Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Fertility and Frida Kahlo
Few artists have put so much of themselves on canvas as Frida Kahlo. Her primary genre was the self-portrait, and her paintings read almost as a diary of her life. Several major themes appear in her work throughout her career, such as her identity as a Mexican, communist politics, her self and her relationship to Diego Rivera and most importantly, fertility. This last theme, which so pervades her work, is partially do to her inability to have children, the result of a bus accident in her youth. Her works are some of the most luscious representations of fertility and fecundity both in man and in nature.
Frida Kahlo was born July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City. Her father was a German Jew and her mother a mestiza. She was a bright student and planned to go to medical school, until September 1925, when the bus she was riding on hit a trolley car. A metal handrail pierced her pelvis, her spinal column was cracked, her right leg was broken in several places, and her foot was crushed. Exactly one year later she produced her first painting. Between 1926 and her death in 1954, she painted over 55 self-portraits. In 1927, she joined the Young Communist League. In 1929, she married then 43 year-old Diego Rivera, another artist in the Communist Party. Rivera accepted a post as Director of the Academy of San Carlos, but due to the government’s right-wing leanings, he was expelled from the Communist Party. Frida spent almost three years in the US while Rivera was commissioned to do several murals there. In New York, she met other American artists, such as Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O’Keeffe. During this period she painted about a dozen works. Both Rivera and Frida had numerous affairs outside their marriage, yet she remained devoted to him. Rivera did divorce her in 1939, but they remarried in December 1940. She was constantly plagued by spinal problems, possibly due to her bout with polio as a girl, her accident, or, as some have suggested, scoliosis or spina bifida. She underwent extensive surgery in 1950 and spent nearly a year in the hospital because of an infection. In 1953, her right leg, infected with gangrene, was amputated. She died on July 13, 1954. Less than two weeks earlier she had participated in a protest against US intervention in Guatemala. Her death, reported as being caused by “pulmonary embolism,” may have been a suicide, as she had attempted it in the past. The last page of her journal read: “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope I never come back—Frida.”
When Frida and Diego Rivera married, she was already pregnant. Frida’s injury in the bus accident had damaged her uterus such that she could conceive, but could not carry a baby to term. She had a miscarriage in 1930. She had very much wanted to have a child, and her inability to do so had a profound effect on her work. Partially as a result of that incident, her work would be pervaded by imagery suggestive of genitalia, sperm, and ova. She explicitly deals with her miscarriages in The Caesarean Operation and Henry Ford Hospital. In Henry Ford Hospital, a pregnant but bleeding Frida lays awkwardly on a hospital bed. In her hand she holds red ribbons tied to a model of a female torso, a fetus, a snail, a pelvis, a crushed orchid, and a machine used for sterilizing medical utensils. The work expresses her feeling of failure after miscarried pregnancies—the snail suggests the slowness of the whole process, the orchid, its shape suggestive of a uterus, represents her damaged reproductive organs, and the machine suggests sterility. The ribbons for her represent lifelines, which she had also made use of in her family portrait, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, from 1936.
Another work dealing directly with her miscarriages is a lithograph simply titled Frida and the Miscarriage, from 1932. A nude Frida drips blood from her vagina to the soil below. From this blood, three plants take root in the soil. The shapes of the plants are vaguely similar to genitalia. This is a very early instance of the use of another prominent subject matter in her work—plants and fruit. She kept a garden with fruits and pet monkeys and other animals. For her these were substitutes for children she could not herself have. Indeed when children of other people visited, she pampered and doted after them.In her paintings, her exotic, lush fruits seem to be dripping with fecundity. Her Flower of Life from 1944 is a red flower similar in shape to a uterus, complete with fallopian tubes grasping for ovaries. Her near obsession with fertility began to include that of nature as well. From here her work moved into the realm of the spiritual.
Despite their stormy relationship, Diego and Frida loved and needed each other. Diego for her became not only beloved husband, but also a sort of baby for her to mother. In her later years, she often came to view his sexual escapades in the light of a sort of mischievous child. Thus he appears in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Senior Xolotl as a baby in her arms, though he is nearly a full size adult. He has a large third eye in his forehead. He is Dieguito, her child, yet also her husband and spiritual partner. Both of them are being embraced by a green female figure suggestive of an Aztec goddess. Milk drips from her nipple. She is further being embraced by a larger, misty figure, along with a host of plants. This figure is part of the background, which is light green on the right and brown on the left. A moon hovers in the brown area and a fiery sun floats in the green area. In her diary, she includes a guide to colors and their personal meaning to her. Green is “good warm light” as well as “leaves, sadness, science”. Brown is the “color of mole, of leaves becoming earth”. Here the all embracing universe is made up of light and earth. It suggests the duality of pre-Columbian mythology; as such ideas began to appeal to Frida later in life. The world is summed up as a process of death which creates new life, and this process involves everyone. Even Frida’s pet dog appears within the arms of Earth’s embrace.
Frida’s health began to deteriorate in the mid-1940s. She had to wear a steel corset for her back. She depicted her plight in The Broken Column, which shows a nude Frida split open and held together with white straps. Instead of a spinal column, she has a broken Ionic column. As her health problem mounted, she began to lose hope, even painting herself with a cornucopia of gore emerging from her mouth in a work entitled Without Hope. She seems to have become more optimistic when she painted Tree of Hope, in which she in a vibrant red dress watches over herself laying nude on an operating table with slashes in her back. Nevertheless her health declined. In her last years, she returned to the theme of fruit. Her color palette is restricted and she uses less subtle color mixtures. One of her doctors said, “The style of her last paintings shows anxiety with states of excitation of the type that comes from drug addiction.” She was constantly on painkillers. The fruit in her Fruit of Life from 1954 is more shallow in depth and simplified in shape and colors. Behind it the background is divided between night and day. A pale yellow moon hangs in the right corner and a blazing orange sun with a face on it presides over the left. Erratic, orange lightning bolts emanate from the sun and reach out across the painting in a jagged web. In her last year, her thoughts turned to politics. A reverent Marxist, she attended a protest despite her condition and leg amputation. She even painted a work entitled Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. In it she wears a medical corset and a dress. She is throwing off her crutches as a dove of peace flies above her and a portrait of Marx watches over in the background. In her last few weeks she seemed to have resolved to leave behind a positive difference in the world through political activism and her paintings. Her last painting, a still life of sliced open watermelons has written on it: “Viva la vida, Frida Kahlo,. Coyoacan 1954 Mexico.” She died eight days later, some say by suicide. Perhaps it was a farewell message.
Frida Kahlo’s work is some of the best and most personal of any artist in Latin America and even the world. She was admired by the likes of Alfred Stieglitz and Andre Breton, and especially by her husband Diego Rivera. Her personal tragedy became the starting point for one of the principle themes of her work—fertility. From there she moved beyond her own situation to an exploration of the fertility and creative power of nature, and from there into the realm of spirituality. In her paintings she reflected her own inner life in a manner that carried all the psychological work of the surrealists with an expressiveness and depth of emotion that were all her own.
Bibliography
Billeter, Erika, ed. The World of Frida Kahlo. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and VG
Bildkunst, Bonn. 1993
Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. HarperCollins Publishers: New York.
1991
Sarah M. Lowe, ed. The Diary of Frida Kahlo. Harry M. Abrams, Inc: New
York. 1995
Frida Kahlo was born July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City. Her father was a German Jew and her mother a mestiza. She was a bright student and planned to go to medical school, until September 1925, when the bus she was riding on hit a trolley car. A metal handrail pierced her pelvis, her spinal column was cracked, her right leg was broken in several places, and her foot was crushed. Exactly one year later she produced her first painting. Between 1926 and her death in 1954, she painted over 55 self-portraits. In 1927, she joined the Young Communist League. In 1929, she married then 43 year-old Diego Rivera, another artist in the Communist Party. Rivera accepted a post as Director of the Academy of San Carlos, but due to the government’s right-wing leanings, he was expelled from the Communist Party. Frida spent almost three years in the US while Rivera was commissioned to do several murals there. In New York, she met other American artists, such as Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O’Keeffe. During this period she painted about a dozen works. Both Rivera and Frida had numerous affairs outside their marriage, yet she remained devoted to him. Rivera did divorce her in 1939, but they remarried in December 1940. She was constantly plagued by spinal problems, possibly due to her bout with polio as a girl, her accident, or, as some have suggested, scoliosis or spina bifida. She underwent extensive surgery in 1950 and spent nearly a year in the hospital because of an infection. In 1953, her right leg, infected with gangrene, was amputated. She died on July 13, 1954. Less than two weeks earlier she had participated in a protest against US intervention in Guatemala. Her death, reported as being caused by “pulmonary embolism,” may have been a suicide, as she had attempted it in the past. The last page of her journal read: “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope I never come back—Frida.”
When Frida and Diego Rivera married, she was already pregnant. Frida’s injury in the bus accident had damaged her uterus such that she could conceive, but could not carry a baby to term. She had a miscarriage in 1930. She had very much wanted to have a child, and her inability to do so had a profound effect on her work. Partially as a result of that incident, her work would be pervaded by imagery suggestive of genitalia, sperm, and ova. She explicitly deals with her miscarriages in The Caesarean Operation and Henry Ford Hospital. In Henry Ford Hospital, a pregnant but bleeding Frida lays awkwardly on a hospital bed. In her hand she holds red ribbons tied to a model of a female torso, a fetus, a snail, a pelvis, a crushed orchid, and a machine used for sterilizing medical utensils. The work expresses her feeling of failure after miscarried pregnancies—the snail suggests the slowness of the whole process, the orchid, its shape suggestive of a uterus, represents her damaged reproductive organs, and the machine suggests sterility. The ribbons for her represent lifelines, which she had also made use of in her family portrait, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, from 1936.
Another work dealing directly with her miscarriages is a lithograph simply titled Frida and the Miscarriage, from 1932. A nude Frida drips blood from her vagina to the soil below. From this blood, three plants take root in the soil. The shapes of the plants are vaguely similar to genitalia. This is a very early instance of the use of another prominent subject matter in her work—plants and fruit. She kept a garden with fruits and pet monkeys and other animals. For her these were substitutes for children she could not herself have. Indeed when children of other people visited, she pampered and doted after them.In her paintings, her exotic, lush fruits seem to be dripping with fecundity. Her Flower of Life from 1944 is a red flower similar in shape to a uterus, complete with fallopian tubes grasping for ovaries. Her near obsession with fertility began to include that of nature as well. From here her work moved into the realm of the spiritual.
Despite their stormy relationship, Diego and Frida loved and needed each other. Diego for her became not only beloved husband, but also a sort of baby for her to mother. In her later years, she often came to view his sexual escapades in the light of a sort of mischievous child. Thus he appears in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Senior Xolotl as a baby in her arms, though he is nearly a full size adult. He has a large third eye in his forehead. He is Dieguito, her child, yet also her husband and spiritual partner. Both of them are being embraced by a green female figure suggestive of an Aztec goddess. Milk drips from her nipple. She is further being embraced by a larger, misty figure, along with a host of plants. This figure is part of the background, which is light green on the right and brown on the left. A moon hovers in the brown area and a fiery sun floats in the green area. In her diary, she includes a guide to colors and their personal meaning to her. Green is “good warm light” as well as “leaves, sadness, science”. Brown is the “color of mole, of leaves becoming earth”. Here the all embracing universe is made up of light and earth. It suggests the duality of pre-Columbian mythology; as such ideas began to appeal to Frida later in life. The world is summed up as a process of death which creates new life, and this process involves everyone. Even Frida’s pet dog appears within the arms of Earth’s embrace.
Frida’s health began to deteriorate in the mid-1940s. She had to wear a steel corset for her back. She depicted her plight in The Broken Column, which shows a nude Frida split open and held together with white straps. Instead of a spinal column, she has a broken Ionic column. As her health problem mounted, she began to lose hope, even painting herself with a cornucopia of gore emerging from her mouth in a work entitled Without Hope. She seems to have become more optimistic when she painted Tree of Hope, in which she in a vibrant red dress watches over herself laying nude on an operating table with slashes in her back. Nevertheless her health declined. In her last years, she returned to the theme of fruit. Her color palette is restricted and she uses less subtle color mixtures. One of her doctors said, “The style of her last paintings shows anxiety with states of excitation of the type that comes from drug addiction.” She was constantly on painkillers. The fruit in her Fruit of Life from 1954 is more shallow in depth and simplified in shape and colors. Behind it the background is divided between night and day. A pale yellow moon hangs in the right corner and a blazing orange sun with a face on it presides over the left. Erratic, orange lightning bolts emanate from the sun and reach out across the painting in a jagged web. In her last year, her thoughts turned to politics. A reverent Marxist, she attended a protest despite her condition and leg amputation. She even painted a work entitled Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. In it she wears a medical corset and a dress. She is throwing off her crutches as a dove of peace flies above her and a portrait of Marx watches over in the background. In her last few weeks she seemed to have resolved to leave behind a positive difference in the world through political activism and her paintings. Her last painting, a still life of sliced open watermelons has written on it: “Viva la vida, Frida Kahlo,. Coyoacan 1954 Mexico.” She died eight days later, some say by suicide. Perhaps it was a farewell message.
Frida Kahlo’s work is some of the best and most personal of any artist in Latin America and even the world. She was admired by the likes of Alfred Stieglitz and Andre Breton, and especially by her husband Diego Rivera. Her personal tragedy became the starting point for one of the principle themes of her work—fertility. From there she moved beyond her own situation to an exploration of the fertility and creative power of nature, and from there into the realm of spirituality. In her paintings she reflected her own inner life in a manner that carried all the psychological work of the surrealists with an expressiveness and depth of emotion that were all her own.
Bibliography
Billeter, Erika, ed. The World of Frida Kahlo. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and VG
Bildkunst, Bonn. 1993
Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. HarperCollins Publishers: New York.
1991
Sarah M. Lowe, ed. The Diary of Frida Kahlo. Harry M. Abrams, Inc: New
York. 1995
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