlo - Surrealist Artist Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Frida Kahlo - Surrealist Artist - Essay Example The essay "Frida Kahlo - Surrealist Artist" states the Frida Kahlo and her art. Rather than restricting her art, though, this confinement helped encouraged her art as it was one of the few things she could do from her bed. This perhaps also led to her willingness to experiment with artistic forms, breaking out of the traditional forms as can be seen in several of her self-portraits, such as â€Å"The Two Fridas† and â€Å"The Broken Column.† Kahlo’s work displays a desperate struggle to find balance between the past and the present, the self and the social expectations, particularly in her 1939 self-portrait â€Å"The Two Fridas.† For Kahlo, this division is represented through a dual image that relates back to Kahlo’s childhood while she was recovering from polio. â€Å"During that time, she created an imaginary friend who would later be reflected in a painting called ‘The Two Fridas.’ Explaining the painting in her diary she wrote, à ¢â‚¬ËœI experienced intensely an imaginary friendship with a little girl more or less the same age as me I followed her in all her movements and while she danced, I told her my secret problems†. This relationship becomes a means of expressing the two sides of Kahlo at the time of her divorce from Diego. One Frida is dressed in European clothing, indicating that this is the actual European half of Frida gained from her father. Her symbolic torn bodice indicate the rejected side of her just as her hand holds a surgical instrument intended to help stop the flow of blood.