Painter Frida Kahlo (1910-1954) often used harrowing(very frightening or shocking and making you feel very upset) images derived from her Mexican heritage to express suffering caused by a disabling accident and a stormy (marked by turmoil or fury “a stormy life”) marriage. Suggesting much personal and emotional content, her works—many of them self-portraits—have been exhaustively psychoanalyzed, while their political content has been less studied. Yet Kahlo was an ardent political activist who in her art sought not only to explore her own roots, but also to champion (to protect or fight for as a champion) Mexico’s struggle for an independent political and cultural identity (the distinguishing character or personality of an individual: INDIVIDUALITY).
Kahlo was influenced by Marxism, which appealed to many intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, and by Mexican nationalism. Interest in Mexico’s culture and history had revived in the nineteenth century, and by the early 1900s, Mexican indigenista tendencies ranged from a violently anti-Spanish idealization of Aztec Mexico to an emphasis on contemporary Mexican Indians as the key to authentic Mexican culture. Mexican nationalism, reacting against contemporary United States political intervention in labor disputes as well as against past domination by Spain, identified the Aztecs as the last independent rulers of an indigenous(native) political unit. Kahlo’s form of Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that focused upon traditional art uniting all indigenistas, revered(to respect and admire someone or something very much) the Aztecs as a powerful pre-Columbian society that had united a large area of the Middle Americas and that was thought to have been based on communal labor, the Marxist ideal.
In her paintings, Kahlo repeatedly employed Aztec (a member of a Nahuatl-speaking people that founded the Mexican empire conquered by Cortes in 1519) symbols, such as skeletons or bleeding hearts that were traditionally related to the emanation(emanate from something: to come from or out of something) of life from death and light from darkness. These images of destruction coupled with (coupled with: 加上，外加) creation speak (to express feelings by other than verbal means “actions speak louder than words”) not only to Kahlo’s personal battle for life, but also to the Mexican struggle to emerge as a nation—by implication (by implication: 含蓄地, 用寓意), to emerge with the political and cultural strength admired in the Aztec civilization. Self-portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States (1932), for example, shows Kahlo wearing a bone necklace, holding a Mexican flag, and standing between a highly industrialized United States and an agricultural, preindustrial Mexico. On the United States side are mechanistic (MECHANICAL) and modern images such as smokestacks(a tall chimney at a factory or on a ship), light bulbs, and robots(a machine that can move and do some of the work of a person, and is usually controlled by a computer). In contrast, the organic and ancient symbols on the Mexican side—a blood-drenched(drenched: covered with a lot of a liquid) Sun, lush(plants that are lush grow many leaves and look healthy and strong) vegetation, an Aztec sculpture, a pre-Columbian temple, and a skull alluding to those that lined the walls of Aztec temples—emphasize the interrelation of life, death, the earth, and the cosmos.
Kahlo portrayed Aztec images in the folkloric style of traditional Mexican paintings, thereby heightening the clash between modern materialism and indigenous tradition; similarly, she favored planned economic development, but not at the expense of cultural identity. Her use of familiar symbols in a readily accessible style also served her goal of being popularly understood; in turn (in turn: in due order of succession; 依次;反过来), Kahlo is viewed by some Mexicans as a mythic figure representative of nationalism itself.
The main purpose of the passage is to
(A) critique(review, criticize) an artist’s style
(B) evaluate opposing theories
(C) reconcile conflicting arguments
(D) advocate an additional interpretation（D）
(E) reconsider an artist in light of new discoveries
answer D, why not A??
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