Self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, " Self-portrait in a velvet dress "

I’ll talk about a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo who called “Self-portrait in a velvet dress”.

Frida Kahlo is a Mexican painter and she is part of surrealist movement. When she was just 20 she had a serious accident. She had to stay into the hospital during almost one year. Therefore, she started to paint but it was very difficult because she couldn’t move and sit down and she had to stay over her back.

That’s why her friends decided to put a mirror in the ceiling because it’s easier to see what she paints. And then she begins to paint her-self and made some self-portrait. This painting is the first self-portrait paint in 1926. It was painted as a gift for her student boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, who had left her. She wanted make him come back and prove him her love. Alejandro was seduced but Alejandro’s parents sent him in Europe to get away from her.

We can see in this portrait that Frida was very interesting by Italian painting because there is a big neck and a beautiful velvet dress that refers to many Italian painting. In this portrait, Frida is very smart and serious whereas in some other painting it’s more provocative and shocking. She is wearing a velvet dress to prove to Alejandro her dignity and her nobility. There are mostly dark colours except her face in order to highlight her intense look. She wants him to show she’s sad and she wants him back. This self-portrait was one of four paintings that Frida took to show Diego Rivera (her future husband) and ask his opinion of her work. After viewing the paintings, Rivera remarked that he was most interested in this self-portrait because it was the most original. So this portrait made her famous.

In most of her works, Frida was painting her pain. Lots of bad thinks happened to Frida during her life like accident, divorce, miscarriage she lost a baby twice. She suffered a lot and she had lots of critical about her paintings. At the end of her life she probably killed herself because her last sentence she said was “I hope I’ll be happy in another world and I hope I’ll never come back”.

I chose this portrait because first it’s a self-portrait and I find that interesting, then I like this painter because she is very original and paint some painting that make me think. Why this picture and not another because it’s easier to understand and explain what she wanted to say.

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