The Bus 1929 by Frida Kahlo
This painting, called El bus, clearly shows Diego Rivera’s influence on the political attitudes of the artist Frida Kahlo. In this illustration, you can see some people sitting next to each other on a wooden seat on a rickety bus. These people belong to different Mexican social classes. Starting from the left there is a housewife with her shopping basket, a man in blue overalls at work in general, a barefoot Indian mother breastfeeding her baby, a child looking at the landscape around him, a businessman together with his bag of money and a girl who can be sensed could be the artist Frida Kahlo herself. On this terrace, Frida demonstrated her predilection for the dispossessed. He painted the Indian mother as a Madonna and the blue-eyed gringo is a representation of the capitalists.
Frida Kahlo accident bus painting
This painting is also a representation of the bus accident that he suffered in 1925 and changed his life forever. Frida herself admitted that she suffered two serious accidents in her life, one was when she was hit by a tram and the other was Diego Rivera. Diego insisted several times that Frida was the best painter of the time. Diego’s criticism of Frida’s paintings was very important to her, to the point where part of her impetus to paint came from her eagerness to please him. According to Diego, she was a better artist than he, and he loved to tell about Pablo Picasso’s reaction to Frida’s work. “Look at those eyes”, it is said that Picasso wrote to Rivera, “neither you nor I are capable of doing anything similar.”
