Happy 114th (or 111th?) Birthday, Frida Kahlo

There were lots of celebratory posts of Frida Kahlo’s birthday yesterday and indeed, her birth certificate states that she was born on July 6, 1907.

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But on the wall of her bedroom in La Casa Azul (The Blue House) there is this inscription: “Aquinacio Frida Kahlo el dia 7 de julio de 1910” which translates to “Here Frida Kahlo was born on July 7, 1910”.

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Frida changed her birth date to coincide with the year of the Mexican Revolution.

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As Hayden Herrera states in her biography “Claiming perhaps a greater truth than strict fact would allow, she chose as her birth date not the true year, but 1910, the year of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Since she was a child of the revolutionary decade, when the streets of Mexico City were full of chaos and bloodshed, she decided that she and modern Mexico had been born together.”

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So, Happy Birthday, Frida, once more.

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Self-Portrait – Time Flies, 1929, oil on masonite. Painted the year she married Diego.