Portait of Frida Kahlo, 1907-1954 Quiz

Answer: Magdalena

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon. She was born on the 6th July 1907 as the third daughter of Matilde Calderon de Kahlo and Wilhelm Kahlo.

Answer: Mexican

Her mother was Mexican, her father was German and she was born in Coyoacan, a part of Mexico City.

Answer: False

She was one of 35 girls out of roughly two thousand pupils at Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, where she admired the work of Diega Rivera. She was there with a view to study medicine. It was only after an accident on 17 September 1925, that she started to paint while convalescing in hospital.

Answer: 1928

Kahlo first admired Rivera's work at school in 1922. She met him again in 1928. He painted 'Ballad of the Revolution', which showed Kahlo distributing weapons for the revolutionary struggle. They got married on 21 August the following year.

Answer: She had a termination

Frida Kahlo endured three pregnancies. The first had to be terminated due to incorrect position of the foetus, the second ended in miscarriage and the third ended with a termination due to 'infantilism of the ovaries'.
She illustrated her feelings about her miscarriage in the painting 'Henry Ford Hospital' or 'The Flying Bed' painted in 1932.

Answer: her sister Cristina

Kahlo painted 'Portait of My Sister Cristina' in 1928. Cristina also modelled for some of Rivera's work and this contact developed into an affair in 1934.

Answer: New York

The Kahlo-Riveras moved to the USA in November 1930 for four years. San Francisco was where they first moved to, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange, then they moved on to Detroit.
In October 1938 an exhibition was held at Julien Levy's gallery in New York. She was happy to have this success because it meant freedom from her husband. She used this freedom and ended up having affairs with various men, including Nickolas Muray.

Answer: The Surrealists

In 1938 Kahlo painted 'What I Saw in the Water' or 'What the Water Gave Me', which contained a lot of fantasy and surrealist elements. Kahlo said, "They said I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
Kahlo does not enirely remove herself from reality in any of her works.

Answer: rejoined Mexican Communist Party

Kahlo became a member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana in 1942.
She received a national prize from the Ministry of Public Education in 1946, the same year that she had to go to New York for an operation on her spine.
In 1950 she had numerous operations on her spine and had to stay in hospital for nine months.

Answer: 13 July 1954

In the years leading up to her death Frida kahlo was confined to a wheelchair for much of the time. She had to have her right leg amputated below the knee in 1953 but still managed to attend an exhibition of her works in Mexico.
In 1954 she caught pneumonia but still went to a demonstration against North-American intervention in Guatemala, against the advice of doctors. She died on 13 July in the Blue house she lived in with Rivera.