Duo of Tea Cups and Saucers Set Frida Kahlo: Mexican Art

Main works

The two Fridas (1939), My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936), Self-portraits (1940), Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940), Me and My Parrots (1941), Diego and I (1949), The Broken Column (1944),
Viva La Vida (1954): her final painting

Artistic movements

Surrealism: Refusal of the label: "I have never painted my dreams, I have painted my reality."
Magic Realism: His work is part of a movement that mixes reality and symbolic elements.
Mexican Muralism (indirectly, through Diego Rivera).
Mexican cultural nationalism: Identity and political claim.

Inspiration, influence

Mexican culture: popular traditions, pre-Columbian iconography, religious symbolism (ex-voto, Catholic imagery).
Folk art: traditional clothing (tehuana), bright colors, handicrafts.
Pain and personal experience: her broken body, her miscarriages, her love affairs.
Support from Diego Rivera: he validates her talent very early on.
International encounters: exchanges with surrealists (Breton, Tanguy, Picasso), but without total adherence.

His contemporaries

Diego Rivera (1886-1957): her husband, a renowned Mexican muralist, major influence and tumultuous love.
Tina Modotti: photographer, friend, communist militant.
Leon Trotsky: Russian revolutionary, with whom she had an affair.
Andre Breton: leader of surrealism, admirer of her work (although she refused this label).
Pablo Picasso, Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy: artists she met during her time in Paris.
Nickolas Muray: photographer and lover.
Jacqueline Lamba: artist, Breton’s wife, with whom she maintained a friendly and intimate relationship.

To keep in mind

Frida Kahlo is a painter, a feminist figure, an icon of Mexican culture, and fashion. Deeply marked by physical suffering and intimate wounds (poliomyelitis since childhood, bus accident in 1925, numerous surgeries, amputations, miscarriages), she managed to transform this negative flow to feed her art, and make it her own personal and unique expression.


Her self-portraits (55 out of 143 total paintings), which are both intimate, symbolic, and nationalist, make her a unique figure in art history. Refusing the surrealist label, she claims a painting rooted in Mexican reality. Her influences are both personal (her life, her body, her loves), cultural (Mexico, traditions), and intellectual (contacts with the international artistic world).