An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London traces the links between her life, her style and her work. Along with 13 of her paintings, it includes some of the thousands of documents, items of clothing and personal possessions which lay sealed in a bathroom in her house in Mexico City for 50 years after she died – the first time these artefacts have been seen outside Mexico. Take the strip cutout and wrap it around the tube doll’s top side of the body. Apply glue to join the overlapped parts of the strip. Kahlo began wearing styles such as the huipil, the traditional dress of the Tehuana women of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, at the time of her marriage to Diego Rivera. Rivera’s socialist endorsement of indigenous culture confirmed Kahlo’s own political and cultural instincts, which she expressed in part through the way she dressed. Dressing as a traditional Mexican woman was a way of confidently asserting who she was and where she was from. O’Gorman gave Rivera and Kahlo a machine to live in, as Le Corbusier would have had it, but also a machine to translate in. Their home brought in foreignness as much as it served as a platform to project a particular idea of Mexico to the world. More than anything, it provided the stage for the power couple of Mexican modernity: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, well-connected and more Mexican than Mexico. The couple’s ultimate oeuvre was, of course, themselves. Kahlo and Rivera were, perhaps, Mexico’s first performance artists, and their casa-estudio was their very own gallery. Row 3-5 Ch 2, turn, [1 DCinc, Ch 2, 1 DCinc, (skip 3st and go into the 4th st)] repeats 18 times, 1 dc (3 rows)

A post-revolutionary symbol of modernity: The casa-estudio designed for Rivera and Kahlo by Juan O’Gorman. Photograph: Pawel Toczynski/Getty Images Cotton huipil with machine-embroidered chain stitch; printed cotton skirt with embroidery and holán Last Halloween, my 21-year-old niece was dragged by her friend to a New York college party. She wasn’t wearing a costume, was not really in the mood. At some point, a trio of Wonder Women stumbled in: red knee-high boots, star print bikini-bottoms, strapless tops, gold headbands fastened around long blond hair. This instance of colonising narratives in cultural translations was not the end but the beginning. In 2002, Harvey Weinstein’s company distributed the film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, asked for a more-sexy Kahlo – more nudity, less unibrow – and got away with it. In a 2016 concert stunt in Mexico, Madonna pulled a Frida lookalike from the audience, said she was “so excited” to finally meet Frida, and then handed her a banana as a token.In likely homage to Kahlo's painting, Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus photographed Wedding Portraits in 1997. On the occasion of her marriage, Brotherus cuts her hair, the remains of which her new husband holds in his hands. The act of cutting one's hair symbolic of a moment of change happens in the work of other female artists too, including that of Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn. The painting also likely inspired a performance and sculptural piece made by Rebecca Horn in 1970 called Unicorn. In the piece Horn walks naked through an arable field with her body strapped in a fabric corset that appears almost identical to that worn by Kahlo in The Broken Column. In the piece by the German performance artist, however, the erect, sky-reaching pillar is fixed to her head rather than inserted into her chest. The performance has an air of mythology and religiosity similar to that of Kahlo's painting, but the column is whole and strong again, perhaps paying homage to Kahlo's fortitude and artistic triumph. It is as if in this painting Kahlo tries on the role of wife to see how it fits. She does not focus on her identity as a painter, but instead adopts a passive and supportive role, holding the hand of her talented and acclaimed husband. It was indeed the case that during the majority of her painting career, Kahlo was viewed only in Rivera's shadow and it was not until later in life that she gained international recognition. This is a haunting painting in which both the birth giver and the birthed child seem dead. The head of the woman giving birth is shrouded in white cloth while the baby emerging from the womb appears lifeless. At the time that Kahlo painted this work, her mother had just died so it seems reasonable to assume that the shrouded funerary figure is her mother while the baby is Kahlo herself (the title supports this reading). However, Kahlo had also just lost her own child and has said that she is the covered mother figure. The Virgin of Sorrows, who hangs above the bed suggests that this is an image that overflows with maternal pain and suffering. Also though, and revealingly, Kahlo wrote in her diary, next to several small drawings of herself, 'the one who gave birth to herself ... who wrote the most wonderful poem of her life.' Similar to the drawing, Frida and the Miscarriage, My Birth represents Kahlo mourning for the loss of a child, but also finding the strength to make powerful art because of such trauma. Sew the lower parts of the flowers. Then fix it by sewing in the middle of the head as in the images Flowers (with red color yarn) make 6

Rnd 27 To join two legs; 2 sc along the left leg, ch 6, join to the middle of the right leg with a slst and 12 sc of the leg, FLO sc over the ch 6 stitches, 10 sc (36) This early double-portrait was painted primarily to mark the celebration of Kahlo's marriage to Rivera. Whilst Rivera holds a palette and paint brushes, symbolic of his artistic mastery, Kahlo limits her role to his wife by presenting herself slight in frame and without her artistic accoutrements. Kahlo furthermore dresses in costume typical of the Mexican woman, or "La Mexicana," wearing a traditional red shawl known as the rebozo and jade Aztec beads. The positioning of the figures echoes that of traditional marital portraiture where the wife is placed on her husband's left to indicate her lesser moral status as a woman. In a drawing made the following year called Frida and the Miscarriage, the artist does hold her own palette, as though the experience of losing a fetus and not being able to create a baby shifts her determination wholly to the creation of art.The notion of being wounded in the way that we see illustrated in The Broken Column, is referred to in Spanish as chingada. This word embodies numerous interrelated meanings and concepts, which include to be wounded, broken, torn open or deceived. The word derives from the verb for penetration and implies domination of the female by the male. It refers to the status of victimhood. Carefully insert the accordion folded round paper through the bottom the side of the tube. Add beads and the flower to the tube doll. In 1933, a few years after Kahlo and Rivera married, they moved in. Rivera’s area was larger, with more work space. Kahlo’s was more “homely”, with a studio that could transform into a bedroom. A flight of stairs led from her studio to a rooftop, which was connected by a bridge to Rivera’s space. Beyond being a workplace, it became a space for the couple’s extramarital affairs: Rivera, with his models and secretaries; Kahlo, with certain talented and famous men, from the sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi to Leon Trotsky. Perhaps without knowing it, O’Gorman designed a house whose function it was to allow an “open” relationship. Last month, Mattel said in a statement that it worked with the Panama-based Frida Kahlo Corp, “which owns all the rights”. As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with Primitivism, Indigenism, Magic Realism, and Surrealism. Posthumously, Kahlo's artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon. The artist's celebrity status for mass audiences has at times resulted in the compartmentalization of the artist's work as representative of interwar Latin American artwork at large, distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's deeply personal subject matter. Recent exhibitions, such as Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago have attempted to reframe Kahlo's cultural significance by underscoring her lasting impact on the politics of the body and Kahlo's challenge to mainstream aesthetics of representation. Dreamers Awake (2017) held at The White Cube Gallery in London further illustrated the huge influence that Frida Kahlo and a handful of other early female Surrealists have had on the development and progression of female art.