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.
I built a complex iconography from Aztec and Christian sources and used my own body — wounded, as a child, in Tehuana dress or a man's suit — as a metaphor to question gender, race and class in Mexican culture.
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.
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.
In my own words: painting made my life full. My writing — journals, letters, illustrated diaries — records how completely work and art filled my life.
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.
I made self-portraits the core of my art because I knew no subject better. Painting from a mirror above my easel, I used my own face and body to explore identity and existence.
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.
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.
