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• 1 2020-10-14T22:02:23+00:00 Frida Kahlo: Art and Suffering 28 by Samantha Castillo image_header 2020-12-07T15:41:55+00:00

  Magdelena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon, widely known as Frida Kahlo, was one of the most revolutionary, influential painters, political activists, and feminists of her time. Frida Kahlo was born in the suburbs of Mexico City just before the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Mexico was beginning to break away from their European ties and traditions and believed that through reinvention and indigenous roots, they would reclaim their identity and culture. Radical nationalism and creative thinking were encouraged during this time and Frida Kahlo, who thrived in this environment, was later to become a stapled icon in Mexican culture. Kahlo’s paintings and series of self-portraits demonstrate the intricate weaving of suffering and art through the various difficult stages of her life. Frida Kahlo was no stranger to the darker themes of reality. Pain, suffering, life, and death decorate her surrealist-like paintings, although she declared no association with the modern movement of Surrealism. Kahlo herself says, “I detest Surrealism. To me it seems like a manifestation of bourgeoise art. A deviation from the true art that the people hope for from the artist,". Frida Kahlo’s art was plagued with the pain of her many medical conditions and illnesses, the torment of her husband’s multiple affairs, and her own crippling battles with mental illness. The psychological responses from the trauma of these experiences have clear effects on the subject material of her work and how her art was made.  

  Most of her artwork displays physical pain in some form. Most notably, paintings such as The Wounded Deer, 1946, and The Broken Column, 1944, have proven that her body has been the biggest bear of misery. At the age of six, Kahlo contracted polio during the United States first large outbreak of poliovirus in 1916, causing the limb in her right leg to fail to develop, leaving her right leg thinner than her left, which she chooses to hide under the guise of long skirts and slacks. However, despite her childhood illness, Kahlo grew into a lively and intelligent young woman. She was accepted into one of the best educational institutes of Mexico, Escuela Nacional Prepatoria, where her plan was to study medicine. At the age of seventeen, when she was traveling home from school, the bus which she was on was hit by a streetcar. She sustained severe injuries from the accident, her pelvis pierced by an iron handrail from the streetcar. She was not expected to survive, or later be able to have children. She would suffer several miscarriages, one she had illustrated in her work Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, which gives the viewer shameless and gruesome visual telling of her miscarriage. The ribbon-like umbilical cords are tied to symbols such as the orchid, with its resemblance to a uterus, the distorted pelvic bone to represent her inability to carry children, the snail to represent the slow duration of the miscarry, and the fetus itself that was sketched after a medical illustration. Kahlo is lying helpless in her hospital bed. The elements in this painting express the disturbing condition of her psychological health. Frida Kahlo illustrates her emotions toward the relationship with her body clearly in The Broken Column, 1944, and depicts herself crying, grieving over her broken body. Her spine, a broken column, having had endured multiple surgeries and nails pierce her body to represent the chronic pain that became her life’s companion. She rejects any pity the viewer may give by looking directly at them. She is declaring the pain her burden only, which was entirely true. Her trunk is strapped together by a corset, its leather bindings holding two halves of a broken body together. The viewer can sense the artist’s distorted image of their body. The effects of her multiple resets, realignments, and reconstruction surgeries have proven to have an influence on how she perceives herself and that is most evident in this painting. 

  Pain on a physical plane was embedded in the norm of Frida Kahlo’s life. She was used to pain, used to her body giving out on her, used to relying on her family during the long recovery months. In Frida Kahlo’s painting, Without Hope, 1945, it is no exception to the long hours spent in bed due to illness that left her malnourished, relying on a strict feeding tube diet that was to be given to her every two hours. Here, Kahlo is in bed, her arms being restrained underneath the covers as she is fed a funnel of carcass cocktail that is being held up by her easel. Inscribed on the back, “Not the least hope remains for me. Everything moves in tune with what the belly contains.” The background is illuminated with both the sun and moon, the sun being an Aztec symbol for human sacrifice. Kahlo being depicted underneath this symbolized sun then becomes very telling, she believed she has been somehow sacrificed. Aztec mythology is a theme recurrent in her paintings, most notably those most common such as skeletons and roses. Her repeated use of bloody Aztec depictions is an intrinsic part of her relationship with life and death. Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me, 1938, a composition unlike her other paintings due to the indirect focus of this piece. Various images scatter on the piece, events of Kahlo's life and this was her indication of the telling of those events of her life.  There is no central focus which causes the viewer to attest to Frida’s immense suffering and her conflicting feelings she had about her own life’s trajectory. Her subconscious beliefs about life and death and how the effects of her trauma that made her perceive life and death to be, are evident in her art and gives the viewer reason to believe that the conditions of which her art was made were of extreme duress and used art as the outlet to put the pain somewhere. Frida Kahlo had abused alcohol, opioids, and morphine to relieve the pain which could have had an influence on the psychological responses in her creative process. 

  Diego Rivera, an artist during the time who was known for his political murals and his affiliation with the Mexican Communist Party. He and Kahlo were married of 25 years and he was more known to be her root of emotional turmoil. Their long complex relationship with many messy fights, extra-marital affairs, one of which with Kahlo’s sister Cristina, and even a short-lived divorce had become a source of trauma that was released into her work such as Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, a declaration of her abandoned femineity in order to become the opposite of what her ex-lover loved most. Her long hair is now scattered on the floor around her, scissors in hand to indicate ownership of her decision. Now dressed in a suit and abandoned the Tehuana dresses that Rivera loved so much. She is reclaiming her agency and distances herself from Rivera as much as she can. The barren background with no detail gives the viewer a great sense of doom, a time in Kahlo’s life that had abruptly changed when she and Rivera divorced. This is also the tone of another portrait following her divorce, Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas, 1939, where two distinct personalities of Fridas are sitting side by side, their hearts binding them together. The Frida on the left is in a European style embraided dress holding a pair of scissors that cuts the artery of the heart that connects her to the other Frida. The Frida on the right is an expression of who Rivera loved. She is wearing the Tenhuana dress and holding an amulet of a childhood picture of him in her hand, which is also entangled in the artery of her heart. Clearly, Frida did not believe she had a strong identity without Rivera, and this could have influenced her psychologically. Their tumultuous and emotionally turbulent relationship must had taken its toll on Frida and causing Rivera to become a stressor and perhaps a trigger in her subconscious mind.  

  Frida Kahlo's The Two Fridas, 1939, also gives an interesting exploration into the mental illness she might’ve faced at the time. It could’ve been possible for these two Fridas to represent her dissociative disorder, a mental break from reality which is common post trauma. The dual images of herself in this painting could represent a wide scale dissociation that only art could help dissipate. As much as Andre Beton, the French leader of Surrealism, wanted to give Kahlo welcome into the movement with her ability to tap into her dreams and access her subconscious thought. Kahlo rejected this, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Andre Beton and other visionaries had followed the principles of Sigmund Freud and his theory of personalities, being largely shaped by our enduring conflict between our impulses to do whatever we feel like, and our restraint to control these urges. The psycho-analytic approach emphasizes the role of the conscious mind and in this case, how the art may have been influenced by the artist’s psychological effects from trauma.  

  Frida Kahlo had experienced the perfect storm of predisposing and causative factors that led to her complex medical conditions and later troubles. But it is how she lived that for which she will be most remembered. Her dramatic and whimsical, colorful images in her paintings, influenced by Aztec mythology, Mexican culture, and folk art spread worldwide. The explorative topics of identity, gender, class, suffering, life, and death in her art are ones that stay with us the most. Her ability to paint life experiences within that small break of reality where dreamlike images emerge from her works keeps her alive in our memory. Although her life was characterized by her pain, her suffering was elaborated and symbolized with fantastical imagery and bright colors to cope. Art was Frida’s major comfort, and it gave her the ability to transform her painful trajectory into a body of work that allowed room for her ambiguous feelings about her life’s existence. Frida Kahlo is an icon for women, the LGBTQ+ community, and Mexican American artists. The personal connection the viewer feels to Frida Kahlo every time we look at a painting of hers creates a longevity for generations to come.