Frida Kahlo 1907-1954: Pain and Passion - Couverture souple

Pain anf Passion (1907-1954)"I remember that I was four [actually, she was five} years old when the 'tragic ten days' tooK'place. I witnessed with my own eyes Za-pata's peasants' battie against the Carrancistas."1With these words Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), writing in her di-ary in the early 1940s, described her memories of the Decena Tra-gica, the "tragic ten days" of February 1913. Indeed, her identifica-tion with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was so strong that she ahvays gave the year of her birth as 1910. Following the colonial era and the thirty-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Dıaz, the Revolution aimed to effect fundamental changes in the country's so-cial structure. Frida Kahlo apparently decided that she and the new Mexico were born at the same time. in truth, however, she was three years the elder: Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderön was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoacan, then a suburb of Mexico City, as the third of four daughters born to Matilde and Guillermo Kahlo.

The author: Andrea Kettenmann (born in 1959) studied art history in Gieen, Gottingen and Heidelberg before joining the art history department of the University of Hamburg. In 1986 she visited Mexico on a fellowship, and now lives there, working as a freelance art historian. She has now worked on a number of exhibitions and catalogues, including the catalogue for the retrospective on Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo's husband, in Detroit.