A few years back when I was still doing my Masters in Women and Gender Studies, I came across the work of Frida Kahlo as a part of the course and took an instant liking to it. She was a painter, an artist, and muralist born in a village in Mexico in the early twentieth century. She fell in love with Diego Rivera and married him. For him, she left her village, her country, and her people and moved to the USA. Owing to an illness and a tragic accident, she experienced several miscarriages and never bore a child. The resulting depression led to her being admitted to several different mental asylums. 

Frida was a strong headed woman who was never bogged down by all the lemons that life threw at her and did everything she could to make her husband happy. However, Diego seemed to be unfazed by all her sacrifices and cheated on her continuously. He often had affairs with younger women while intermittently coming back to Frida, who accepted him every time he was back. 

Frida’s tragic life filled her canvases with amazing work. She painted the grotesque realities of life without shame. Her work talked about everything that was taboo at the time and still is in many parts of the world. She used her work to open up about her numerous miscarriages, her time in the mental asylum, and her broken inner self. Her immense sadness led her to make some of the best paintings in the world which shot her to global fame. Her work is mostly remembered for its pain and passion and its intense vibrant colours. A mixed race Mexican woman ruled the world of art in the fifth and sixth decade of the twentieth century. This was a feat in itself.

I believe it must have taken tremendous courage on her part to bare her inner self for the world to see, even though she had no guarantee of the reaction, especially when she dared to do it for the first time. Women in every part of the world at the time were still fighting for their rightful space in public lives. They were considered inferior to men in every respect. There were hardly any jobs for women, any readers for female writers, and admirers for women painters, an atmospher which has hardly changed today. It was through this chaos that Frida carved a niche for herself despite the many agonies she went through. She created a space for other women to come out of their homes and into the world of men, and to be able to share their side of the story. This is the biggest reason why her work is not only widely acclaimed but also taught in various institutions and loved in many more.

For people like me, her self-portraits have always been something to applaud. She painted herself with a uni-brow, a hint of moustache and hair on her neck. Having grown up in Mexico she was constantly aware of how different she was when compared to her white neighbors, and yet she continued to paint herself exactly as she looked instead of trying to fit in the cultural notions of beauty and femininity that were prevalent at the time. While working on any self portrait Frida made sure that her reality remained visible on the canvas. She painted every scar with pride and held her head high while doing so. Her boldness was admired by feminists all over.

When I first saw her self-portraits, I was in awe of this artist’s courage. How many women have the strength to face the world like she did? I found her inspiring, the way she looked in the mirror, the confidence in her eyes, the enigma dripping from her portraits which showed no sense of embarrassment for standing in front of the world, defying their pre-conceived notions. It made me want to salute the artist. She helped me realise the importance of being comfortable in one’s own skin. She celebrated the beauty that was at odds with the norm, breaking all the centuries-old conventions in one go through her self-portraits. I loved her work. I appreciated it and tried to be more like her - assertive, becoming the mistress of my own destiny, not giving into body shaming, loving every pimple mark on my face.

With time, I began diving into Frida’s collection more and more. She has more than a hundred masterpieces, most of which come from her own experience of life. As a staunch advocate of women’s rights, I looked for the subtle meaning, subtexts, and hidden messages in her work with interest. She is said to have depicted the desires of women boldly and passionately, celebrating the self and the several strata that remain buried beneath. Many critiques expressed that her work was a vehement and unrestrained feminine world in itself. And that is exactly why I enjoyed her work to such a great extent. She has painted the pain of a woman without inhibition on the canvas.

Frida was undoubtedly a visionary who knew what to say and how to be bold, however, the more I studied her self-portraits, the more questions concerning the context of her work began wandering through my brain.

The paintings that made me question Frida’s work the most were the self portraits that she painted soon after or during periods when her relationship with Diego was its most tempestuous. Usually Frida went into depression every time there was a problem in her married life and painted herself in the most un-feminine way she could.

This is the first self portrait she painted after her divorce while battling with grief of losing her husband. As we can see, she painted herself in cropped hair and an ill-fitting suit. Her shaved long hairs are strewn all over the floor as a symbol of rejection of her femininity. She has an empty expression on her face.

Finding love is one of the greatest joys of life and losing it one of its most devastating disasters, but the more I pondered this particular portrait I disagreed with her rejection of femininity as a response to grief, and questioned what it meant for me.

My femininity, my love and pride for womanhood, my desire to look or not look a certain way can never be attached to acceptance from a man. Loving a man, becoming the love of his life, the desire and passion to share my life with him is entirely different from trying to be a woman just for his sake. Frida cut her hair short because Diego admired her long hair. If she did that to get rid of her feelings for the man she should have looked liberated, free of the burden of loving a man who left her in mental asylum to run around with younger girls.

Were Frida alive today, I would have asked her how she could betray her womanhood? Is a woman only a woman if a man loves her? Will she not remain one if he leaves? After all the bold proclamations of being a woman defying the patriarchal norms of beauty, was her assertion of femininity ultimately a result of a relationship with a man and not something that came from within?

Looking beautiful, looking liking a woman, admiring all the curves in my body, putting on lipstick and mascara, and smiling at my own reflection in the mirror is a joy to me. Claiming my femininity is a thing I do because it makes me happy and not because it would make me pleasing in a man’s eyes. Why Frida would want to get rid of that is beyond my comprehension.

The man I loved with all my heart for more than five years married another woman three short months after our last fight and has married twice since. Yes, it makes me question a lot of things said and done in our relationship, it makes me question my self-worth at times too but never ever did the thought of disowning my feminine self came to my mind. I still dress the same way, use the same makeup, and keep on growing my hair long and cutting it short alternatively, not because a certain man likes or doesn’t like the way I present myself, but to make myself happy. I do not feel that my expression of myself is connected to a man, and it makes me sad that Frida maybe thought that hers was.

My sense of worth as a woman leads me to not being dependent on anyone for approval. To me, asserting my feminism means refusing to be treated like a second class citizen, to proclaim that my work, my decisions, my words, my thoughts, and I as a person are equally important. I hold the same status as any other man in my vicinity and I deserve the same respect, admiration, acceptance, and accolades as he does.

The other thing that makes me curious was her tolerance to Diego’s infidelity and disloyalty. A woman as bold and courageous as Frida, allowed a man to betray her repeatedly. She then accepted him every time he came back to her knowing that it wouldn’t last long. Like clockwork Diego would run after a new girl within weeks, leaving Frida devastated. I understand the concept of love, yet I felt frustrated that her value was so closely tied to her relationship with Diego, and how much her work suffered for it.

Frida’s obsession with Diego overtook her assertive self and that is where she stops being a role model to me. She had once said, ‘Being the wife of Diego is the most marvelous thing in the world..... I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody’s husband and never will be, but he is a great comrade.’ 

With my newly acquired sense of criticism for Frida’ work, I looked into her work and noticed that her portraits changed their tone according to the way Diego treated her. When he loved her, accepted her as his woman, Frida painted herself in the ways he cherished her – long hair, traditional Mexican costume, Tehuana, and jewelry. Whenever they got divorced or separated (they went through both), she would discard the clothes, the decorative jewelry, and cut her hair short and when they reconciled, she painted a self-portrait again with long braided hair.

This makes me wonder if those self-portraits were actually the way Frida was or just a reflection of herself in Diego’s eyes? Who was she to herself, the woman with short hair or the woman with long?

Changing with time is inevitable, our self-image too transforms with that. However, discarding and reclaiming her femininity according to Diego – his behavior and vision makes Frida lose her position as a feminist artist for me.

Womanhood is not a material possession, it has no concrete definition neither can it be described with characteristics nor labels. Instead, it is an abstract concept and that too is a fluid one. You are a woman if you feel like one, if your inner self identifies with the beauty of femininity, when you look at the world with the eyes of a woman irrespective of how the world looks back at you. It is not something that could be switched on and off like a light bulb. It doesn’t matter if you are happy or sad, in a relationship or single, a mother or not, are emotionally vocal or a private person. 

In a world where thousands of women are fighting constantly for equality and a more gender-fluid society, where activists are trying to create an atmosphere for women to be no longer considered subjective to men but be treated as an equal, as a person with individual existence and as creatures of wisdom who have the power to decide for their own, Frida’s paintings remind me of the tragedy of patriarchy on woman potential.

She has been and will always be a world acclaimed painter. Her art, her calibre as a painter,  and the beauty of her work in undeniable and will surely last for centuries to come. I just hope that we can reach a place where artists to come like her will not feel like their self-expression and creativity are tied to their male partners.

Nazia Kamali is a research scholar of Gender and Literature. She has written for local news paper as well as research journals. Additionally her poems have been published in anthologies by Cape Comorin Publishers, PCC Inscape and also in magazines. When not hunched over the keyboard clicking away keys, Nazia is busy admiring birds and trees around her.