Van Gogh

Her actual birth date is July 6 1907, 3 years before the start of the Mexican revolution. Which happened in 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Kahlo would later claim that this life-changing event was her actual date of birth. Her parents named her Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon. She was born in the Blue House built by her father the same house in which she would also die in Coyoacan Mexico a suburb of Mexico City. Her father Wilhelm Kahlo who was born in Baden-Baden, Germany a Hungarian Jew whose parents were prosecuted under the Hungarian empire, so they fled to Europe in order to avoid prosecution. In 1891 at the age of 18 he would move to Mexico where he did not speak the language and only possessions were the clothes on his back. Yet, not to long after he was confidant enough to change his name to Guillermo. In 1894 he would marry a Mexican woman who would die while giving birth to their second child. With the death of their mother he was forced to put the children into an orphanage. Not long after the death of his first wife he would meet Matilde Calderon whom he would fall in love with and then marry. Matilde Calderon came from a mixed background she had an Indian father and Creole mother. Her maternal grandfather was a Spanish General. Mitilde who was a very devout Catholic whose own piety bordered on bigotry. “My mother was excessively religious.” Frida would say. She also said, “We said grace before every meal and, while the others were concentration on their inner selves, Christ and I would just look at one another and choke back our laughter.” Matilde was heart broken because at an early age one of her lovers committed suicide, and she married Frida’s father not out of love but out of necessity. And showed true anguish in the Catholic Church. She would insist that Guillermo send the two daughters from his first marriage to a convent, which he would then do. It was also was also her desire that he become a photographer like her father. Guillermo was a very observant and was able to capture the majesty of the country as outsider looking in. From 1904 to 1908 he was the official government photographer where he would often accompany the dictatorial President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz on many trips throughout Mexico. He recorded Spanish colonial architecture. His main form of income in Mexico City was from portraits, which he detested because he did not wish to improve what God had made ugly. As a child Frida would help her father in the studio, which probably helped Frieda become Guillermo’s favorite daughter out of the four sisters. Guillermo would earn enough money to build the Blue House and send his daughters to a German school.

At the age of six she was diagnosed with Polio and would spend nine months in bed. This would begin the cycle of loneliness and isolation, which would fallow her entire life. Her ailment left her with a slight limp in her left leg; she would later injure this leg again in a bus accident in 1925. The students at the German school who called her ‘gammy leg’ because of her limp tormented her. Since she was too proud to show that their teasing bothered her she choose to find sallies in her imagination. Frida recalled “I must have been about six years old when I started vividly picturing to myself a friendship with another girl of about my own age. I used to blow on the window of my room, which gave onto Allende Street, and draw a door on the pane. I imagined that I ran, full of excited anticipation, out trough this “door”, and crossed the vast “plain” which I saw in my minds eye stretching out before me until I reached the “Pinzon” (Finch) dairy. There I slipped through the “o” in Pinzon and immediately plunged into the bowels of the earth, where the playmate of my dreams awaited me. I no longer remember her form and coloring but I do know that she was a lot of fun and laughed a great deal, soundlessly, of course. She was very nimble and could dance. When I returned to my window from my imaginary excursion, I came back through the “door”; then I rubbed it out quickly with my fingers to make it disappear.” At this time her father taught her many nonladylike things like boxing and swimming. As a young girl she would dress like a boy, which her family accepted with few resignations.

In 1922 at the age of 15 she went to the prestigious National Preparatory School, which was celebrating the radical new nationalism native heritage of Mexico. Her mother did not want her to go to this school because it was near the Zocolo, the center of Mexico City along way from her home. Her mother also was very disturbed by the fact that it was a co-educational school, which was quite unusual in that time. She was one of 35 girls out of 2,000 students in the school. Despite their reservations her parents allowed her to take the entrance exam, which she passed with flying colors. When she started