Viva la Vida

Viva la Vida is an oil-on-masonite still life by Frida Kahlo, dated 1954 and held by the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico City. Across the horizontal panel — about 52 by 72 centimetres including its frame — she crowded a pile of whole and cut watermelons against a mottled blue sky; a wedge near the front carries the painted words VIVA LA VIDA together with her name, Coyoacán, 1954 and México.

The museum's account of its making is more complicated than the familiar last-painting story. Its current collection record states that Kahlo painted the watermelons around 1950 and returned to the picture years later, adding the celebrated phrase only a few days before her death on 13 July 1954; it calls Viva la Vida the last painting she intervened in rather than the last she began. An earlier museum description, still carried by Google Arts & Culture, says she wrote the words eight days before she died, and the scholar Salomón Grimberg has suggested the underlying still life may date to 1952.

Whatever its exact sequence, the inscription turned a late still life into Kahlo's most famous farewell. The genre itself was a long-running but little-studied part of her output: one catalogue counts more than twenty-five still lifes among her works, and the words 'long live life' cut into the flesh of the fruit have made the painting a standard image of her final months.