Barbie Collector FJH65 Inspiring Women Series Frida Kahlo Doll, Multicoloured

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Last Halloween, my 21-year-old niece was dragged by her friend to a New York college party. She wasn’t wearing a costume, was not really in the mood. At some point, a trio of Wonder Women stumbled in: red knee-high boots, star print bikini-bottoms, strapless tops, gold headbands fastened around long blond hair. O’Gorman gave Rivera and Kahlo a machine to live in, as Le Corbusier would have had it, but also a machine to translate in. Their home brought in foreignness as much as it served as a platform to project a particular idea of Mexico to the world. More than anything, it provided the stage for the power couple of Mexican modernity: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, well-connected and more Mexican than Mexico. The couple’s ultimate oeuvre was, of course, themselves. Kahlo and Rivera were, perhaps, Mexico’s first performance artists, and their casa-estudio was their very own gallery.

Rnd 27 To join two legs; 2 sc along the left leg, ch 6, join to the middle of the right leg with a slst and 12 sc of the leg, FLO sc over the ch 6 stitches, 10 sc (36) The hair strewn about the floor echoes an earlier self-portrait painted as the Mexican folkloric figure La Llorona, here ridding herself of these female attributes. Kahlo clutches a pair of scissors, as the discarded strands of hair become animated around her feet; the tresses appear to have a life of their own as they curl across the floor and around the legs of her chair. Above her sorrowful scene, Kahlo inscribed the lyrics and music of a song that declares cruelly, "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are hairless, I don't love you anymore," confirming Kahlo's own denunciation and rejection of her female roles. This painting debuted at Kahlo's exhibition in Julien Levy's New York gallery in 1938, and was one of the works that most fascinated André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. The canvas in the New York show is a self-portrait of the artist and her spider monkey, Fulang-Chang, a symbol employed as a surrogate for the children that she and Rivera could not have. The arrangement of figures in the portrait signals the artist's interest in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child. After the New York exhibition, a second frame containing a mirror was added. The later inclusion of the mirror is a gesture inviting the viewer into the work: it was through looking at herself intensely in a mirror in her months spent at home after her bus accident that Kahlo first began painting portraits and delving deeper into her psyche. The inclusion of the mirror, considered from this perspective, is a remarkably intimate vision into both the artist's aesthetic process and into her personal introspection. This was Kahlo’s last major work before she became too ill to paint anything more ambitious than the occasional still life. The painting, which affirms Kahlo’s own highly personal system of beliefs, contains elements of Mexican, Christian and Hindu religion. Xolotl is the Aztec god of fire and lightning and appears here in the form of the dog curled up on the flounce of her skirt. Kahlo casts herself in the role of the Madonna, cradling her naked husband, like the Christ child, in her lap, his divine wisdom marked by the third eye which appears in the centre of his forehead. Even in the late 1940s, in constant pain and with her body falling apart, she continued to defy her fate. In this image Kahlo is attempting to unify the complex mix of forces which had shaped her remarkable life. Attuned to the ideological and architectural changes taking place, the couple asked O’Gorman to design a studio and house for them. He created a space specifically for a couple of painters – at once separated and connected. The buildings were the first in Mexico designed for specific functional requirements: living, painting and showcasing work. Perhaps without knowing it, the architect designed a house whose function it was to allow an “open” relationship

Rnd 2 Starting from the 3nd stitch from hook crochet; [1 DCinc] repeats 12 times (24) Cape Edge (with blue color yarn) This tiny painting on tin is an example of one of Kahlo’s great innovations. Retablo or ex-voto paintings are a Mexican tradition dating from the late 19th century, and Kahlo herself collected them. These miniatures were painted by folk artists for private clients, to give thanks for deliverance from some brush with death that the client had survived. Kahlo subverted the genre to convey a “message of pain” which she later said was the key to her work. “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932) depicted the trauma of a terrible miscarriage from which she had nearly bled to death. “Me and My Doll” was painted shortly after another miscarriage. The doll on the bed next to her could be a reference to the child she wanted but knew she would never have. In this painting most of Kahlo's body is obscured from view. We are unusually confronted with the foot and plug end of the bath, and with focus placed on the artist's feet. Furthermore, Kahlo adopts a birds-eye view and looks down on the water from above. Within the water, Kahlo paints an alternative self-portrait, one in which the more traditional facial portrait has been replaced by an array of symbols and recurring motifs. The artist includes portraits of her parents, a traditional Tehuana dress, a perforated shell, a dead humming bird, two female lovers, a skeleton, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship set sail, and a woman drowning. This painting was featured in Breton's 1938 book on Surrealism and Painting and Hayden Herrera, in her biography of Kahlo, mentions that the artist herself considered this work to have a special importance. Recalling the tapestry style painting of Northern Renaissance masters, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the figures and objects floating in the water of Kahlo's painting create an at once fantastic and real landscape of memory.

An interesting example of this is the house and studio in Mexico City where she and Diego Rivera lived and worked during some of their most productive years in the 1930s. It was designed by Juan O’Gorman, the young architect who was then pioneering the radical architectural changes that took place in post-revolutionary Mexico City. The Broken Column is a particularly pertinent example of the combination of Kahlo's emotional and physical pain. The artist's biographer, Hayden Herrera, writes of this painting, 'A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her in two. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida's feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart'. A broken ionic column replaces the artist's crumbling spine and sharp metal nails pierce her body. The hard coldness of this inserted column recalls the steel rod that pierced the artist's abdomen and uterus during her streetcar accident. More generally, the architectural feature now in ruins, has associations of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female body. Beyond its physical dimensions, the cloth wrapped around Kahlo's pelvis, recalls Christ's loincloth. Indeed, Kahlo again displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; through identification with Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of spiritual suffering.

Learn about 10 famous Frida Kahlo paintings.

A functionalist Mexican house that showcased post-revolutionary art? Impossible! Let’s just use the picture with the cacti. The colonising narratives go on. In 2002, Weinstein asked Salma Hayek for a more-sexy Kahlo – more nudity, less unibrow Finding herself often alone, she worked obsessively with self-portraiture. Her reflection fueled an unflinching interest in identity. She was particularly interested in her mixed German-Mexican ancestry, as well as in her divided roles as artist, lover, and wife. The Harper’s piece is a perfect example of how Mexico was perpetuated in such stories as a marginal space, with glimpses of modernity a rare exception to the rule. The magazine shows an utterly foreign Mexico, but in a way that also makes it easier to capture and explain to foreign audiences through its associated cliches. It is a form of translation that simplifies the complex operations that took place in the Rivera-Kahlo home. This self-portrait shows Kahlo as an androgynous figure. Scholars have seen this gesture as a confrontational response to Rivera's demand for a divorce, revealing the artist's injured sense of female pride and her self-punishment for the failures of her marriage. Her masculine attire also reminds the viewer of early family photographs in which Kahlo chose to wear a suit. The cropped hair also presents a nuanced expression of the artist's identity. She holds one cut braid in her left hand while many strands of hair lie scattered on the floor. The act of cutting a braid symbolizes a rejection of girlhood and innocence, but equally can be seen as the severance of a connective cord (maybe umbilical) that binds two people or two ways of life. Either way, braids were a central element in Kahlo's identity as the traditional La Mexicana, and in the act of cutting off her braids, she rejects some aspect of her former identity.