Frida Kahlo Theme

The theme of Identity incorporates several aspects in multiple disciplines. According to the Cambridge Dictionary Identity means who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group that make them different from others: IDENTITY In-text: (Identity, 2021) Your Bibliography: In Cambridge Dictionary. 2021. Identity. [online] Available at: [Accessed 2 May 2021].Research highlights that in most cases, identity refers to the way we perceive and express ourselves such as race, heritage, or sex. Many artists use their work as an expression of their identity. Frida Kahlo's painting 'Broken Column and Nick Caves Sound suites reflect a number of aspects related to identity.

Frida Kahlo is one of the most recognized female artists of all time. She has become an icon in the Mexican community and is one of the most famous artists associated with surrealism. However, Kahlo was not a dominant leader in the surrealist movement during its culmination. For all of her life and many decades later, outside of the surrealist community, Kahlo was simply regarded as the wife of Diego Rivera, another Mexican artist. It was only in the late 1970s that worldwide attention grew towards Kahlo’s work after political activists and historians began to question the historical lack of female and non-Western artists in the surrealist canon.

Most of Kahlo’s work was self-portraits exploring her own identity. Kahlo explained this preference, stating ‘I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best’ (Kettenmann 2000, 18). While much surrealist art which featured female subjects focused on the mystery of the woman, Kahlo strove to show her reality, including, unconventionally, the negative aspects of her reality.

Themes of pain and suffering are common in Kahlo’s work. In the piece The Broken Column (1944), Kahlo paints herself with a split open chest, exposing a broken column replacing her spine, which is kept from collapsing only by a corset brace. Here Kahlo is reflecting upon her own trauma. Kahlo was severely injured in a road accident when she was eighteen, preventing her from becoming a doctor as she had wished and leaving her in constant pain for the rest of her life. The Broken Column was painted shortly after Kahlo had undergone spinal surgery to further correct her injuries from the accident.

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In the painting, pins are stuck into her entire body and face, portraying the constant pain she was in after the accident. However, though her body is struggling and tears fall from her eyes, Kahlo’s expression does not depict pain but defiance. Kahlo’s painful experience warrants empathy but Kahlo seems to reject sympathy as she stands bare-chested, calling attention to her female body. Though in pain, Kahlo maintains hold of her sexuality, exposing her breasts through her corset and endorsing herself as a sexual being. Kahlo portrays herself as an intricate woman, revealing herself as a fragile structure that stands defiantly. Kahlo would continue to explore taboo and personal subjects in her work, such as miscarriages in Henry Ford Hospital (1932) and dual heritage in The Two Fridas (1939).

To truly discuss the theme of identity and the complexity of Kahlo's painting we must understand the tragic background that Kahlo drew inspiration from. As a teen, Kahlo was involved in a terrible tram crash that would leave long-lasting last physical and mental issues. Although she regained the ability to walk, Frida Kahlo would go on the experience bouts of intense paint throughout her life, undergoing 30 operations in her lifetime and spending a large portion of her adult life bedridden. Most of her work can be regarded as part of her clinical history, as it deals with her chronic pain. The painting above was painted in 1944. The period from 1934 to 1944 was a tumultuous point for Kahlo, it was during this time that she began a series of paintings that delved into her roots of herself.

The pain led to Kahlo disassociating from herself and instead painting herself in a variety of Human Forms. Are these your own words? The Broken Column was inspired by the orthopedic cast Kahlo had to wear due to her declining health. In the painting, she is being held together by inanimate objects. Kahlo is the center of the painting, immediately our eyes are drawn to her, she is naked in the middle of a deserted landscape's immediate focus is the stark white corset wrapped around Kahlo seemingly holding her in place as the aforementioned column protrudes through her open chest, reaching from her chin to her pulvinars cover her whole body, driven into every inch of her skin while tears stream down her face. Although the work displays a human body being imprisoned and dismantled, it also displays Kahlo's self-expression, of her own identity. Her face remains unconcerned about the destruction affecting her body conveying more about her emotional standpoint towards herself, than the dominating, physical situation the painting expresses. Although her face is streaked in tears her expression remains blank, illustrating her separation from the reality of her imprisoned pain and her physical identity, she is conveying a message of self-identity she looks forward to challenging the audience. The painting tackles identity in a completely fresh way, instead of the average portrait we see pain, we see the torment, and instead of a woman in agony, we are faced with an almost stoneless detached expression. The pain was an integral part of Kahlo's identity- her branding. When dealing with the theme of identity in art Kahlo plays an integral role as each painting especially the Broken Column plays with the idea of pain and suffering which made Kahlo the painter she was. (Reference the source from where the interpretation above is researched).

In her dissertation, Dr. Laura Crary-Ortega writes that Kahlo has a tendency to want her art to speak for her life. In-text: (Crary Ortega, 1966) Your Bibliography: Crary Ortega, L., 1966. PH.D. The University of Pittsburgh. Crary-Ortega implies that Kahlo is painting in order to speak to others. The Broken Column offers the viewer an outside perspective of what it is like to be in isolation and in pain. Kahlo was painting for the purpose of therapeutic self-discovery and as a coping mechanism. The disassociated Human Forms that Kahlo paints herself in reveal that Kahlo doesn't see herself in her body, her main identifier, instead she shows her body broken in her paintings, but it is truly not a reflection of herself, but the pain in which she deals with which eventually became her identity. Kahlo was exploring multiple identities and was realizing that identity can be fluid and change through time. She let her trauma influence her art. Kahlo saw her entity as suffering and struggled to separate her struggles from her being, hence heavily influencing her work.