Frida Kahlo



The Broken Column (1944)

Artists such as Frida Kahlo used visual analogies and metaphors through text and illustrative paintings. Her artworks were often considered unconventional in subject matter for the 1940s due to these somewhat surreal paintings often depicting internal organs outside the female body. This not only relates to Frida Kahlo’s interest in science and art but can are symbolic representations of her emotional life experiences; traumas associated with miscarriage and accident related health issues. Her public artworks have combined a traditional Mexican method of artistic practise alongside metaphorical and symbolic Christian Iconography, making them appear surreal where the figures are suspended in vast imaginative scenes.  For example The Broken Column (1944) is a self-portrait with clear metaphoric reflection regarding Kahlo’s health and the pain and emotion she bears but it is also referencing the Crucifixion of Christ; she is naked and alone, the skin punctured with sharp nails.

However in her personal journal Frida Kahlo’s self portraits express anguish and pain of deeply felt loneliness, appearing more human than that of her public works. They are highly contrasting in the sense of her journal being private and only for herself clearly reflects her emotional psychic compared to the public works which have a strong element of self control. She is conscious of the perception of self through the eyes of the observer and they hold an element of feminine mystery; distorted windows into the artist’s soul? This honesty in her journal perhaps is an indication to the criticism of female artists and their progression up until this particular time. I find myself asking the obvious, why were these highly emotive intimate portraits, exploring identity, purposely hidden within the protective pages of her journal? Perhaps these artworks are an honesty of self that the world was not ready to understand? Frida Kahlo is often associated with Virginia Woolf, using expressionism as a means of a story in an immensely emotive and complex way:

“Who used mental illness, psychiatry and her husband to fashion for herself a life of her own choosing (madness) was her property, her treasure, her identity she transformed into the triumph of literacy-psychiatric immortality.”

(Szasz, T. 2006 My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf)