About one third of Kahlo’s paintings are self-portraits which are intensely personal and directly relate to her life. This quality in her work compels people to look at her biography for the meaning behind her images. This preoccupation with her life,Pablo Picasso paintings which is a dramatic read, allows skeptics to accuse, wrongly, that her popularity is due to her biography and not because her paintings are anything particularly special (Lowe 75). Her art breathes and beats with life; however, she is often overlooked and written off as overrated,Frida Kahlo paintings since her fascinating biography continues to shadow her visionary work, which is offered as a collection, not unlike a storybook,Diego Rivera paintings detailing her life (Mencimer 1).
Part of the problem is the difficulty one faces when trying to define Frida Kahlo’s art work. Her paintings have an almost conscious unwillingness to be labeled and categorized. Her earliest paintings display a rudimentary working of cubist ideas, where the composition is broken into many facets,Fabian Perez paintings while her later painting titled My Dress Hangs There, uses a collaged cubism (Herrera 41, 101). However, by no stretch can Kahlo be neatly fitted into a cubist’s box.