ART 125/FIST 340 Frida Kahlo's 'Disrupted Symmetery'

Frida Kahlo’s 1939 oil painting “The Two Fridas.”

Between 1925 and 1954 Frida Kahlo painted 55 self-portraits. In most of these she confronts the viewer in a full-frontal, straight-on manner. This helps her bring you into her world. She wants you to feel her pain, and her passion.

'The Broken column' painted in 1944

Much of her pain was physical. Her health problems began when she contracted Polio at age 6. At age 18 a bus she was riding in was struck by a streetcar and she was impaled by a handrail and her pelvis, spine and leg received multiple fractures. It was during this bedridden recovery period when she began painting seriously. But she never did really recover. In her lifetime she would have 35 surgeries and would wear 50 different supportive corsets and a prosthetic leg.

'Self-Portrait with Monkeys' painted in 1943

Her damaged body did nothing to suppress the power that emanates from the inner self here. We are left to wonder what her understanding of 'self' really was and how she was able to so directly communicate something so intangible.

Much of the lore of her life surrounds her long, disrupted marriage to Mexican painter Diego Rivera. The well-known biographical movie, Frida (2002), is no exception;