Madonna was a teenager when she first encountered the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) in a museum in Detroit, in her native Michigan (USA). This is what the American singer herself has said in interviews and has recently mentioned it in her concerts at the Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City – she started her presentations on April 20 and 21, and will continue on the 23rd, 24th and 26th. The encounter of the queen of pop with a painting of Frida marked her for life. You could even say that her vision of her art is largely based on that connection. “I love Frida Kahlo. “She looked for herself in her paintings and I do the same with my songs,” Madonna told her audience at a concert in Mexico City in 2016. Last weekend she told her followers at the Palacio de los Deportes : “I went to the only museum of Diego Rivera in Detroit [el Instituto de las Artes de Detroit], but I was only interested in the small painting of a woman with long hair and big eyes. I read her story and she gave me hope.”
Although Madonna has not specified which Frida Kahlo work she is referring to, there are at least two that could fit her description: Estate (1943), in which Frida is portrayed lying with her black hair among large green leaves, some of them protruding from her chest and abdomen – there are versions that the singer secretly acquired it at an auction – or it could also have been of Henry Ford Hospital or The Flying Bed (1932), a painting begun in sketches by the Mexican artist in Detroit, during her convalescence from a spontaneous abortion, which shows Frida in a hospital bed, naked and with a stain of blood on the sheet. Around her there are three floating symbols connected to her by a red thread, among them the baby she lost, and three more figures on her floor. This work is located in the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico City.
Detroit was a key city for Frida Kahlo and her husband, the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957). Kahlo and Rivera settled there in the early 1930s. Between 1932 and 1933, he painted the murals Detroit Industry in the central courtyard of the local Institute of Arts, inspired by the relationship between the city and the automotive industry. On July 4, 1932, Frida suffered the abortion that gave rise to her oil painting, after taking a doctor’s recommendation to continue with her pregnancy after having had to interrupt a previous one in 1930. Dr. Leo Eloesser argued that It was more convenient to keep the baby than to have an abortion, despite her physical condition due to a tram accident in her adolescence in which she had suffered multiple injuries to her pelvis, collarbone, spine and one leg.
Madonna was born in Bay City (Michigan) in 1958, four years after the death of Frida Kahlo in 1954, at the age of 47. Pain is a common element in both. Frida for her physical ailments and Madonna for the death of her mother, due to cancer, when she was five years old. That is why it was fundamental for her to discover Kahlo’s work when she was a teenager. It was an event prior to her move from Detroit to New York, in 1978, to seek an artistic future, first as a dancer and then as a singer. “[Frida] He used his arms and his paint to transform pain into beauty. She grew up as an outcast and I can relate to that. If Frida Kahlo could endure all the pain and suffering and continue creating wonderful works without feeling sorry for herself, [pensé que] I could too. “She has always been a source of inspiration and a muse for me,” Madonna told Vanity Fair in 2023.
Tribute from artist to artist
Frida Kahlo’s influence on the queen of pop can be seen in her costumes, in her aesthetics on stage, in her speeches and messages, and in the collection of works she owns. On July 6, 2019, for example, Madonna commemorated the birth of the Mexican artist on the social network X, accompanying a message —Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo. Madame. eternal muse (eternal muse)—with four images alluding to the Mexican. One of them is a version of the painting The two Fridas in which she appears next to the painter.
On the album cover Rebel Heart (2015) Madonna is seen with a tangled black thread on her face, an image that resembles a black and white photograph of Frida Kahlo with a string around her face, distributed in the same areas: over the eyebrows, and around the nose and lips.
At one of her concerts in Mexico City in 2016, Madonna pointed out a Frida Kahlo in the audience and stated that the most beautiful colors were the ones she painted, just before singing True blue, and also dedicated Who’s that girl? The singer has at least two works by Kahlo in her art collection: My birth and Self-portrait with monkey, according to the site RobbReport.
In one of her recent presentations at the Palacio de los Deportes, the pop diva has elevated her to the role of “mother” for herself and spirit animal.
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