| Artist: | Kahlo, Frida |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Broken Column | |
| Date of Work: | 1944 | |
| Nationality: | Mexican | |
| Context: | Latin American Modernism | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | oil paint on Masonite | |
| Subject: a self-portrait that emphasizes the hurt body and references her own history of illness and psychic distress played out on the body. Stricken with polio at age 6, her right leg was noticeably thinner than the other leg. On Sept. 17, 1925, during the Mexican National Day celebration, an eighteen year old Frida suffered a horrible accident when the bus she was riding in collided with a streetcar. Frida was impaled on the rod of a metal handrail; she almost died. While recuperating, she started painting and re-defining herself. This iconic self-portrait reflects the lifelong pain Frida endured (she suffered miscarriages and later her right leg had to be amputated). The ground behind her cracks apart, just as her body breaks in two; a Greek ionic column fills the hollowed-out section, functioning as a kind of surreal prosthesis or brace. She wears a painful corset, and her skin is pierced all over with nails; tears drain from her eyes. Kahlo always references the hurt, desiring body, whose wounds are both physical and psychological. Style: representational and fantastic, symbolic and iconic. This frontal image is placed on a strong, central axis, like an icon or the traditional sacred altar format of a Mexican retablo painting. Kahlo sets out to create a mythic identity for herself; the self-portrait thus becomes a format for enacting her own identity as myth and martyr. Context: it is often debated whether Kahlo's work should be labeled Surrealist (suggesting a European influence or association) or as a form of magic realism that belongs more to a Latin American vision. Breton once said of Mexico, "it is already surreal." As she herself wrote, "I adore surprise and the unexpected. I like to go beyond realism." But she also reminds us, "I paint my own reality." It is difficult to separate art from life (and myth) in Kahlo's case because her art is so painfully autobiographical. Her imagery is less about fantasy than about an exploration of her own personal reality; it is a quest for self-identity. That search leads her to the inner eye and psychic "I" that characterize Surrealism, only it is a search that is rooted in her native Mexican reality and life experience. Kahlo's vision is her own, but it is one that has affinities with Surrealism. | ||
