On the Cover

Cover image: Frieda Kahlo (1907-1954) �ARS, NY, La

Columna Rota, The Broken Column, self-portrait, 1944.

Dolores Olmedo Mexico

Photo Credit: Nicholas Sapieha / The Art Archive at Art

Resource, NY

Frieda Kahlo’s art is framed by her political passions, her

sexual defiance, her love involvement with Diego Rivera

and a lifelong narrative of physical pain and disabilities.

By most accounts the latter were related to the dreadful

injuries she sustained at age 18 when she was involved

in a streetcar crush that resulted in her being impaled by

a steel beam. She suffered multiple spine, pelvic, and

extremity fractures. Pain became a constant companion

and she reportedly underwent 32 surgical procedures to

treat the consequences of bone, soft tissue and visceral

injuries. She had deformity and chronic ulcerations of

her left leg that eventually became gangrenous and had

to be amputated a year before her death at age 47. But

these problems with her right leg were probably not due

to the horrific streetcar accident. Dr. Eloesser, an

American surgeon who treated her, corresponded with

her, and to whom she dedicated a portrait, noted that

she had radiological evidence of congenital spina bifida.

A6

Furthermore, when 6 years old, she contracted polio and

the residuals of that disease affected mostly her right leg.

Her paintings consists mainly of self-portraits that

narrate her life and circumstances, opening her raw

emotions to the viewer using symbols, garments,

animals, plants and occasionally written statements.

Regardless of the narrative told in her painting, her face

is always shown serene. Her work exhibits her pain, her

up-and-down love affair with Diego Rivera, her

wandering and intense sexuality and her self-deprecating

humor; always encaged inside an exterior image that is

self-controlled and stoic. Frieda Kahlo’s profusion of self-

imaging and outpouring of her emotions and

contradictions has at times been interpreted as a display

of narcissism and self-absorption. On this point she said:

‘‘I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone,

because I am the person I know best.’’ In fact she started

painting when she was 18 years old, recovering from the

multiple trauma of the streetcar crush in a full body cast,

when her mother brought to her a lap easel and paints.

It was then, with the help of a mirror, that she began

doing self-portraits.

The title of this painting ‘‘Broken Column’’ derives from

the Spanish term for the spine: Columna Vertebral. In

a surrealistic expression her body is split open at the

front to reveal a crumbling Ionic column - an allegory

for the multiple fractures she had in the spine, pelvis and

extremities - that stands in place only by the help of

a bracing metal corset. The iron nails that pierce her skin

signify pain. The barren land of Mexico in the

background is also cracked, like her body and devoid of

growth. Her face - irrespective of the silent tears – is

controlled and stoic, without grimace or expression. As

always, she tends to exaggerate rather than mask her

trademark thick eyebrows and upper lip hair.

Although the Surrealist gurus such as Andre Breton and

Marcel Duchamp were pleased to count her within their

movement, Kahlo never felt as one of them. She did not

share their self-indulgent trips of imagination. She rather

created allegory and stories using symbols from Mexican

popular art. These included many forms existing in

popular Mexican art: from the Virgins and Madonnas of

Christian mythology to the pre-Columbian art of the

Aztec. Her contribution to the definition and exaltation

of her country’s soul is surely as important as that of any

Mexican artist.

R. Berguer