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This essay proposes new readings of two of Frida Kahlo's most important early paintings, done after the bus accident that truncated her studies at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. An unfinished picture of around 1927, erroneously known as "Pancho Villa and Adelita", is not fundamentally about the Revolution; rather, seen in context with related images, it is an attempt by Kahlo to imagine herself and her high school classmates (the 'Cachuchas') as members of an avant-garde artistic group performing in an urban café. The essay also closely examines an innovative 1927 portrait of her close friend and fellow 'Cachucha', the poet Miguel N. Lira. Although these experimental works are less famous than her later iconic paintings, they help expand our understanding of how Kahlo found her mature artistic style. The visual innovations of these two works are also contrasted with Kahlo's contemporaneous watercolours showing quaint scenes in Coyoacán, inspired by the children's art programmes of the Education Ministry. In the mid-1920s, Kahlo viewed rural Mexico as a place of melancholic isolation, while the capital was a place for exciting intellectual exchange, a privileging of city over country that she would invert by the early 1930s.
