Perspective

Frida Kahlo is a Mexican artist and intellectual. She is strongly influenced by the Surrealist tradition in art and a lot of her art borrows from this tradition. Diary pages are full of fantastic creatures like angels and impossible circumstances, like monsters made from nude women, or body parts littering a field. Kahlo delights in playful "automatic writing," in which she writes whatever happens to enter her head. At other times, she might play association games where one word evokes another and these words are strung together into free-form poetry. Kahlo also believes that truth is self-knowledge, and so many of the figures in her work represent herself to one degree or another.

Kahlo is deeply involved in the Communist movement. She believes Communism to be the wave of the future and the promise of a better life for all. She frequently heaps praise upon Communism's founders and...