Frida Kahlo, born on July 6, 1907, was an incredibly strong woman and an internationally recognized Mexican painter. She was married to the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, whose art she admired. Her work used to carry a competent mix of Mexican and European cultures. Most of her paintings were self-portraits (55 of 143), most notably portraying her pain and sexuality. Kahlo’s “The Roots” is one of her most magnificent works.

In her brief life span, Frida endured what most people cannot even imagine. When she was 19 years old, she had an accident with a tram. She had a broken spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, her right foot was crushed and dislocated, and she also had a dislocated shoulder. She had up to 35 operations, due to this accident. To unleash all her trauma, she transformed her sufferings, on her canvas, into self-portraits, especially “The Roots”. To justify her obsession with self-portraits, she once said: “I paint self-portraits because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint.” everything that goes through my head without any other consideration”.

“The Roots”, painted in 1943, as mentioned above, was one of his most beautiful and identifying self-portraits. She painted it to mark her reunion with her ex-husband, Diego Rivera, after an unwelcome phase of pain and suffering. The painting, in the background of happiness, also shows her feelings about her physical disabilities ‘developed’ in life. Frida had lost her reproductive capacity in the accident and she carried that incompleteness and that pain in her heart. This 12″ X 19.5″ oil on metal reflects Frida’s desire to be part of the female genesis and to be connected to life like everyone else. It shows her desire to have her own children by her. Frida Kahlo loved the rough gray rocks of Pedregal in southern Mexico and placed them as the backdrop for her painting. The detailed, leafless stems around Frida, in the painting, portray her ‘deliberate’ infertility, her gravely wounded body, her lost loves, and the other strangers in her life.

Sotheby’s auctioned “The Roots” at a record price of $5,616,000, the highest price ever achieved by a Latin Mexican artist. Other popular paintings of his were “The Two Fridas”, painted to mark his divorce from Diego, “Tree of Hope” and “My Nurse and I”. Kahlo’s artistic ability was amazing. He absorbed inspirations from different people, cultures and his environment, blending his essence into his personalized, fresh and distinctive style. She competently analyzed not only her physical trauma, but also her lifetime’s psychological trauma, translating into numerous uncharted ideas and emotions. Frida did not paint dreams or fantasies, but her own reality. She actually said, ‘I’m not sick. I’m broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.” The tower of strength, Frida died of her pain on July 13, 1954.