Frida Kahlo Velvet Dress Analysis

Frida Kahlo’s honest, often bizarre, self-portraits reflect a beauty beyond the physical--- an impishness in the wide eyes, a small smirk teasing at the corners of her mouth. In her renderings, her cheeks are always heavily rouged, and exotic flowers adorn her raven hair. Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress uses the contrast of light --- Kahlo’s glowing skin --- and dark--- the black background, and in doing so, this painting not only communicates the subject’s outward beauty. It also points to an unspoken turmoil inside of the painter: as dark as the night sky and as deep as rolling sea.

Much of Kahlo’s life was characterized by immense pain resulting from a lifelong battle with polio, and a bus accident in 1925 that left her crippled at the age of eighteen. It was in those lonely evenings, laid up in her hospital bed when Kahlo began to paint herself, as she was the only subject matter she had.

Frida Kahlo was born

Take the exaggerated features of this work; one could suppose that the woman’s neck is too stretched, her tempting dress to too red, the cut of it too low. Consider these features, and this here Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress becomes a caricature-Kahlo and is no longer the genuine artifact.

This mockery is Kahlo’s rejection of the European standard, a rejection of the culture, and it acts as the artist’s way of further embracing her Mexican culture and identity. It would not be too hard to imagine, given that the artist was a notorious firecracker, a rebel and a patriot to the very end.

Kahlo’s Velvet offers a shining example of her own talent and versatility while never abandoning her signature style. Chiefly, it demonstrates the artist’s complexity and her ability to critically examine her cultural identity and herself as only she