Burying pain and filling it with hope,
Dedicated to you who wants to be comforted
Frida Kahlo's 47 Picture Letters

Frida Kahlo is a Mexican genius painter who symbolizes a confident woman.
She was a pretty and smart student with a promising future, but a tragic accident in a moment shattered all her dreams.
But she didn't avoid it.
He showed his strong will to overcome his pain by vividly depicting it in his drawings.
These paintings by Frida Kahlo give us hope in life when we are tired of the hardships of life.

This book contains a total of 47 works by Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo's life is a widely known story, but this book introduces her stories along with her paintings, allowing for a vivid appreciation of her work.
As a book that tells the story of her life, it includes a significant number of lesser-known paintings in addition to her representative works, allowing readers to take a detailed look at Frida Kahlo's life and her state of mind at the time.
Additionally, partial cuts are inserted so that even the smallest details of the painting can be observed without being missed, and as if viewing Frida Kahlo's exhibition with a curator, even her smallest voice and every thought are meticulously conveyed.

Frida Kahlo's paintings are complex and bizarre, reflecting her complex emotions and difficult life, and appear somewhat difficult to understand at first glance.
That is why famous writers who advocated surrealism, including André Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky, praised her as a genius surrealist painter.
But she is a painter who has depicted the reality and feelings she faces better than anyone else.
Frida Kahlo, a painter who was highly praised as a surrealist painter but was more realistic than anyone else, shed tears of physical and mental pain throughout her life due to a tragic accident in a moment, and was unable to break off a love-hate relationship with her husband who betrayed her countless times.
This book tells her story, which could not be fully conveyed in the art museum, through 47 paintings.

She has a lot of ardent fans.
The queen of pop, Madonna, is one of them.
Madonna owns several of her works, including one called "My Birth," and said, "Anyone who doesn't like this painting can't be my friend."
This shows how much of a fanatic she was.

--- p.8

This painting, which Frida Kahlo painted for the first and last time to seduce a man, played a role in bringing Alejandro back to Frida Kahlo before he left for the country, and he worked his magic once again after that.
When Frida Kahlo went to see Diego Rivera, wondering if she could really become a painter, this was one of the works she brought with her, and Diego Rivera was very fond of it.
This was the moment when Frida Kahlo's second destiny began.

--- p.28

Her older self-portraits often show her sitting slightly tilted back, or looking straight ahead with her face turned to the side, but in this self-portrait she is sitting completely upright, looking straight ahead.
I sense a subtle change in her attitude towards the world.
Could this be her intention to face the situation head-on, not avoid it? Her gaze also changed to match that stance.
Staring straight ahead, but the focus is on space.
So, the person facing you doesn't feel burdened.
In the past, most people looked at it aggressively.
--- p.112

On the right, a large snail is floating, tied to a red string.
Frida Kahlo said, “This symbolizes the slow progression of legacy.”
Pleasant things pass quickly, and painful things pass very slowly.
But that day, I experienced not only physical pain but also mental pain.
How long must that painful and agonizing time have felt? The memory of that emotion is expressed as a slow snail.

--- p.232

Although it was a doll, Frida Kahlo gave the newborn doll a separate room and bed to act as a substitute for a baby, and she also made it the main character of her paintings.
But the room is a damp, bare room, devoid of any furniture, and without any bedding.
Although they were the main characters in the painting together, they did not give love to the doll.

--- p.246

This work simultaneously depicts Frida Kahlo's hope and despair, her anticipation of life and death.
The deer was hit by nine arrows.
There are also nine trees on the left that are keeping the deer confined.
If you count the tips of the horns that rise above the deer's head, there are nine.
Nine is interpreted as both a perfect number and an unlucky number.
Frida Kahlo put her heart and soul into even the smallest things.

--- p.280

In a way, that child is Frida Kahlo herself.
It could be that he was depicting his own fate of living his whole life wearing the mask of death, as he always lived in pain and could not help but feel that death was right next to him.
Or perhaps Frida Kahlo, who was particularly fond of children, painted it in memory of a child she saw on the Day of the Dead.
I might have drawn it while thinking about all three of those things.
But whatever the intention, it seems clear that death was near for Frida Kahlo.

--- p.295

Frida Kahlo finished this work eight days before she died.
On the watermelon at the very front, it says 'Viva la vida'.
And below that, he writes his name and 'Coyoacan 1954 Mexico'.
He wrote that this was the last place he lived.
Judging from the fact that she wrote 'Long Live Life' despite suffering from so much pain, she must have been a happy artist.

--- p.346