The Surrealist Playlist: Frida Kahlo’s favourite music
Frida Kahlo is one of the most beloved and renowned painters in contemporary history. Not only are her paintings representative of the surrealist style, but they’re deeply representative of her own life, merging metaphors and imagery with true stories and explorations of herself. Though her years are marked with pain and illness, Kahlo also once said, “Everything can have beauty, even the worst horror”. Among even the worst moments of physical or emotional suffering, she always had three things: her spirit, her art, and the music she loved.
Even though Kahlo is best known as a painter, her life was far more dynamic than any one label could capture. In her work, she was a vivid storyteller. Paintings like ‘Diago and I’ or ‘The Two Fridas’ or the devastating ‘Henry Ford Hospital’ tell whole tales in her brush strokes. Her work is heavy with meaning as she translated her experiences in artistry, dealing with the topics of child loss, heartbreak, disability, betrayal and belonging.
Belonging is especially key in understanding Kahlo. Throughout her work, the self-portrait is perhaps her most common painting. She regularly returned to the image of herself. As someone who spent the majority of their life ill and a fair amount of it bedbound, her paintings became a way of understanding herself or feeling seen and understood in the world. A major element of that was connecting her own image with her culture.
Kahlo was a proud Mexican woman. She was born and raised in Mexico City, and even when she was pulled away from her home country, her heart yearned to be back there. Her painting ‘Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States‘ shows this best, as Kahlo’s figure is stuck between two places: her home, where she feels contextualised and understood, and abroad, where she feels alien. Her Mexican identity is found in some way in everything she does, from the traditional style of her paintings to the images and characters that inhabit her work.
It also rules over her tastes. As well as art, Kahlo loved music, along with really any other kind of culture she could get. Despite her pain, she clung to life, eager for experience, joy and excitement. Music was a part of that. Naturally, traditional Mexican folk music and mariachi soundtracked a lot of her life, even from bands in her home country or, as she listened, homesick from abroad. Famous Mexican singer and actor Jorge Negrete was one of her favourite artists, along with Chavela Vargas. She loved the traditional Cancion Ranchera singers who define Mexico’s musical history, keeping the sound of home close, wherever she was.
But her taste expanded beyond that. As a child, she was raised by a German father who played the piano. He introduced her to the European masters of classical music. She’d hear him play pieces by Beethoven and Strauss, forging a lifelong love for evocative, moving symphonies and concertos.
Beyond her childhood home or native land, Kahlo’s hunt for culture never stopped. In 1938, she travelled to New York alone for a solo gallery show. While the city’s art scene became obsessed with Kahlo’s traditional, colourful Mexican dress and style, she became obsessed with NYC’s music. While in the city, she discovered their jazz scene. In her months there, she painted very little but did a lot while her health allowed her to go out and hear the sounds coming out of the city’s jazz bars. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and The Mills Brothers were the stars of the moment, and the artist became a fan.
With tastes as dynamic as her work and sitting in the same tradition of merging pain and emotion with vibrant, impassioned power and life, Kahlo’s favourite songs feel like another beautiful reflection of who she was. Combining her home, her proud nationality and her explorations abroad, a playlist of her favourite songs is like a snapshot of her life.
