Research : Judy Chicago on Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo.

Judy Chicago on Frida Kahlo : The power and originality of F.K's paintings. She expanded the scope of art, making room for the private, the shameful, the hidden, and the ignored, demonstrating that these are all aspects of the human condition. Kahlo was able to transform her private reality into universal truths, thereby transcending the rallying cry of 1970s feminism-that the personal is the political. Instead, her work teaches us that through art, one person's private universe has the capacity to reveal many people's experiences.

See : Kahlo's work on "The Dream" (1940) Oil on canvas.

Kahlo : "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, i have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

Kahlo belongs to that small group of artists for whom the absence of conventional training is not a drawback.

See : Portrait of Luther Burbank by Kahlo (RIGHT) (pg69 on Frida Kahlo : Face to Face by Judy Chicago )

Frances Borzello : "Self-portraiture has a long tradition of being used by artists to speak about themselves and their concerns. With modernism, the tradition expanded to include the depictions of psychological and emotional states, a development which interested the women who became artists in the twentieth century."