"I paint self-portraits," Frida Kahlo once said, "because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head" (Herrera x, xi). Kahlo produced over fifty self-portraits; vibrant works that chart not only the changes in her personal aesthetic, but also documented her pain. When Kahlo was eighteen-years-old, she was involved in a trolley accident that left her in almost constant pain for the rest of her life. Frida recalls, "the train smashed the bus against the corner, it was a strange collision, it was not violent, but rather silent, slow, and it harmed everybody, but me most of all" ( ). Her body was almost destroyed in the accident. Her spinal column was broken in three places. She had a triple fracture of the pelvis from the steel handrail which skewered her body; entering her hip and exiting her vagina. The doctor's did not expect her to live. During her long recovery Kahlo took up painting and created mostly portraits of her friends and family. The canvases depict her subjects in front of dark and gloomy cloudscapes, but have an undercurrent of strong emotion that would grow stronger as she developed her skills.
Finding its way onto the canvas, a lifetime of pain birthed some of the most original, dramatic, and intensely personal images that the world ever saw. Perhaps the most telling characteristic of Kahlo's self-portraits is her connection to the landscape of her beloved Mexico. It is that deep connection to her country and her identification with her ancestors, the indigenous people of pre-Hispania, that she ties herself so closely tightly to the land itself. Although the Mexican landscape remains constant with characteristics that range from lush, green jungle to parched and cracked earth to fields of lave from its volcanic past, it is the landscape of her self-portraits that would change depending on Kahlo's physical or emotional state. There are moments when she not only reveals her emotions in the landscaped background but also, at times, seems so deeply rooted that her tortured body and the landscape becomes one-she flowers and vines, she breaks open like deep crevasses, and she bleeds like rain soaking into the dark Mexican soil.
When Frida was eighteen years old, she was involved in a trolley accident that left her in almost constant pain for the rest of her life. Frida recalls, "the train smashed the bus against the corner, it was a strange collision, it was not violent, but rather silent, slow, and it harmed everybody, but me most of all" ( ). Her body was almost destroyed in the accident. Her spinal column was broken in three places. She had a triple fracture of the pelvis from the steel handrail that skewered her body; entering her hip and coming out her vagina. The doctors did not expect her to live. While recuperating, Kahlo took up painting mostly portraits of her friends and family, at first; depicting her subjects in front of a dark and gloomy cloudscape, but with a quiet undercurrent of strong emotion. And then turning to the subject she knows best-herself-that emotion would grow even stronger as she continued to develop her skills as a painter.
In her painting, My Grandparents, my Parents and I," painted in 1936, Kahlo portrays herself at the age of two. Together with her forebears and standing naked and self-possessed in the courtyard of her home, Frida holds a crimson ribbon that connects Frida to her parents and to her two sets of grandparents. Her maternal grandparents rise above the terrain of the Mexican Sierra with indigenous cacti and mountains stretching out into the distance, while her paternal grandparents rise above the ocean, suggesting their European origin. She is the solid ground- the foundation that roots her to her past. These are the self-portraits of fond memories and those happier times in her life when Kahlo injects more life into the landscape; where Kahlo identifies her beginning in the landscape of her family.
The self-portrait, "My Nurse and I" painted in 1937 is a "declaration of faith in the continuity of Mexican culture," and the source of Kahlo's sustenance and life-force. Even as an adult she "continues to be nourished by her Indian ancestry (Herrera 219). She wrote of the painting, "I appear with the face of an adult woman and the body of a baby girl in the arms of my Nana. From her nipples falls milk as from the sky…and she is so strong and so saturated with providence that it made me long to sleep" (Herrera 220). The nurse's Telotewaquan mask evokes the past Mexican culture yet she has become a part of historical Mexico; an inextricable part of the indigenous culture. She imbibes, along with the milk, a terrible knowledge of her own fate. In the last ten years of her life, Frida kept a diary recalling her origins. "In Coyoacan my first cell was hatched. It was incubated in the womb of my mother, Matilda Calderon."
In 1929, Frida married the muralist, Diego Rivera. In Diego, Frida found both joy and sorrow; their marriage was a union of sacred monsters. In their marriage portrait painted two years later, Frida looks like a person from a totally different world than the Frida from her first Self-portrait in Velvet Dress (1926). She wears a cheap, Mexican peasant blouse, pre-Columbian jade beads and Mexican colonial earrings. The romantic melancholy European princess of the first self-portrait has turned into an emphatically Mexican girl with a fresh eager face. When Frida married Diego she began to espouse his Mexicanism. She wore the regional costumes of Tejuana. She began to paint Indian children in the bright, often jarring colors so often seen in Mexican popular art or in any market square.
One of Kahlo's most important self-portraits was painted when she was in Detroit with Diego in 1932. She is clad uncharacteristically in a long pink dress and lacy gloves. She stands on the border between ancient Mexico and the United States. On the Mexican side of the portrait where Kahlo's heart lives, are the sun, moon, pyramids, exotic plants, and pre-Columbian idols. The United States side of the painting shows dull and drab smokestacks belching smoke and windowless skyscrapers that look like tombstones. The American side of the painting shows various machines that have electrical cords that not only plug into the pedestal where Kahlo stands between the two very different vistas, but those same cords burrow beneath the dirt and merge with the roots of Mexican indigenous plants. Kahlo's body remains connected with the Mexican land regardless of where she is standing.
Frida became pregnant at least three times but her pelvis, injured in the trolley accident prevented her from bringing a child to term. Each time she became pregnant she would either miscarry or be forced to have a therapeutic abortion. The most traumatic miscarriage was the one she had on July 4, 1932 in Detroit. Her life was saved but during the thirteen days of hospitalization she wept and said she wanted to die. She also wanted to draw the fetus the way it would have looked when she lost it. She painted her miscarriage on a small sheet of tin, thus immolating the Mexican retablo paintings. In the painting "Henry Ford Hospital" (1932), Frida lies naked in her bed hemorrhaging onto the white sheets. Her stomach is still swollen from pregnancy-a series of objects symbolic of her emotions at the time of the miscarriage float around her bed. They are attached with loops or ironically festive bows to the ends of red ribbons that suggest veins or umbilical cords that she holds against her stomach. One of the objects is a male fetus. The snail, Frida explained, "refers to the slowness of the miscarriage which like the snail was soft, covered, and at the same time open." At the bottom of the painting is the broken pelvis that prevented Frida from having children. The large lavender orchid looks like an extracted uterus. "Diego gave it to me in the hospital," Frida said. "And when I painted it I had the idea of the sexual thing mixed with the sentimental." With Kahlo emptied out of all life, she paints the landscape empty of all life. The feeling of despair and loneliness is emphasized in the vast desolation of the landscape and because of that lack of landscape Kahlo is holding on to the only grounding factors she knows. In the distance is the Henry Ford rouge plant where Diego was making his studies for his murals. His distance in the landscape makes a comment on his distance in the relationship.
It is in "Self-portrait as a Tehuana," painted in 1943, where Frida's love and longing for Diego made her deck herself in the headdress of the woman of Tehuantepec with its bridal ruffle and veils. Framed with a starched white lace, her face looks perverse-a beautiful carnivorous tropical flower. White threads from the headdress intertwine with the black tendrils that spring from the veins of leaves adorning her hair. Like a female spider peering from the center of her web Frida seems to have trapped her thoughts of her mate in the form of a miniature portrait of Diego.
Roots (1943) In the painting "Roots" Kahlo has a dream of her body opening up and turning into a vine through which her own blood courses to extend into the parched Mexican earth. Kahlo has a dream of her body opening up and turning into a vine through which her own blood courses to extend into the parched Mexican earth. The opining up of her body is connected with the opening up of these crevices or barrancas ravines in the desert like Mexican terrain. Where her body ends and where the landscape, the surrounding indigenous plants and geological and volcanic formations, begins.
"The Broken Column" was painted in 1944 soon after she had undergone spinal surgery. her body is opened up and it is like the fissures in the earth behind she often associated and she connects her own body with that of the desert like Mexican earth Frida's resolute calm forms an almost unbearable tension; a feeling of paralysis. Anguish is made vivid by nails driven into her naked body. A gap resembling an earthquake fissure, mirroring the fissures in the Mexican landscape, splits her torso the two sides of which are held together by an orthopedic corset as a symbol of the invalid's imprisonment. Inside her torso we see a cracked ionic column in place of her own deteriorating spinal column. Life is thus replaced by a crumbling ruin.
In "Tree of Hope," painted in 1946, Kahlo portrays a duel self. The self that only knows suffering and the self that is strong and confident. Frida stages her personal drama in a vast and cracked landscape. The image on the left half is bathed in light from a burning sun and shows an anesthetized Kahlo wrapped in a white sheet and laying on a gurney. The faults and fissures of the land reflecting in the two deep and bloody incisions along her spine. The image on the right is set in evening with a glowing moon illuminating a strong and confident Kahlo sitting on the same gurney only instead she is dressed in a fine red Teotihuacan costume. Much of her confidence comes from her holding in her hands a back brace as if she is looking toward a future free of pain.
Having been shaped by her relationship with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo As long as the Mexican landscape exists with its indigenous flora and fauna and its recognizable geological formations, so to exists Frida Kahlo.
She painted herself cracked open after a surgery. Wearing Christ's crown of thorns from 1940. Looks fearfully alone. Herself=portraits are extraordinary for their honesty with which she faced the changes within herself through suffering and through age. Kahlo pierced so deeply into the personal that her message became universal. Her small meticulously painted self-portraits. Demand our attention by singling out the viewer as the person that must share her feelings. Though they are shockingly self-revealing they do not offer a full confession. Gripped by the magnetism we come to realize that she never lets down her mask of reserve. Strange energy radiates from her portraits. Then energy comes from her need to confront and communicate her pain. It is the only way she could free herself from it.
ï‚· Title: Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo's Paintings: Indigenity and Political Commitment
ï‚· Author(s): Janice Helland
ï‚· Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990 - Winter, 1991), pp. 8-13
ï‚· Publisher(s): Woman's Art, Inc.
ï‚· Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3690692
ï‚· Title: Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in "Gringolandia"
ï‚· Author(s): Rebecca Block, Lynda Hoffman-Jeep
ï‚· Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 1998 - Winter, 1999), pp. 8-12
ï‚· Publisher(s): Woman's Art, Inc.
ï‚· Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358399
ï‚· Title: Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration
ï‚· Author(s): Sharyn R. Udall
ï‚· Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Autumn, 2003 - Winter, 2004), pp. 10-14
ï‚· Publisher(s): Woman's Art, Inc.
ï‚· Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358781
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Frida Kahlo Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/qu_frida_kahlo.htm . Date accessed: (today).
Herrera, Hayden. "Preface." Introduction. Frida, a Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Print.
