At age 18, Frida Kahlo suffered a catastrophic accident that had lifelong consequences. The school bus in which she was a passenger collided with a trolley. Her spinal column was broken in three places, as were her collarbone, two ribs, her right leg and foot. The treatment was to lie on her back for one month, enclosed in a plaster cast. In addition, Kahlo had polio as a child, and one leg was shorter and thinner than the other.
This stunning portrait demands the viewer’s attention. A woman, Frida Kahlo, looms in the foreground, central to the painting, facing the viewer fully frontal, a few tears spilling down her face. She is nude, except for a sheet that is wrapped around her foreshortened lower body, and the widely spaced straps of an upper-body corset. On the one hand, the figure is passive, gazing at us almost without expression, completely still, acceptant of the scattered nails and rigid column that penetrate her body. On the other hand, the beauty of her perfectly formed breasts and well-formed upper body, the eyes that engage the viewer, subtly convey the energy of the figure’s spirit and will. At this point in Kahlo’s life, the painful physical problems that had plagued her on and off for years were becoming unrelenting. Doctors prescribed a variety of orthopedic corsets to support her degenerating spine. The portrait seems to personify pain and simultaneously some level of tolerance for pain.
Many who view the painting are reminded of images of Christ on the cross. Kahlo was certainly long-suffering and represented the physical and emotional aspects of her condition in many of her works (for example, “Tree of Hope” and “Henry Ford Hospital“), but the energy and originality of her personality and artistic vision shine through. For interesting commentary on “The Broken Column,” see Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: Harper Perennial) 2002, pp. 180-183. Also useful is Gannit Ankori’s commentary in her book, Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 114-119). Ankori points out that the vertical fissure of Kahlo’s body and the fissures in the earth surrounding her evoke violation — consistent with Kahlo’s statement that a metal rod had entered her hip and penetrated her vagina.
Web image from Wiki Commons
