Already the very beginning of Frida’s life is an example of her ability to package and promote her own persona. She was born in 1907, but consistently stated that 1910 was the year of her birth: she did this to link her life with the life of the Mexican nation-state. At birth, she was named “Frieda” but later changed it to “Frida” in solidarity with the German people who were being oppressed by the Nazi government.
Two of the most basic facts about any human being — one’s name and one’s date of birth — were recreated by Frida about herself.
She also sometimes took liberties in telling her family’s history: at times, she described them as Hungarian Jews, whereas they were in reality Lutherans from southwest Germany.
If Frida re-made her life’s story, it may have been because she was following a family tradition. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, reinvented himself when he emigrated from Germany and immigrated to Mexico in 1891. Born in the 1870s, he renamed himself Guillermo. Explaining Wilhelm’s life, historian Hayden Herrera writes that “he was a successful photographer who had just been commissioned by the Mexican government to record the nation’s architectural heritage.”
As a photographer, Wilhelm had an eye for things like form, shape, space, line, and texture — the elements of an image. He introduced Frieda to painting. The skill transfer from his photography to her painting was one dimension of their close parent-child relationship, as Hayden Herrera explains:
Guillermo Kahlo was a fastidious technician with a stubbornly objective approach to what he saw; in his photographs, as in his daughter’s paintings, there are no tricky effects, no romantic obfuscation.
For Wilhelm Kahlo — for business purposes using the name Guillermo — to receive a significant contract from the Mexican government “was a remarkable achievement for a man who had arrived in Mexico without great prospects, just thirteen years before.” He’d arrived in Mexico and worked in a variety of small businesses in the German emigre community there. His career didn’t seem to have a strong sense of direction until he got into photography. This was the world into which Frieda was born, as Hayden Herrera reports:
He arrived in Mexico City with almost no money and few possessions. Through his connections with other German immigrants, he found a job as a cashier in the Cristaleria Loeb, a glassware store. Later he became a salesman in a bookstore. Finally, he worked in a jewelry store called La Perla, which was owned by fellow countrymen with whom he had traveled from Germany to Mexico.
Wilhelm was able to nimbly shift from one business to another because he had a good education — although an education which was broken off before it was complete. He’d been a student at the university in Nünberg, but a head injury left him susceptible to epileptic seizures and unable to earn his diploma.
Frida sometimes helped her father when he was experiencing a seizure. Later in life, she faced her own physical health problems — first polio, then injuries from a bus accident — equipped with the example of her father, who dealt with a medical condition and yet excelled in his profession.
At home, Frida spoke German with her father. The Kahlo family sent at least some, if not all, of their children to the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a school which functioned in German.
Although professionally successful, Guillermo remained a foreigner:
He never really felt at ease in Mexico, and although he was anxious to be accepted as Mexican, he never lost his strong German accent.
In addition to photography and painting, Guillermo filled the family home with culture, giving his children exposure to literature and music.
As befitted a cultured European of that period in Mexico, he also had a small but carefully selected library — mainly German books, including works by Schiller and Goethe, as well as numerous volumes of philosophy.
His working rooms in the house contained his photographic equipment, including cameras and lenses imported from Germany. “Above his desk and dominating the room was a large portrait of a personal hero, Arthur Schopenhauer.”
Hayden Herrera records Guillermo’s daily routine:
Every evening Guillermo Kahlo returned home at the same hour. Solemn, courteous, a little severe, he greeted his family, then went directly into the room that housed his German piano and shut himself in for an hour. His passions were Beethoven first, then Johann Strauss.
Just as she had changed her name from “Frieda” to “Frida” as a protest to the brutalities which the Nazis inflicted on the Germans, so also Guillermo opposed Naziism.
Frida saw bravery, both in the way that Guillermo lived with his physical handicap, and in the way that he took a stand against Naziism. She wrote: “He suffered for sixty years with epilepsy, but he never stopped working, and he fought against Hitler.”
The mature works of Frida Kahlo manifest that she shared her father’s passion for the visual arts, his perseverance in the face of physical handicaps, and his thoughtful reflection on culture.
