What is The Two Fridas?

The Two Fridas is an oil painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The painting was the first large-scale work done by Kahlo and is considered one of her most notable paintings. It is a double self-portrait, depicting two versions of Kahlo seated together. One is wearing a white European-style Victorian dress while the other is wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. The painting was created in 1939, the same year that Kahlo divorced Diego Rivera. Kahlo remarried Rivera a year later and although their second marriage was as troubled as the first, it lasted until her death. The painting is the largest work of Kahlo and also her most famous. Kahlo’s work often refers to powerful mythologies of Mexican identity; the Tehuana woman represented for Kahlo a new positive future of a postcolonial state. The political message of this painting suggests that through adopting an anti-colonial position, a healing of the pains of the past can take place. In the analogy of self and nation, Kahlo characterizes her own emotional and physical problems as symptomatic of the post-colonial condition. Thus the European-style wedding gown and the Tehuana dress of the ‘The Two Fridas’ reflect ideological positions as much as the historical realities of Mexico’s past. The famous painting is currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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