Frida Kahlo (July 61907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter of the indigenous culture of her country in a style combining Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism, an active communist supporter, and wife of the Mexican muralist and cubist painter Diego Rivera.

Kahlo was noted for her unconventional appearance, declining to remove her facial hair (she had a small mustache and unibrow which she exaggerated in self portraits), and for her flamboyantly styled clothing, drawn largely from traditional Mexican dress.

Biography

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Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón in her parents' house in Coyoacán, which at the time was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was a German who was born in 1871 in Pforzheim, Germany as Carl Wilhelm Kahlo to Lutheran parents whose antecedents, craftsmen, soldiers, gingerbread bakers and sluice keepers, have been traced back to the 16th century. His father was the jeweller and goldsmith Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and his wife Henriette née Kaufmann, both of whom were ethnic Germans and Lutherans (although some sources incorrectly claim that her father was Jewish^*). Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19 where he then changed his German forename for its Spanish equivalent, Guillermo. Her mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was of primarily indigenous descent mixed with Spanish. Frida was the product of an unhappy marriage; her father had hastily married her mother after his first wife died in childbirth. For most of her life, Kahlo was closer to her father than to her mother. The young Frida suffered a bout of polio at age six, which left her right leg looking much thinner than the other. Still, with her father's encouragement and with the feisty and brash personality that she kept throughout her life, she overcame her disability. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of the top schools in Mexico. She was one of only 35 girls. Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution took place. It was a moment that changed Kahlo's life.

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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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