The year spent in Detroit was a difficult time for Kahlo. Although she had enjoyed visiting San Francisco and New York City, she disliked aspects of American society, which she regarded as colonialist, as well as most Americans, whom she found "boring". [194] She disliked having to socialize with capitalists such as Henry and Edsel Ford, and was angered that many of the hotels in Detroit refused to accept Jewish guests. [195] In a letter to a friend, she wrote that "although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States", she felt "a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger." [33] Kahlo's time in Detroit was also complicated by a pregnancy. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion, but the medication used was ineffective. [196] Kahlo was deeply ambivalent about having a child and had already undergone an abortion earlier in her marriage to Rivera. [196] Following the failed abortion, she reluctantly agreed to continue with the pregnancy, but miscarried in July, which caused a serious hemorrhage that required her being hospitalized for two weeks. [32] Less than three months later, her mother died from complications of surgery in Mexico. [197] External images Alice O'Keeffe (8 November 2009). "The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (book review)". The Guardian. theguardian.com . Retrieved 4 June 2015. Herrera 2002, pp.180–190; Kettenmann 2003, pp.38–40; Zamora 1990, pp.50–53; Burrus 2005, p.203; Ankori 2002, p.193.

Ankori, Gannit (2005). "Frida Kahlo: The Fabric of Her Art". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5. Udall, Sharyn (Autumn 2003). "Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 24 (2): 10–14. doi: 10.2307/1358781. JSTOR 1358781. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019.

Ankori, Gannit (2002). Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo's Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-31565-7. Dexter, Emma (2005). "The Universal Dialectics of Frida Kahlo". In Dexter, Emma (ed.). Frida Kahlo. Tate Modern. ISBN 1-85437-586-5.

Furthermore, the wealthof information on religious and cultural symbolism in her choice of colors, clothing, subject positions, fruits, animals, draw attention to the tiniest details,adding further layers to appreciating her art. Ronnen, Meir (20 April 2006). "Frida Kahlo's father wasn't Jewish after all". The Jerusalem Post . Retrieved 7 July 2018. Weidemann, Christiane (2008). 50 women artists you should know. Larass, Petra., Klier, Melanie. Munich: Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-3956-6. OCLC 195744889.Bilek, Suzanne (2012). Great female artists of Detroit. Charleston. ISBN 978-1-60949-671-5. OCLC 806018780. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Carnivele, Gary (2 July 2016). "Second LGBT Honorees Selected for San Francisco's Rainbow Honor Walk". We The People . Retrieved 12 August 2019. When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which eventually made her right leg grow shorter and thinner than the left. [149] [b] The illness forced her to be isolated from her peers for months, and she was bullied. [152] While the experience made her reclusive, [145] it made her Guillermo's favorite due to their shared experience of living with disability. [153] Kahlo credited him for making her childhood "marvelous... he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter), and above all in understanding for all my problems." He taught her about literature, nature, and philosophy, and encouraged her to play sports to regain her strength, despite the fact that most physical exercise was seen as unsuitable for girls. [154] He also taught her photography, and she began to help him retouch, develop, and color photographs. [155] Helland, Janice (1990–1991). "Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo's Paintings: Indigenity and Political Commitment" (PDF). Woman's Art Journal. 11 (5): 8–13. JSTOR 3690692. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2019. A painting known today by the descriptive title Two Nudes in the Jungle (1939; originally titled The Earth Herself) is usually interpreted, like the contemporaneous Two Fridas, as a double self-portrait. Painted for Dolores Del Rio around the time of Frida’s divorce, it may in fact be a slightly veiled sapphic image of Kahlo with the screen goddess. In the Campos interview Frida states that she painted a portrait of Del Rio, yet in the actress’s estate only two Kahlo pictures turned up: Girl with Death Mask (1938) and Two Nudes. The fairer, recumbent nude, with her sloe-eyed, oval face, bears an undeniable, if somewhat stylized, resemblance to photos of Del Rio from the period. The painting brings to mind a salacious confession Kahlo made to Campos—that she was “attracted to dark nipples but repelled by pink nipples in a woman.”

In 1922, Kahlo was accepted to the elite National Preparatory School, where she focused on natural sciences with the aim of becoming a physician. [159] The institution had only recently begun admitting women, with only 35 girls out of 2,000 students. [160] She performed well academically, [10] was a voracious reader, and became "deeply immersed and seriously committed to Mexican culture, political activism and issues of social justice". [161] The school promoted indigenismo, a new sense of Mexican identity that took pride in the country's indigenous heritage and sought to rid itself of the colonial mindset of Europe as superior to Mexico. [162] Particularly influential to Kahlo at this time were nine of her schoolmates, with whom she formed an informal group called the "Cachuchas"– many of them would become leading figures of the Mexican intellectual elite. [163] They were rebellious and against everything conservative and pulled pranks, staged plays, and debated philosophy and Russian classics. [163] To mask the fact that she was older and to declare herself a "daughter of the revolution", she began saying that she had been born on 7 July 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, which she continued throughout her life. [164] She fell in love with Alejandro Gomez Arias, the leader of the group and her first love. Her parents did not approve of the relationship. Arias and Kahlo were often separated from each other, due to the political instability and violence of the period, so they exchanged passionate love letters. [12] [165] 1925–1930: Bus accident and marriage to Diego Rivera Kahlo photographed by her father in 1926 More than a century after Goethe’s theoretical inquiry into the emotional hues of color, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) contemplated the question from a far more intuitive place in a fragment from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait ( public library) — the treasure trove that gave us the visionary Mexican painter’s DIY paint recipe, her ferocious political convictions, and her stunning handwritten love letters to Diego Rivera. There were several causes for the almost morbidly elated tone of Kahlo’s note to Gómez Arias. Surgery always gave her a strange high—she gleefully soaked up the ministrations of doctors, nurses, and visitors (in bed she entertained guests like a hostess at a party). She also was receiving huge doses of morphine, which left her addicted to painkillers for the rest of her life. But, most pertinent to the genesis of her diary, she had embarked on what would be her last and most satisfying romance with a man. But who was this Dr Farill? Why is Kahlo dressed the way she is? What has Catholicism got to do with that palette on her lap? Wait, is that a palette or a heart? Readers may be surprised by many of her lesser-known or overlooked works "that may not be associated with Kahlo," in Lozano's words. These include pencil sketches such as Showing the Scar (1938), still-life paintingsincluding Long Live Life (1953), surrealist pieces like What the Water Gave Me (1938-39), and early portraits that differ in style and rendition from her renowned later, lusher works. "What Water Gave Me" suggests self-analysis begins in the womb and is fed by life's memories Image: Bridgeman Images/Christie\'s Images

Nearly a century later, Rebecca Solnit would write her own lyrical meditation on blue as the color of distance and desire. Shelter, Scott (14 March 2016). "The Rainbow Honor Walk: San Francisco's LGBT Walk of Fame". Quirky Travel Guy . Retrieved 28 July 2019. In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the recently reformed, nationalistic Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda". [62] She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art and to derive their subjects from the street. [63] When her health problems made it difficult for her to commute to the school in Mexico City, she began to hold her lessons at La Casa Azul. [64] Four of her students– Fanny Rabel, Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, and Arturo Estrada– became devotees, and were referred to as "Los Fridos" for their enthusiasm. [65] Kahlo secured three mural commissions for herself and her students. [66] In 1944, they painted La Rosita, a pulqueria in Coyoacán. In 1945, the government commissioned them to paint murals for a Coyoacán launderette as part of a national scheme to help poor women who made their living as laundresses. The same year, the group created murals for Posada del Sol, a hotel in Mexico City. However, it was destroyed soon after completion as the hotel's owner did not like it. [ citation needed] First of all,who was she as an artist? What did she think of her own work? What did she want to achieve as an artist? And what do these paintings mean by themselves?" Lozano said about the focus of his book in an interview with the BBC. October 2007 – 20 January 2008 – Frida Kahlo an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 20 February – 18 May 2008; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 16 June – 28 September 2008.