Frida Kahlo: When Innocence died and Art was born

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

The devastation to Frida Kahlo’s body can only be imagined, but its implications were far worse once she realised she would survive. This vital vivacious young girl on the brink of any number of career possibilities had been reduced to a bed-bound invalid. Only her youth and vitality saved her life, but what kind of life did she face? Her father’s ability to earn enough money to feed his family and pay Frida’s medical bills had diminished with the Mexican economy. This necessitated lengthening her stay in the overburdened, undermanned Red Cross hospital for a month.

The Red Cross Hospital was very poor. We were kept in a kind of tremendous slave quarters, and the meals were so vile they could hardly be eaten. One lone nurse took care of 25 patients.

After being pinned to her bed, swathed in plaster and bandages, she was eventually allowed to go home to La Casa Azul. Being away from her friends in Mexico City, she penned a voluminous correspondence to them and especially to Alejandro Gómez Arias. Their sexual relationship ended prior to the accident and they had agreed each could see other people. When they met as “friends” however, Frida shrugged off Alejandro’s boasts of female conquests. But he became sullen when she ticked off the young men she had bedded. They were too much alike.

While she was recuperating from the accident, Alejandro’s parents sent him to Europe and to study in Berlin. The long separation and worldly adventure considerably cooled what ardour remained in him for the small town Mexican girl he left behind. Frida, conversely, kept up a flurry of letters filled with pitiful longing to see him as she lay in her plaster prison.

“When you come I won’t be able to offer you anything you’d want. Instead of having short hair and being a flirt, I’ll only have short hair and be useless, which is worse. All these things are a constant torment. All of life is in you, but I can’t have it… I’m very foolish and suffering much more than I should. I’m quite young and it is possible for me to be healed, only I can’t believe it; I shouldn’t believe it, should I? You’ll surely come in November”.

Gradually, her indomitable will asserted itself and she began to make decisions within the narrow view she commanded. By December, 1925, she regained the use of her legs. One of her first painful journeys was to Mexico City and the home of Alejandro Gómez Arias just before Christmas. She waited outside his door, but he never came out to meet her. Shortly thereafter, she was felled by shooting pains in her back and more doctors trooped into her life. Her three undiagnosed spinal fractures were discovered and she was immediately encased in plaster once again.

Trapped and immobilised after those brief days of freedom, she began realistically narrowing her options. At the Preparatory School she had begun studies that would lead to a career in medicine. That dream faded when she accepted her physical limitations. As days of soul searching continued, she passed the time painting scenes from Coyoacán, and portraits of relatives and her friends who came to visit. As an artist, she only visited the scene of her accident once in a pencil drawing that showed her bandaged body with the small bus and the trolley car crushed together against the corner of the market building. It was a cathartic drawing, pulled from her imagination and the testimony of others. How many times in her dreams and day dreams had she stood apart from that terrible scene before she drew it – and then left it unfinished?

The praise her paintings elicited surprised her and she began deciding who would receive the painting before she started it – often writing the name of the recipient on the canvas. She gave them away as keepsakes, assigning them no value except as tokens of her feelings. Of these early efforts, her best portraits succeeded in reaching beneath the skin of the sitter and stood alone and original without technical tricks, or imposed sentiment. Her most successful work was a self-portrait, painted specifically for Alejandro Gómez Arias in yet another vain attempt to win him back. With this painting, she began a remarkable lifetime series of fully realised Frida Kahlo reflections, both introspective and revealing, that examined her world from behind her own eyes and from within that crumbling patchwork of a body. Officially titled Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress, her 1926 gift to Alejandro was named, “Your Botticeli” (sic).

While on his tour of Europe, Arias had mentioned that Italian girls were “so exquisite, they look like they were painted by Botticelli”. Frida added some of the elegant mannerisms of the sixteenth century painter, Bronzino (1503-1572), a favourite of hers. In the portrait she holds her hand open to Arias, a possible desire for reconciliation. Her skin glows with an ivory cast and the blush of health in her cheeks, not the pasty face of a surrendering invalid. Her gaze is direct and challenging beneath her exaggerated single eyebrow. What she gives away with her open Bronzino hand, she takes back with the defiance of a survivor. This stoic, examining and unsmiling gaze is the pose that she adopted in real life. As if to add a period to her message, across the bottom of the canvas she wrote:

“For Alex, Frida Kahlo, at the age of 17, September 1926 – Coyoacán – Heute Ist immer noch (Today is like always)”.

In other words, she is saying “If you ever did love me, then today is like always and that love is still there”. Frida Kahlo consistently maintained her own demanding reality that no one, not even Diego Rivera, ever succeeded in penetrating to its steel core.

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Discover the extraordinary story of how Frida Kahlo in:

• Frida: The Making of an Icon exhibition in Tate, from 25 June 2026 – 3 Jan 2027 and Houston Museum of Fine Arts through 17 May, 2026.
• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition: Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, from 21 March to 12 September 2026.