Frida Kahlo with the figure of Olmec, 1939.
Icon, artist, activist, symbol and reference for thousands of women in the world, Frida Kahlo she is and will be one of the most important characters in the 20th century contemporary art . Today we continue to see how her influence reaches all areas and many artists have been inspired by her colorful philosophy of life to create and design.
Frida and hers her particular universe that she created at her whim in her Blue house, the home where she lived and died in Mexico, opens for all after more than 50 years kept under lock and key.
It has taken us half a century to get to know her collection of clothes, jewellery, cosmetics and other personal items, which the Victoria & Albert Museum in London now presents in the unprecedented exhibition "Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up", available until November 4.
Self-portrait on the border between Mexico and the United States of America, Frida Kahlo, 1932.
The Frida Kahlo collection was discovered in 2004 and contains many of her personal belongings that help to better understand her life and her art. In it you can see typical garments of the mexican indigenous culture to, jewels like pre columbian necklaces which she made herself, also hand-painted examples of medical corsets and orthopedic devices.
As well as self-portraits, love letters and several makeup items , still in the original packaging of it. All this locked in one of the bathrooms of the Casa Azul, where the artist's museum is located, but which they had not been able to open due to the desire of her husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera , Y Dolores Olmedo , friend and patron of Rivera.
Prosthetic leg with leather boot. Frida Kahlo Museum. Photography by Javier Hinojosa.
"I felt like an intruder, what right did we have to be there with Frida's things? However, it was also important to restore, rescue [...] the letters and photographs, which had remained as they were, frozen in the time, some of them were already in poor condition. You could say that the cats and rats had arrived and were biting them," says museum director Hilda Trujillo.
Since then, there has been a great restoration job of the pieces found, 200 of them are now in the V&A London for you to enjoy.
Frida Kahlo, ca. 1926. Image courtesy of the Frida Kahlo Museum.
"With the support of V&A we will continue the restoration work, because it is not an easy task to restore more than 22,000 documents, more than 300 Frida clothes and lots of other textiles, like tablecloths, some of which were embroidered by Frida's mother or by Frida herself," she notes.
For those who adored her aesthetic, so personal, in the exhibition you will find beauty products like her favorite lipstick, 'Everything's Rosy' from Revlon, and a ebony eyebrow pencil , which she used to emphasize her eyebrows. All this, creating an image of a woman who experimented and artistically constructed her appearance.