The reason Frida Kahlo never smiled

The face of twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has become iconic. In somber self-portrait after self-portrait, she presented an unflinchingly honest depiction of imperfect beauty: bushy eyebrows that meet to form a unibrow, an unmistakable moustache on her upper lip, and a body increasingly wracked by injury and infection. In her paintings, she exposed every inch of her body to public scrutiny. With one notable exception. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:400/0*KbTZZCi-lwQ5bpE5" style="height:400px; width:400px" /> Through her surreal, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/primitivism" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">primitivist</a> art, Kahlo offered an intimate look at her entire body, which had been ravaged first by polio as a child, then by a horrific accident as a teenager. She displayed her damaged spine in “ <a href="https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-broken-column.jsp#prettyPhoto%5Bimage1%5D/0/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Broken Column</a>,” her bleeding thigh in “Remembrance of an Open Wound,” her heart and blood vessels in “ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Fridas#/media/File:The_Two_Fridas.jpg" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Two Fridas</a>,” her diseased foot in “ <a href="https://www.fridakahlo.org/what-i-saw-in-the-water.jsp#prettyPhoto%5Bimage1%5D/0/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">What the Water Gave Me</a>,” and her naked body in the midst of a miscarriage in “ <a href="https://www.fridakahlo.org/henry-ford-hospital.jsp#prettyPhoto%5Bimage1%5D/0/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Henry Ford Hospital</a>.” But there’s one part of her body that Kahlo never painted: her teeth. She never painted herself smiling. <a href="https://katherineluck.medium.com/the-reason-frida-kahlo-never-smiled-681c15c17174">Learn More</a>