Blog Post #2 - The Lonely Palette: Ep. 40 Frida Kahlo’s “Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia)” (1928) - Emma Pohlman
Frida Kahlo is a very recognizable artists of the twentieth century. She is famous for her striking self-portraits and her touching way of turning pain into art. The podcast The Lonely Palette, episode 40, takes us back to a quieter moment in her career. The podcast focused on the 1928 double portrait Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia). The story behind this painting helps one truly understand how Kahlo’s early experience and the complicated questions about identity that followed her all of her life shaped her art.
Kahlo’s background is full of many traumas and events that someone should never have to live through. She was born in Mexico in 1907 to a German father and mestiza mother who was part European and part Indigenous. As a child, she was very sick and often times bedridden. Later in life, she became an athletic tomboy. Her original plan in life was to become a doctor, but after getting hit by a bus as a teen and having extensive injuries to her spine and pelvis, becoming a doctor was not going to become easy for her. While recovering from her accident, she turned to painting. During her time in school, she met Diego Rivera, a famous muralist. They began a relationship about 3 years after her accident. They then got married and move to the United States for Rivera’s career. While living away from Mexico, Kahlo started to think deeply about her Indigenous Mexican culture. She began to shape her artistic identity around this, and this is what later made her famous.
In the podcast, it was noted that this identity was complicated. Kahlo had a Western-style education and training in Renaissance techniques. She was able to embrace the folk traditions and presented herself as a self-taught outsider. Kahlo dressed in traditional Tehuana clothing, highlighting her Indigenous roots. The tension between her two worlds appears in many of her later works. One of the most famous ones is the 1939 paining The Two Fridas. This painting showed two versions of herself. One in a European dress, and one in an Indigenous dress. They are both seated and holding hands with their hearts connected but also wounded. This image captures her lifelong struggles about who she was and where she belonged.
This painting also holds a special place in Kahlo’s career. This was the first painting that she had ever sold. Not only did she sign and date the front of the painting, but she dated the back of the painting on the day that it sold a little over a year after it had been painted. She celebrated this milestone in her life with professional people that helped her get to this point, as well as friends and family. The back of the painting was also signed by magazine publishers, and friends who celebrated with her including Rivera and her sister. The mix of professional and personal history makes this work feel even more intimate.
Listening to this podcast and learning about the painting so early is Kahlo’s career raises some questions. Why did Kahlo, a young woman from a middle-class family, choose to paint the household staff as her subject? Was she trying to make a statement about class and dignity in Mexico, or was it simply an affectionate tribute to the women she knew well? By removing their aprons, was she freeing them from the roles that society had assigned them, or was she making them less tied to their real lives?
It is also worth thinking about how this portrait connects to the bigger themes in some of her other art. Later in life, Kahlo became famous for her self-portraits that we mixed symbols of Aztec mythology, hearts, blood, skeletons, and personal pain. People often referred to these portraits as magical realism. She suffered many miscarriages, had ongoing health problems and even lost a leg. Through all of this, she kept painting. She said that she doesn’t paint dreams or nightmare, just her own reality. In that sense, Dos Mujeres shows her focus on reality, the real human faces and emotion.
Museum notes from MFA Boston backs up what the podcast suggests about Kahlo being deeply engaged with questions of national identity, class and the representation of “normal” people. Knowing this context also helps us to see Dos Mujeres not as a simple portrait, but as the beginning of Kahlo’s lifelong exploration of who gets to been seen in art.
In the end, this painting and story told in the podcast reminds us that Kahlo’s work wasn’t just about her own suffering, or fame. It was about the empathy by seeing and honoring the lives around her. The portrait of Salvadora and Hermina makes us think about whose stories get to be told and remembered. As a viewer, I am left wondering how many other early paintings we will never get to see of Kahlo’s. Those paintings might tell us about the quieter and more personal sides of who she really was.
Sources:
“Episode 40: Kahlo.” The Lonely Palette Podcast, www.thelonelypalette.com/episode-40-kahlo. Accessed 1 Oct. 2025.
“Frida Kahlo: Dos Mujeres.” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, www.mfa.org/exhibitions/frida-kahlo-dos-mujeres. Accessed 1 Oct. 2025.
Smarthistory – Frida Kahlo, the Two Fridas (Las Dos Fridas), smarthistory.org/kahlo-the-two-fridas-las-dos-fridas/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2025.
I have a female artist that I really admire, Frida Kahlo. I don’t know a lot about all of her works, but I think what draws me to her is her unique way of expressing herself. At first, I was simply attracted to her painting style and started looking into her work, but after watching short documentaries about the accidents she went through and her life story, I began to view her art with a sense of respect for her life itself. When I’m going through difficult times, her artwork gives me a sense of understanding. The way she expressed her own pain seems to create a feeling of empathy and solidarity for me as well.
ReplyDeleteThis is my first exposure to an early work of Frida Kahlo. I am most familiar with her self portraits but Dos Mujeres is a portrait of two other people. This portrait is also notable in how intimate it is, coming into tight focus on the faces of her subjects.
ReplyDeleteThe painting brings to mind the work of contemporary portrait artists Jennifer Packer and Kehinde Wiley and suggests that Kahlo had some influence on these two artists.
Packer creates portraits of her friends and peers but she intentionally hides details from the viewer in these portraits. She is not performative in these protrayals much like Kahlo's intentional choice to remove the aprons so that we see the person unfiltered by the trappings of their worklife.
The parallels to Wiley are more stylistic. He also sets his figures against a patterned abstract background; his portraits radiate personality despite his almost cartoonish color pallate. Wiley achieves an arresting level of engagement with his portraits and attained a level of recognition that places him in the sphere occupied by Kahlo and John Singer Sargent.
On a spectrum from abstract to realistic, I would place Packer as the most abstract of the three (Packer, Kahlo, Wiley) in terms of the physical appearance of her figures and choice of color palette but the most realistic in terms of the setting in which she places her figures. Wiley is just the opposite...depicting the most realistic portraits but set within a highly patterned evocative abstract space. Kahlo's work sets an interesting baseline from which to compare these contemporary artists.
I have heard of Frida Kahlo and her artwork but I never knew of her history and experiences. It is unfortunate that it took a traumatic experience for her to find this beautiful talent and be an inspiration to people in the art world. What I found most beautiful about the painting, Dos Mujeres, is that Kahlo repainted the aprons that were originally there. Instead of seeing the two women as workers, we can imagine them to be anything. They are muses for the art piece and we the audience can see these women as something more than domestic workers.
ReplyDeleteAlso to give an answer to the questions you mentioned above: I do believe Kahlo held a lot of respect for the household staff and that is why she decided to use them as subjects. I believe that she wanted to show that they were more than just household staff, especially if at that time household staff weren't really considered good enough for mutual respect. I also think she was doing both in making a statement about class and dignity in Mexico and making a tribute to the women in her life.
I really enjoy how in-depth this post was, especially the focus on Dos Mujeres rather than Kahlo’s more dramatic, well-known self-portraits. The way you explained her background and complicated identity helped me understand why this early painting matters so much. I liked the point about Kahlo painting over the aprons, being able to see Salvadora and Herminia as individuals rather than workers really does give the piece a quiet sense of dignity. The questions you raised about class, intention, and whether Kahlo was making a statement or simply honoring people she cared about were especially interesting, because they don’t have easy answers. Connecting this painting to her later work and lifelong themes of identity and representation made it feel like a starting point rather than a separate moment. Overall, this post really made me think more deeply about how Kahlo’s empathy and awareness of everyday people shaped her art.
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