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Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
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Introduction

Frida Kahlo lived among Mexican votive paintings, ceramics, toys, masks and other objects now often grouped as arte popular. Their colours and materials entered conversations around her art, but the objects were not all made for the same purpose or in the same region. A painted prayer of thanks, a glass surround from Juquila and a pre-Columbian sculptural motif each had a history before Kahlo made anything from them. [1] [2] [3]

The most revealing question is therefore not whether she was a “folk artist” in some general sense. It is what happened when she selected a familiar form, moved it into a painting about her own concerns and changed what that form could say. The answer varies from work to work—and it cannot alone establish what she privately believed. [2] [4] [5]

At a Glance

  • An ex-voto tells of thanks: Mexican painted votives often name a person, a danger, a sacred helper and a reported rescue. [1] [6]
  • The Casa Azul collection: Kahlo and Diego Rivera assembled more than 450 ex-votos, according to the Museo Frida Kahlo. [1]
  • A specific comparison: The museum relates a 1934 votive thanking the Virgin of Talpa after a bedside attack to the composition of A Few Small Nips. [1]
  • More than votives: Kahlo's artistic world also included ceramics, toys, masks, papier-mâché figures and regional craft. [2]
  • Forms are not confessions: Scholars have proposed Christian parallels in several paintings, but visual resemblance cannot by itself prove religious practice. [4] [5]

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. A Votive Painting Is More Than a Style
  3. What Kahlo and Rivera Collected
  4. When the Thanksgiving Story Changes
  5. A Glass Frame and a Tin Frame
  6. Christian Images and an Artist's Beliefs
  7. What Changes in a Museum
  8. Related Reading

A Votive Painting Is More Than a Style

An ex-voto is an offering made in gratitude for a favour believed to have been granted. Many Mexican painted examples compress the account into a small surface: an illness or accident, an intervening sacred figure and an inscription naming the rescued person or donor. Their direct perspective and modest materials can be visually striking, but the original painting also records a devotional act by someone other than the later collector. [1] [2] [6]

The word retablo needs care. It can refer to a sacred image placed in relation to an altar, including a saint picture for domestic use, while retablo ex-voto names a particular kind of thanksgiving offering. People sometimes use the two words interchangeably, yet a saint portrait without a narrated rescue and a votive scene thanking a saint do different work. [2] [6]

These traditions are part of Mexican Catholic history, with colonial antecedents and a flourishing of inexpensive metal votives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are not simply surviving pre-Columbian images. Kahlo could admire a votive picture, use a pre-Columbian form elsewhere and support a modern Mexican national culture without those three histories becoming one timeless source. [6] [7]

Watch: Frida Kahlo

Five perspectives to view here alongside the article.

Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas: Great Art Explained

Great Art Explained

A focused visual introduction to the painting and its context.

What Kahlo and Rivera Collected

At the Casa Azul, Kahlo and Rivera brought together a large collection of votive paintings. The Museo Frida Kahlo describes it as more than 450 works and says that a 2011 exhibition showed 138 of them. Such figures describe a joint collection and a later display, not a list of which partner acquired each piece or how every object was used in the house. [1]

The museum's examples retain the votives' original particulars. One describes a cart overturning near La Barca and gives thanks through St Nicholas of Tolentino; another records a woman surviving an attack in bed and thanks the Virgin of Talpa in 1934. These are not interchangeable symbols of Kahlo's own accident or pain. They speak first of named people, dangers and sacred helpers, even as Kahlo's collecting gave them another setting. [1]

Casa Azul contained other kinds of objects, too: furniture, toys, ceramics, clothing and works made for everyday use. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, brought eight Kahlo paintings into dialogue with about forty examples of Mexican popular art, including masks, pottery and children's toys. The exhibition helps show the range of her interests, but an object displayed alongside a painting is not automatically one she owned. [1] [2]

That distinction is concrete in two exhibition examples. The large Judas figure seen at the Boston exhibition was commissioned in 2018 from Leonardo Linares, although historical figures of this kind appear in Casa Azul photographs. A painted 1777 votive shown with Kahlo's work in Paris in 1939 belonged to André Breton. Neither should quietly enter an inventory of her own belongings. [2]

When the Thanksgiving Story Changes

The bedside-attack votive at the Casa Azul gives a particularly precise point of comparison. Its inscription thanks the Virgin of Talpa for the woman's survival, and the museum notes a compositional resemblance to Kahlo's A Few Small Nips. Kahlo's painting does not offer the same reassurance of rescue or grateful resolution. [1]

This does not prove that she copied that one votive directly. It does show how a format associated with a moment of danger could become a way of confronting violence without supplying a miracle. Mexican art historian Teresa del Conde argued more broadly that Kahlo chose popular conventions deliberately while changing the logic of devotional thanksgiving. Her insight is a reading of the work, not a reason to treat every small painting on metal as an ex-voto. [5]

The Museum of Fine Arts proposes another transformation in My Grandparents, My Parents and I. It points to the work's metal support and shifting spatial relationships as echoes of votive painting, but notes that Kahlo places ancestors where a votive might place saints. MoMA's object record identifies the support more precisely as zinc and describes family lines set across Mexican land and the Atlantic. [2] [11]

Family genealogy, rather than a story of intercession, becomes the subject. MoMA has also read that genealogy in the context of racial laws in 1930s Germany; this is the museum's later interpretation, not a statement of Kahlo's exact intention. The formal ex-voto comparison is useful, but cannot contain every historical question raised by the painting, nor does it mean she offered devotion to her relatives. [2] [11]

A Glass Frame and a Tin Frame

In The Frame, Kahlo's painted self-portrait is joined to a reverse-painted glass surround made in Juquila, Oaxaca. Centre Pompidou describes the glass as a craft object originally suited to a mirror or a holy picture. The assembled work makes the surround part of the experience of looking at the portrait, rather than treating a frame as merely neutral furniture. [3]

The museum likens the result to an ex-voto. That analogy points to intimacy and the meeting of image and popular craft, but the record does not say the work was offered to a saint in thanks for a miracle. Nor is Juquila glass the same medium or devotional object as the Talpa votive. Kahlo's use of a pre-existing surround matters precisely because the components remain distinct. [3]

Survivor, made in 1938, offers another material pairing: an oil-on-metal miniature in a handmade Oaxacan tin frame. Christie's catalogue separates this work from The Airplane Crash, with which an earlier catalogue had confused it. Those details secure an object identity before an interpretation is attached to it. [8]

In the same catalogue, Salomon Grimberg reads Survivor as an ex-voto of survival and connects its small central figure to a pre-Columbian Colima source. His comparison brings an older sculptural tradition, a modern painted miniature and Oaxacan metalwork into view. It remains his interpretation of their meaning: the catalogue's material facts alone do not tell us that Kahlo made a devotional promise, or identify a single private crisis that the work must encode. [8]

Christian Images and an Artist's Beliefs

Christian imagery can offer another way to read particular Kahlo paintings. Art historian María A. Castro-Sethness compares Henry Ford Hospital and My Birth with images of the sorrowing Virgin, and sees a possible resemblance between the exposed, wounded figure of The Broken Column and depictions of Christ shown to the crowd. She also proposes a Eucharistic reading of the vine imagery in Roots. These are detailed art-historical hypotheses, not inscriptions by Kahlo stating what each picture means. [4]

The distinction matters because similarities in pose, wounds or the placement of a sacred image can be seen without deciding that Kahlo practised Catholic devotion throughout her life. Castro-Sethness makes that larger claim, but the comparison of paintings alone does not establish it. A reading that makes every act of visual borrowing a declaration of faith is as reductive as one that refuses to see Christian forms because Kahlo also had political commitments. [4] [5]

Her work arose in a post-revolutionary culture in which artists and intellectuals argued over what Mexican national art should include. Popular objects could be valued for their makers and for their association with an independent cultural identity; they could also be reclassified and displayed by urban collectors. Kahlo's political engagements belong to that history, but a political label cannot serve as a key to every religious image she adapted. The paintings ask us to examine the actual form and context rather than choose a single label for the person. [2] [5] [9]

What Changes in a Museum

Collecting and exhibiting a votive changes its audience. At a shrine or in a home, it was linked to a particular request and an act of gratitude; in Kahlo's house or a later museum it may also be viewed for composition, colour and its relation to her paintings. Those later views can deepen understanding, provided they do not erase the first person's story. [1] [10]

An essay by the Votives Project makes this point about the V&A's 2018 Making Herself Up exhibition. It argues that when votives chiefly illustrate Kahlo's accident or Mexican identity, the worshippers' devotional purposes can recede. That is a critique of a particular display, not proof that every museum has failed or that the objects have only one meaning. [10]

Kahlo's own achievement is clearest when both sides stay visible: the maker and earlier user of an object, and the artist who found new pictorial possibilities in it. The Virgin of Talpa's rescue, the Juquila glass surround and the Oaxacan tin frame should not dissolve into one generic “folk” style. They help us see how selectively Kahlo worked—and how much a painting can change a familiar form without ceasing to carry traces of where it came from. [1] [3] [8]

  • A Few Small Nips examines the painting's violence and votive comparison in detail.
  • The Frame follows the assembled portrait and its early Paris history.
  • Frida Kahlo's Politics considers the artist's political commitments in their own chronology.
  • Frida Kahlo's Fashion explores another form of visual self-presentation and regional material culture.

Discussion

Use the cited evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. The prompts below are starting points, not fixed interpretations.

Reader Insights

Close Looking

How does a votive picture of thanks differ from a painting that adapts its format without a miracle?

Context

What changes when a Juquila glass surround, an Oaxacan tin frame and a Colima motif are treated as distinct sources?

Open Question

Can a Christian visual parallel tell us about Kahlo's private religious practice, or only about one way to read a painting?

Join the Conversation

Which reading best fits the evidence, and where does uncertainty remain?

References

  1. Museo Frida Kahlo, Casa Azul collection and “Con veras de mi corazón” exhibition records, especially the ex-votos thanking St Nicholas of Tolentino and the Virgin of Talpa. View source text.
  2. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular,” exhibition account, 25 January 2019. View source text.
  3. Centre Pompidou, Le cadre / The Frame, collection record and object description. View source text.
  4. María A. Castro-Sethness, “Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-voto Paintings on Her Art,” Woman's Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2004–05), pp. 21–24; accessible journal scan. View source text.
  5. Teresa del Conde, “Lo popular en la pintura de Frida Kahlo,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 13, no. 45 (1976), pp. 195–203. View source text.
  6. María A. Castro-Sethness, “Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World,” pp. 21–22, for the distinction between retablo saint pictures and narrated ex-voto offerings. View source text.
  7. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, account of Raúl Cano Monroy's Por un favor recibido presentation and the history of Mexican ex-votos, 2023. View source text.
  8. Christie's, Survivor, lot catalogue and essays by Salomon Grimberg and Laurette E. McCarthy, 2010. View source text.
  9. Joëlle Guyot, “Mythes identitaires et histoire dans l'œuvre de Frida Kahlo,” América 3 (1988), pp. 81–99. View source text.
  10. The Votives Project, “Frida Kahlo's ex-voto collection in Making Herself Up, V&A London,” 4 March 2019. View source text.
  11. Museum of Modern Art, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, collection record and 2024 Vital Signs gallery label. View source text.