Broken body, Unbreakable spirit – The story of Frida Kahlo

The text below is the excerpt of the book Frida Kahlo (ISBN: 9781783107438), written by Gerry Souter, published by Parkstone International.

As a young girl, wherever she went she seemed to run as if there was so little time left to her and so much to be done. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico. By that time running, hiding, and learning to quickly identify which army was approaching the village were everyday survival skills for Mexican civilians. Frida eventually dropped the German spelling of her name, inherited from her father, Wilhelm (changed to Guillermo), a Hungarian raised in Nuremberg. However, she used the German “Frieda” spelling in some of her intimate letters. Her mother, the former Matilde Calderón, a devout Catholic and a mestiza of mixed Indian and European lineage, held deeply conservative and religious views of a woman’s place in the world. On the other hand, Frida’s father was an artist, a photographer of some note who pushed her to think for herself. Guillermo was surrounded by daughters in La Casa Azul (the Blue House) at the corner of Londres and Allende Streets in Coyoacán. Amidst all the traditional domesticity, he fastened onto Frida as a surrogate son who would follow his steps into the creative arts. He became her very first mentor that set her aside from traditional roles accepted by the majority of Mexican women. She became his photographic assistant and began to learn the trade, though with little enthusiasm for the photographic medium. She traveled with him to be there if he suffered one of his epileptic seizures.

Guillermo Kahlo was a proud, fastidious man of regular habits and many intellectual pursuits from the enjoyment of fine classical music – he played almost daily on a small German piano – to his own painting and appreciation of art. His work in oil and watercolour was undistinguished, but it fascinated Frida to watch him use the small brush strokes of a photo retoucher to create scenes on a bare canvas instead of just removing double chins from vain portrait customers.

He rigidly maintained his own duality: outwardly active, but trapped with his epilepsy as he regained consciousness lying in the street, felled by a grand mal seizure with Frida kneeling at his side holding the ether bottle near his nose, making sure his camera was not stolen. He played his music and read from his large library, but inside was constantly in turmoil about money to support his family. He wore what Frida described as a “tranquil” mask. She adopted that self-control, or at least the appearance of it, in the darkest moments of her life, never willing to display any public face that revealed what lay behind the stoic image.

Frida Kahlo was spoiled, indulged and impressionable. Her father’s success landed him a job with the government of Porfirio Díaz, photographing Mexican architecture as a sort of advertisement to lure foreign investment. Since 1876 Díaz had enjoyed some 30 years as president of Mexico and adopted a Darwinian philosophy toward governing the Mexican people. This “survival of the fittest” concept meant virtually all government money and programs went to building up the rich and successful while ignoring less productive peasants. Mexico became the economic darling of international trade as countries took advantage of its mineral wealth and cheap labour. European customs and culture ruled while native Mexican and Indian traditions languished. Díaz personally selected Guillermo Kahlo to show the best side of Mexico to foreign investors, vaulting the photographer from an itinerant portraitist into the coveted middle class.

Kahlo wasted no time in buying a lot in the nearby suburb of Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City and building La Casa Azul, a traditional Mexican wrap-around home – painted a deep blue with red trim – with its rooms opening onto a central courtyard. In 1922, to assure her a better than average education, he also entered Frida into the free National Preparatory School in San Ildefonso. She became one of 35 girls admitted to the school’s enrollment of 2,000 students and rose to become a class character alongside other male pupils who became some of Mexico’s leading intellectuals and government leaders. She devoured her new freedom from mind-numbing domestic chores and hung out with a number of cliques within the school’s social structure. She found a real sense of belonging with the Cachuchas gang of intellectual bohemians – named after the type of hat they wore. Leading this motley elitist mob was Alejandro Gómez Arias, who reiterated in countless speeches that a new enlightenment for Mexico required “optimism, sacrifice, love, joy” and bold leadership. His good looks, confident manner and impressive intellect drew Frida to him.

All her life, Frida attracted men of this stripe and, once conquered, each became enmeshed in her passionate, possessive web. But each conquest also puzzled the country girl as she pondered what these strong decisive men saw in her.

She was short, dark, slender and a cripple. At age 13, Frida had been felled by a bout of polio that withered her right leg leaving it shorter than her left. Neighbourhood children taunted her with shouts of, “pata de palo” or “peg leg”. To conceal her affliction, she wore layers of stockings on her thin leg and had a half-inch added to the heel of her shoe. Considering the state of medicine in Mexico of the 1920s – hot walnut oil baths and calcium doses – she was lucky to be alive. To further compensate for her limp, she plunged into sports: running, boxing, swimming and wrestling, every strenuous activity available to girls. But her greatest sport was intellectual debate, and with Arias she found a true soul-mate.

By 1923 they were lovers and sharing hours at the Ibero American Library, absorbing Gogol, Tolstoy, Spengler, Hegel, Kant and other great European minds. From these sessions and her own reading, she gradually developed a deep-seated affinity for socialism and the uplifting of the masses. To her in that circle of social climbing students, these two concepts were abstractions for lip service, but she remained a committed and vocal Communist for the rest of her life. She even substituted the 1910 date of the start of the Mexican Revolution for her actual birth year, 1907, as an affirmation of her commitment to revolutionary ideals.

To get a better insight into Frida Kahlo, please continue this exciting adventure by clicking on:

Ebook

Hardcover

Take a look at our other titles on Kahlo:

Discover the extraordinary story of how Frida Kahlo of Tate’s exhibition in 2026: Frida: The Making of an Icon, from 25 June 2026 – 3 Jan 2027.