I am a Mexican painter of portraits, self-portraits and works drawn from the nature and artifacts of Mexico. I use a naive folk art style to question identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society.
In April 1953 Lola Alvarez Bravo staged my first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Arte Contemporaneo. Under orders of bed rest, I had my four-poster bed moved to the gallery and arrived by ambulance.
In 1943 I took a teaching post at La Esmeralda, the national school of painting, sculpture and engraving. I taught students to value Mexican popular culture and folk art and to draw their subjects from the street.
Through the 1940s I refused to adapt my style to clients' wishes. Regular private patrons, a 5,000-peso national prize for Moses in 1946 and the Museo de Arte Moderno's purchase of The Two Fridas in 1947 made my art pay.
After 1939 I changed how I made my art to earn my own living: large canvases instead of small tin sheets, fewer graphic details, more quarter-length portraits — and painted The Two Fridas and Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.
In 1939 I arrived in Paris to find my paintings stuck in customs and no gallery. With Marcel Duchamp I staged the show at Renou et Colle, and the Louvre bought The Frame — the first work by a Mexican artist in its collection.
In November 1938 I held my first solo exhibition at Julien Levy's gallery in Manhattan and sold about half of the 25 paintings during the Great Depression — the moment my art reached an international public.
In Detroit in 1932 I took up the retablo — the small votive painting on metal made by amateur artists — instead of the mural, and used it to tell narrative and allegory in Henry Ford Hospital and My Birth.
My artistic ambition was to paint for the Mexican people. Within Mexicanidad I drew on Indigenous culture and folk art to resist the colonial idea that Europe defines civilization.
Before I chose art as a career I studied drawing with printmaker Fernando Fernández and, in 1925, became his paid engraving apprentice; I also learned photo retouching. That training gave my art its precise line.
