Quiz on Frida Kahlo

What art form is Frida Kahlo most famous for creating?

• Sculptures
• Paintings ✓ (Correct answer)
• Murals
• Photographs

Source: Though her husband painted huge murals, Frida focused on intimate easel paintings, many of them self-portraits.

Which country was Frida Kahlo from?

• Argentina
• Spain
• Mexico ✓ (Correct answer)
• Colombia

Source: Frida wrapped her identity in Mexican folk culture, wearing traditional Tehuana dress as a badge of national pride.

Which subject did Frida Kahlo paint most often?

• Herself ✓ (Correct answer)
• Cityscapes
• Religious icons
• Still-life flowers

Source: Roughly a third of her works are self-portraits; she said she painted herself because she was so often alone.

What facial feature is instantly associated with Frida's self-portraits?

• A facial scar
• Painted teardrops
• Joined eyebrows ✓ (Correct answer)
• Red eyeshadow

Source: Frida deliberately emphasized her unibrow and faint moustache, refusing to soften them for the sake of beauty.

What recurring physical health struggle shaped much of Frida's adult life?

• Severe asthma
• Failing eyesight
• Chronic pain ✓ (Correct answer)
• Heart disease

Source: Dozens of operations followed her bus accident, and chronic pain became the raw material of her most haunting canvases.

What does Frida's blue-walled childhood home in Mexico City go by today?

• The Blue House ✓ (Correct answer)
• The Red Villa
• Casa Azteca
• The Garden House

Source: La Casa Azul, painted cobalt blue, is now a museum drawing crowds to the rooms where Frida was born and died.

A major life event left Frida bedridden and sparked her painting. What was it?

• Polio in childhood
• A bus crash ✓ (Correct answer)
• A house fire
• A horse-riding fall

Source: At 18, a steel handrail pierced her body in a bus collision; she began painting from a special easel above her bed.

Frida often surrounded herself in paintings with which living things?

• Owls and hawks
• Horses and dogs
• Bulls and goats
• Monkeys and parrots ✓ (Correct answer)

Source: Her pet monkeys and parrots appear as protective companions, standing in for the children she could never have.

Which famous muralist did Frida Kahlo marry?

• Rufino Tamayo
• David Siqueiros
• José Orozco
• Diego Rivera ✓ (Correct answer)

Source: Frida married Diego Rivera twice, calling their stormy union the second of the two great accidents of her life.

Which traditional clothing style did Frida adopt as her signature look?

• Flamenco gowns
• Tehuana dresses ✓ (Correct answer)
• Charro suits
• Maya huipils only

Source: The flowing Tehuana costume from Oaxaca let Frida hide her injured leg while celebrating indigenous matriarchal culture.

Which surrealist leader hailed Frida's art, a label she herself rejected?

• André Breton ✓ (Correct answer)
• Salvador Dalí
• Max Ernst
• Marcel Duchamp

Source: Breton called her a surrealist, but Frida snapped that she painted her own reality, not dreams.

Which political cause did Frida actively champion throughout her life?

• Mexican monarchism
• Anarchism
• Communism ✓ (Correct answer)
• Liberal capitalism

Source: A committed Communist, Frida had her last public outing weeks before death, protesting at a rally in a wheelchair.

Which exiled Russian revolutionary had an affair with Frida while staying at her home?

• Nikolai Bukharin
• Vladimir Lenin
• Joseph Stalin
• Leon Trotsky ✓ (Correct answer)

Source: Trotsky lodged at the Blue House after fleeing Stalin; his brief romance with Frida ended their friendship coldly.

Frida's painting 'The Two Fridas' depicts her with what unusual detail between the figures?

• A broken mirror
• A shared artery ✓ (Correct answer)
• A bleeding heart locket
• A pair of doves

Source: A single vein links the two Fridas; one heart bleeds out, painted as she divorced Diego and felt herself split apart.

In her painting 'The Broken Column', what splits Frida's torso open?

• An iron chain
• A flowering vine
• A jagged mirror
• A cracked pillar ✓ (Correct answer)

Source: A shattered Greek column stands in for her ruined spine, her body pierced with nails yet refusing to weep.

Which French museum bought a Frida self-portrait, a first for a 20th-century Mexican artist?

• Musée d'Orsay
• The Louvre ✓ (Correct answer)
• Centre Pompidou
• Musée Rodin

Source: In 1939 the Louvre acquired 'The Frame', making Frida the first Mexican artist of her century in its collection.

Frida endured several pregnancies that ended in loss, the subject of which raw painting?

• Henry Ford Hospital ✓ (Correct answer)
• My Birth
• The Wounded Deer
• Without Hope

Source: Painted after a miscarriage in Detroit, it shows Frida bleeding on a hospital bed, a taboo subject for 1932.

Frida's wounded-animal self-portrait casts her as which creature pierced by arrows?

• A bull
• A jaguar
• A horse
• A deer ✓ (Correct answer)

Source: In 'The Wounded Deer' she grafts her own face onto a stag struck by arrows, painted as a spinal surgery failed her.

Which everyday object did Frida transform into vivid hand-painted canvases of her own?

• Plaster body casts ✓ (Correct answer)
• Wooden doors
• Ceramic plates
• Leather shoes

Source: Confined in surgical corsets for months, Frida painted them with hammers, sickles and a fetus, turning bondage into art.

What defiant line did Frida reportedly write in her final diary entry?

• Long live the dead
• I paint my truth
• Hope I never return ✓ (Correct answer)
• The end is light

Source: Her last words, beside a winged figure, read: 'I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.'