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 The key to understanding “Love Embrace of the Universe”, which she painted in 1949, is to understand Frida Kahlo. Frida was many things besides an accomplished artist — revolutionary, lesbian, rebel, communist, bisexual, patriot, lover, wife, disabled person, surrealist, divorcee, cross-dresser, and the “personification of national glory”. Born in 1907 in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, Mexico, three years before the Mexican Revolution, she often gave the beginning of the Revolution as her date of birth.
A descendant of Jewish jewelers in Germany, her
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father was a sickly artist-photographer. She considered him warm, affectionate, tender and understanding. But she had mixed feelings about her Mexican mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, a descendant of a Spanish general. She considered her kind but calculating, intelligent but cruel, active but fanatically religious.
In order to express her deep feelings which were often masked, Frida developed her own system of pictorial language with it's own vocabulary and syntax which she used to create her votive paintings. In her twenties, her art began to lose its European and Italian renaissance influence and to more greatly reflect Mexican folk art. |
