Frida Kahlo Art Frida Kahlo Self Portrait in a Landscape With the Sun Going Down

THE MEXICAN PAINTER FRIDA Kahlo (1907–1954) underwent some 35 surgical operations between the ages of 18, when her body was crushed in a omnibus accident, and 47, when she died. "I hold the record for operations," she announced in 1951, after spending a yr in the infirmary having nine operations, seven of which were on her spinal cavalcade.¹ The public Frida dismissed pain with a full-bellied express joy, hiding her limp and her injured leg with long ruffled skirts from Tehuantepec, walking with a grace that turned lameness into an allure. With dark devouring eyes below eyebrows joined like a swallow'southward wings, she had a delicate however savage beauty.

Kahlo took this dazzler and made herself into an exotic animate being, the perfect foil for her immense, Buddha-similar husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. Both were historic personalities; their adventures, political and amorous, were reported past an avid press. During her lifetime, though, Kahlo'south painting was overshadowed by her married man's fame.

Kahlo's paintings testify u.s. the misery behind her facade of alegría—her particular brand of exuberance and wit. Psychological and physical pain are so intertwined that it is oft hard to determine whether the subject field of a weeping self-portrait is rejection in beloved or spinal spasms. Frida's horrendous medical history, as she told it in paintings and in her diary and letters, reveals that she used illness to make herself into a tragic victim and a heroic sufferer. I role brought pity, the other admiration.

Kahlo played these twin roles in a long series of cocky-portraits that began in 1926. Wounded, weeping, cutting open up and bleeding, she is still always a survivor. The steely determination with which she transformed pain into a fuel for art, and art into a means for survival, is evident in every brushstroke. She painted herself as she felt herself to exist from within and every bit she saw herself to be from without. The first Kahlo hurt, the second was heroic. These two aspects of Kahlo never seem to quite merge in her cocky-portraits, but in their disjunction Kahlo the sufferer becomes Kahlo the voyeur of her own sufferings. No doubt there was something heartening nigh this distancing. Painting self-portraits may also have been a form of exorcism: past projecting pain outward onto a replica of herself, she gave her agony to an alternate Kahlo, 1 whose stoic impassivity could put up with information technology. She projected hurting onto the viewer as well; to look at her self-portraits is to experience her anguish.

In her diary, written in the last decade of her life, Kahlo recalled: "My childhood was marvelous, because, although my begetter was a ill man (he had vertigos every month and a half), he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and besides painter) and above all of understanding for all my issues." Guillermo Kahlo was indeed attentive to his favorite daughter. When, at the age of vi, Frida was bars to her room for nine months with polio, he made sure that she did the exercises that would strengthen her shriveled correct leg. Hurt by the jokes that other children made nearly her leg, Kahlo hid it with several pairs of socks and defied her deformity by becoming a tomboy. Merely she did not have the freedom of movement of the athlete she wanted to be. In 1938, when she painted the memory of polio in They Enquire for Planes and Just Get Straw Wings, she showed herself at about seven holding a model airplane and wearing straw wings that are suspended from the sky past ribbons, and that conspicuously cannot wing; she too is tethered by a ribbon, but 1 that is attached to the footing past nails.

In 1925, when Kahlo was well along in her studies to prepare for medical school, the jitney in which she was riding domicile from school was rammed by a streetcar. Years after, she spoke of information technology with a typically gallant detachment:

A little while after nosotros got on the bus the collision began. Before that we had taken another bus, merely since I had lost a petty parasol, nosotros got off to look for information technology and that was how we happened to get on the bus that destroyed me. The blow took place on a corner in front of the San Juan market, exactly in front. The streetcar went slowly, but our bus driver was a very nervous swain. When the trolley car went effectually the corner the bus was pushed against the wall.

I was an intelligent young daughter, but impractical, in spite of all the freedom I had won. Perhaps for this reason, I did not appraise the situation nor did I guess the kind of wounds I had. The offset thing I idea of was of a balero [Mexican toy] with pretty colors that I had bought that day and that I was carrying with me. I tried to await for it, thinking that what had happened would non have major consequences.

It is a lie that one is enlightened of the crash, a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears. The crash bounced us forward and a handrail pierced me the manner a sword pierces a bull. A man saw me having a tremendous hemorrhage. He carried me and put me on a billiard table until the Red Cross came for me.

Kahlo's boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias recalls that the collision threw Kahlo out of the bus, and that somehow when she landed she was totally nude and covered with blood. One of the passengers had been conveying a package of powdered golden, and this fell all over Kahlo, prompting onlookers to weep "La bailarina, la ballerina!" every bit if she were a dancer.

None of the doctors at the Cerise Cross Hospital expected her to survive. Her spinal cavalcade was cleaved in three places. Her right leg had 11 fractures and her correct human foot was dislocated and crushed. Her collarbone and two ribs were broken; one shoulder was out of articulation. The bone that would cause Kahlo a lifetime of frustrated longing was her pelvis; because it was broken in three places, she was prevented from bearing children. A steel handrail had pierced her left hip and come out through the vagina, causing internal damage. "I lost my virginity," she joked afterwards.

When she was strong enough, Kahlo wrote to Gómez Arias. Her letters tell him her status in minute detail:

Alex de me vida, yous more than anybody know how deplorable I have been in this piggy filthy hospital, since you can imagine it and also the boys must have told you nigh it. Everyone says I should not exist so drastic, but they don't know what 3 months in bed means for me, which is what I need, having been a callejera [person who loves wandering almost in the streets]. But what can one do; at least la pelona [the baldheaded one, Kahlo's discussion for death] didn't take me abroad. Right?

Kahlo recovered, but in less than a twelvemonth she relapsed. A os surgeon discovered that 3 vertebrae were out of place. As her letters show, several times she was not given sure treatments, such every bit X-rays, because her family could not afford to pay for them. Adding to the misery of being sick again was Kahlo'due south rejection past Gómez Arias, who left her considering he felt that she had been promiscuous. Now Kahlo's letters are a plea for forgiveness, and she begins to use illness as a way to hold onto her lover. On September 28, 1926, she wrote in an unpublished letter:

I am going to do everything possible to learn how to suffer, without you, and sick. It is too much for me, and I want to ask you to write sometime if you feel like information technology, telling me how you are, yesterday I went to meet the doctor and he told me that I cannot move my leg at all for a long time to come because information technology is worse than the other time, y'all tin see how many hopes I have! but it is meliorate, I think that with these sufferings I am paying little past little, for all that I did to you and maybe sometime you volition think that I am good, that even if it is out of compassion, you will come dorsum—

This letter mentions a portrait that Kahlo had just finished. Like many of her self-portraits it was a token of love, a manner of keeping herself in Gómez Arias' heart and listen: "I entreat y'all," she said, "to put information technology in a depression place where yous can see it as if you were looking at me." This Cocky-Portrait, 1926, may well have been her beginning painting. During her convalescence, "bored as hell . . . with a plaster cast," she took up painting as something that she could practice in bed. "Since I was young," she said, "this misfortune [the accident] did not at that fourth dimension take on the character of a tragedy: I felt I had energies enough to do anything instead of studying to become a medico. And without paying much attention, I began to paint." Even though she sounds as if she picked up a paintbrush by mere take chances, painting was in fact a matter of necessity: "Thus," Kahlo once remarked, "as the accident inverse my path, many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which anybody considers normal, and to me zippo seemed more normal than to pigment what had not been fulfilled."

Kahlo said that she could non paint her accident, just the blow led her to chart her land of mind not in terms of facial expression or gesture, but in terms of injuries inflicted upon her immobile body. Painting was a class of psychological surgery. She turned her torso within out, placing her heart on her breast or cutting open up her chest to show her broken backbone. Every bit an invalid, Frida did not travel far from the confines of herself. Looking into a large mirror affixed to the underside of her bed'southward canopy, she painted her image over and over again. As the dramatization of pain became increasingly crucial to her self-image, Kahlo exaggerated the painful episodes of her by. She claimed, for example, that she had had the blow at 16, not eighteen, and that she had spent non one, but three months in the Cherry-red Cross Hospital.

Each year the pains grew worse, and Kahlo consulted more than and more doctors. Dr. Leo Eloesser, a prominent orthopedic surgeon in San Francisco and Kahlo's lifelong friend, believed that many of her operations were unnecessary. In that location is, indeed, a possibility that Kahlo suffered from a psychological disorder called the Munchausen syndrome, later the proper noun of the 18th-century recounter of alpine tales fictionalized in Rudolph Erich Raspe's Adventures of Baron Münchhausen (1785).² An individual suffering from the Munchausen syndrome wants to be a patient and will become from hospital to hospital in lodge to find a place where the fictitious nature of his or her symptoms has not already been discovered. Such patients may abuse themselves physically, either exacerbating an existing ailment or creating a new one, and they take a trend to take more drugs than necessary, especially painkillers and sedatives. Many Munchausen patients are prepared to undergo multiple invasive operations, and their bodies are covered with scars. For them the operating table is a kind of throne.

One of the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen syndrome is the ability to present in a disarming style invented physical symptoms that appear to be under the patient's voluntary command, with the effect that the patient is frequently hospitalized. Some Munchausen patients acquit a grudge against the medical profession which may stem from an before experience of medical mismanagement. Kahlo seemed alternately to scorn or idolize her doctors. Underlying dependent, exploitative, or masochistic personality traits can be factors. According to Dr. Don R. Lipsitt, Chief of Psychiatry at Mountain Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Munchausen patient is both victim and victimizer.³ False physical symptoms may coexist with real ones: this, I believe, was the case with Kahlo. If, every bit Dr. Eloesser thought, she elected to have surgery for symptoms that she invented or for ailments that she exaggerated and that might have been treated in some less drastic way, it was probably merely in the last decade of her life.

During her 13 days in the hospital for a miscarriage in July 1932, Kahlo asked for medical illustrations to aid her describe the fetus as it should have looked when she lost it. Dorsum in her apartment, she painted to combat low. Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, shows her weeping and hemorrhaging on her infirmary bed while she clutches confronting her belly six cherry-red ribbons resembling veins or umbilical cords; from the ends of the ribbons float objects symbolic of her miscarriage. Although the painting expresses aught but pathos, its format might offer some promise. Henry Ford Hospital is the first painting that Kahlo based on Mexican retablos, pocket-size votive paintings on tin can which depict a person saved from disaster together with the holy epitome that did the saving. Such paintings are acts of gratitude and affirmations of faith, and they are hung on the walls of churches.

An even more gruesome response to the miscarriage is My Birth, 1932, painted a few months later. Here a child—who resembles Kahlo—is being born to a dead mother (Kahlo'south own female parent had just died); or in another reading, Kahlo herself is giving nascency to a dead child. On a wall in the background, the Virgin of Sorrows pierced by knives is a completely ineffectual holy intercessor as she weeps over this double decease. There is a fleck more than optimism in Frida and the Abortion, 1932, a lithograph made shortly afterward the miscarriage. It shows a bawling Kahlo with an embryo in her womb; attached to the embryo by a long umbilical cord which winds around Kahlo'south leg is a male fetus which sits at her feet. The claret from her hemorrhage drips downward her leg and into the ground, where it fertilizes several anthropomorphic plants. Kahlo is equipped with an extra arm, and she wields a palette as if information technology were a shield. In 1954 she told a friend: "My painting carries within it the bulletin of pain. . . . Painting completed my life. I lost three children. . . . Painting substituted for all of this. I believe that piece of work is the all-time thing." Another painting, Roots, 1943, depicts a childless adult female's dream of nascency, withal it borrows a surgical metaphor, equally Kahlo's trunk is opened up to reveal non cleaved bones, but a healthy vine. Her blood courses through stems and leaves, and it continues to flow in rootlike vesicles which grow beyond the leaves' edges and out to nourish the dry, rocky earth.

In 1934, when Kahlo and Rivera had returned to Mexico after living in the United states for four years—he had painted major murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York—Kahlo became pregnant again but was given an ballgame because of "infantilism of the ovaries." During this twelvemonth she was hospitalized two other times, for an appendectomy and for the first of many operations on her right foot. Parts of her toes were removed, and the healing process was extremely slow. "My pes continues to be bad," she wrote to Dr. Eloesser, "merely it can't be helped and 1 day I am going to determine that they should cut it off and then that it won't badger me and so much anymore."

These troubles were compounded by Rivera's affair with her younger sister. In 1934 Kahlo was likewise unhappy to paint, and in 1935 she produced only ii works. One is a bland self-portrait showing her cropped hairdo. (During Diego's affair she cut her long black pilus and forsook her beloved Mexican costumes for European-style clothes.) In the other, entitled A Few Pocket-sized Nips, 1935, she projected her agony onto another woman's violent death at the hands of her brutal lover, who stands over her property his bloodied dagger. The subject came from a news detail, and Kahlo said that she had needed to paint it because she herself had felt "murdered by life." Kahlo's injure did not heal quickly. She painted her recollection of information technology in Memory, 1937, and Remembrance of an Open up Wound, 1938. By this time, she was able to accept the wounds of the stabbed woman in A Few Pocket-size Nips upon herself, but the imagery is less horrifying, and more than distanced past fantasy. Kahlo has switched from real to imaginary wounds as conveyors of feeling. The bandaged foot in Memory and Remembrance and the deformed or cracked toes in What the Water Gave Me, 1938, refer to actual pes operations; Kahlo's foot was operated upon in 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1938. But in Retentivity, neither the pigsty in her breast pierced past a metallic rod (at the ends of which seesawing cupids symbolize the ups and downs of her marriage with Rivera), nor the huge extracted heart that lies bleeding at her feet, represent concrete wounds. Rather they are bright symbols of pain in love. In Remembrance and What the Water Gave Me, the long cut on Kahlo'south inner thigh is an invention—it points to her damaged sense of cocky as a sexual being.

This association of sex with injury has much to do with Kahlo's induction past André Breton into the ranks of the Surrealists in 1938. Although Kahlo's wounds are more concrete and less enigmatic than the punctured fingers or severed heads of Surrealism, her knowledge of Surrealism encouraged her to use these subjects in her art. Breton loved her wounded cocky-portraits and called her work "pernicious," and "a ribbon around a bomb." In 1938 and 1939 Kahlo was given exhibitions in New York and Paris. The outset was at the Surrealist-oriented Julien Levy Gallery on 57th Street; the 2nd was organized by Breton in Paris. In both cities she had severe health bug, and in Paris she had to exist hospitalized for a colibacterial inflammation of the kidneys.

Her troubles did not terminate with her return to Mexico. By belatedly 1939 Rivera had divorced her. If the reasons given were ambiguous, nothing could be clearer than the anguish revealed in Kahlo'south paintings and her letters, written in her idiosyncratic English language: "Nick Darling," she wrote to her ex-lover, the lensman Nickolas Muray, on October xiii,

I couldn't write to you before, since y'all left [Muray had been in Mexico in September], my situation with Diego was worse and worse, till came to an stop. 2 weeks ago we began the divorce. I have no words to tell you how much I been suffering and knowing how much I love Diego you must understand that this troubles volition never end in my life. . . . Now I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I practice, but of course it will exist different I promise in a few months. . . . Allow me tell y'all kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one tin live through it.

From this time on, Kahlo fell sick whenever she felt she was losing her grip on Rivera. The tugs and pulls and heartaches acquired by Rivera'southward philandering continued later on their remarriage in December 1940. She now expressed them in a more than sophisticated iconography, one total of complex psychological innuendo, and the themes of surgery and blood became even more central to the metaphor of heartbreak. Thus she might describe herself tearing out her heart to indicate the wounds of dearest, or cracking open her head to show how destructive rejection tin can be.

During the year she was divorced, Frida had severe pains in her spine, and she consulted numerous doctors. Some recommended surgery. Dr. Juan Farill, a doctor she consulted in Mexico City, told her that what she needed was total rest, and he ordered that a twenty-kilogram weight be used to stretch her spine. A photograph taken by Nickolas Muray shows Kahlo'southward head in an orthopedic contraption that pulls her chin away from her body. The constant concrete pain, together with her longing for Diego, collection Kahlo to booze; she began to swallow at least a bottle of brandy a mean solar day.

The cocky-portraits from this time are some of the almost powerful paintings Kahlo always produced. In The Two Fridas, 1939, completed at the moment the divorce came through, both Fridas have their heart exposed, and they are connected by a vein, the source of which is a miniature portrait of Rivera. This vein passes through both women's hearts and ends in the lap of the spurned Frida, who cuts off its flow of blood with a pair of surgical pincers. Kahlo's fascination with the behavior of claret has intensified: the pincers do non halt its flow, and it continues to drip, forming intricate splotches, some of which are sly transformations of flowers embroidered on her skirt. In Self-Portrait with Cropped Pilus, 1940, Kahlo wears Rivera'southward suit and holds the scissors that have cut off her hair but where she had held the pincers in The Two Fridas—near her genitals. The animate swirls of shorn hair are no less sinister than the trickling blood in the earlier painting. In The Dream, 1940, Kahlo, who often felt suicidal during these months, goes ane step further and chooses a new mate, the skeleton that she actually kept on tiptop of her bed'southward awning—Rivera called information technology her lover.

Twice in 1940, Frida portrayed herself wearing a necklace of thorns that makes her bleed. Although she had left religion during her adolescence, Catholicism permeates the wounded cocky-portraits. Borrowing a symbol of Christ'south martyrdom, she presents herself as an icon to be worshipped both by herself and others. The rhetoric of Catholicism suited her purposes: her own paintings, too, are about organized religion and salvation.

When Leon Trotsky was murdered in Coyoacán in August 1940, Kahlo, who had been his hostess, friend, and lover 3 years earlier, was distraught, and her health declined. Rivera was concerned. He asked her to come to San Francisco, where he was painting a mural, to consult with Dr. Eloesser. Early on in September Kahlo was admitted to Saint Luke's Hospital, where Dr. Eloesser diagnosed her condition as osteomyelitis and he said she had suffered from a crunch of nerves and needed residue and avoidance from alcohol. Kahlo wrote to a friend:

I was very ill in Mexico. . . . Three months I was lying in an awful appliance on my mentum which fabricated me suffer like hell. All the doctors in Mexico thought I had to be operated on my spine. They all agreed that I had tuberculosis on the basic due to the old fracture I suffered years ago in an machine blow. I spend all the coin I could afford to see every specialist on bones there, and all told me the aforementioned story. I got then scared that I was sure I was going to die. . . . In three months I lost 15 pounds of weight and felt lousy all together.

Finally I decided to come to the States and not to pay any attention to Mexican doctors. So I came to San Francisco. There I was in the hospital for more than a month. They made every possible exam and establish no tuberculosis, and no demand for an operation. You lot can imagine how happy I was, and how relieved [sic]. Besides, I saw Diego, and that helped more any thing else. . . .

They plant that I have an infection in the kidneys which causes the tremendous irritation of the nerves which go through the right leg and a strong anemia. My explanation doesn't audio very scientific, but that is what I gathered from what the doctors told me. Anyhow I feel a trivial meliorate and I am painting a lilliputian flake. I will go back to San Francisco and marry Diego again. (He wants me to do so because he says he loves me more than any other daughter.) I am very happy. . . .

The ravages of pain—both physical and psychological—had a dramatic effect on Kahlo's bust-length self-portraits. The soft, seductive, vulnerable Kahlo that appears in Fulang-Chang and I, 1937, is gone in Cocky-Portrait with Monkey, 1940. Now her face up is thinner and her expression is tense and wary. In both paintings, she compares herself to her spider monkey, but while in the earlier one she does so with a mischievous wink, in the subsequently portrait the connection seems menacing. The lavender ribbon that loosely connected Frida to her pet in the 1937 painting is blood blood-red in the 1940 one, and it circles her cervix many times, threatening to choke her. In Self-Portrait with Modest Monkey, 1945, Kahlo looks still older and more than worn. This time the ribbon is yellowish, a color that to Kahlo symbolized illness and madness, and it begins by looping around an illusionistically painted nail, an keepsake of martyrdom whose point is driven into a cloudy heaven.

The hurting the nail refers to was largely in Kahlo's back. In 1944 an orthopedic surgeon ordered a steel corset without which she felt she could not sit down or stand. Kahlo once described the series of 28 corsets that she wore in her lifetime as a "punishment." A diary entry from 1944 hints at the feeling of lonely solitude that her steel corset gave her: "To hope with anguish retained, the broken column, and the immense look, without walking, in the vast path . . . moving my life created of steel." She wears that corset in The Broken Column, 1944, in which her naked torso is broken open as if in surgery, revealing a aging Ionic cavalcade that replaces her ain ruined vertebral column. The manner the column thrusts from loins to chin suggests the link Kahlo fabricated betwixt sex and hurting. Nails driven into her flesh underscore her agony, and she weeps, though her features are as unflinching every bit a pre-Columbian mask. A female Saint Sebastian, Kahlo displays her wounds and uses nakedness and sexuality to drive her bulletin home. Only unlike most Christian martyrs, her optics practice not beseech the heavens for conservancy. Rather, they stare straight ahead, challenging both the viewer and herself (in the mirror) to confront her predicament. The isolation of physical pain is amplified by the vast desert landscape whose ravines repeat the rents in her torso.

In 1945, Kahlo wrote a rhyme on the back of Without Hope, one of her grimmer self-portraits. In translation information technology says: "Not the least promise remains to me/ Everything moves in time with what the belly contains." In it Kahlo lies in bed weeping. Held betwixt her lips is a membranous funnel full of butchery. Kahlo has enlarged the scope of her personal drama by placing it betwixt the opposite worlds of the microscope—seen in the cellular organisms that dot her canvass—and the solar system—seen in the lord's day and moon that appear together over her, just as they appear on either side of Christ's cross in so many Mexican crucifixions.

In 1946, Kahlo went to New York to consult with Dr. Philip Wilson, a specialist in spinal surgery. "Lovely Ella and Love Boit," she wrote from Mexico to her close friend Ella Wolfe and her husband Bertram, Rivera'southward biographer, on February 15:

Hither the comet appears again! Doña Frida Kahlo, although you won't believe it!! I write to you from my bed, considering for four months I accept been in bad shape with my kleptomaniacal spine, and subsequently having seen numerous doctors from this country, I have decided to get to New York to come across 1 who they say is admittedly terrific. . . . Everyone hither, the "bone men" or orthopedes, feel that I should have an operation that I remember is very unsafe, since I am very thin, worn out and completely going to hell, and, in this state, I practice non want to let myself be operated without first consulting with some high upwardly doctor of Gringolandia. Thus I want to inquire you a very great favor, that consists in the following:

I enclose here a copy of my clinical history that will serve to make you realize all that I have suffered in this damned life, but also if possible, you will prove it to Dr. Wilson who is the i I want to consult with in that location. It is a question of a physician specialist in bones whose complete proper name is Dr. Philip Wilson, 321 East 42nd Street, North.Y.C. . . .

You can tell him more or less what kind of a ranch-mode cockroach your cuate Frida Kahlo pata de palo [peg leg] is. I exit you in consummate liberty to requite him whatsoever kind of explanations and you even may draw me (if it is necessary enquire Nick [Muray] for a photo so that he should know what I await like). . . .

Tell him that equally a ill person I am rather stoic, but that at present it is a little hard for me because in this f . . . ing life, 1 suffers merely one learns. . . .

In May she flew to New York. After extensive examinations by various doctors, it was recommended that her spinal cavalcade be reinforced. Early in June, at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Dr. Wilson fused iv of her vertebrae. Kahlo was in the hospital for over ii months and and then confined to bed for another month. During these three months, her recovery was remarkable. On June 30, in her high-spirited colloquial, she wrote to Alejandro Gómez Arias:

Alex darling,
They do not allow 1 to write very much, merely this is simply to tell you that the big operation already took place. Three weeks agone they proceeded to the cut and cutting of bones. And he is so marvelous this medico, and my body is so total of vitality, that they already proceeded to take me stand up on my "puper" feet for 2 little minutes, merely I myself do not believe it. The first two weeks were full of great suffering and tears and then that I practice not wish my pains on everyone. They are very strident and evil, only now, this week, my yelling diminished and with the help of pills I have survived more than or less well. I accept two huge scars on my back in this class. [Hither she drew her naked body with ii long scars with the marks of surgical stitches.] From here [an arrow points to the scar on her buttock] they proceeded to the pulling out of a slice of the pelvis in order to graft information technology onto the column, that is where my scar ended up being less hair-raising and straighter. Five vertebrae were damaged and now they are going to be like a rifle [in popular usage, "in terrific shape"]. The bother is that the bone takes a long time to grow and to readjust itself and I still have to spend six weeks in bed before they release me and I volition be able to flee from this terrifying metropolis to my honey Coyoacán.

Kahlo felt so renewed that she disobeyed medico's orders and began to paint. Back in Mexico, she did not follow Dr. Wilson's instructions to pb a placidity life. In October she wrote to her friend and patron Eduardo Morillo Safa, telling him that she had just received a letter from Dr. Wilson:

Information technology made me feel like an automatic rifle! He says that I tin now paint two hours a twenty-four hours. Earlier I received his orders I had already started to pigment, and I tin stand up up to three hours defended to painting and painting. I have well-nigh finished your first painting [Tree of Promise] which is of course nothing but the effect of the damned functioning! . . .

Kahlo played "the strong i" and defied her doctor's advice. She led a tense, active life and before long she was nervous, wearied, and depressed. Ultimately, the spinal fusion did not alleviate her troubles. Her sister Cristina maintained that the large injections of morphine that Kahlo had been given in the Hospital for Special Surgery began the drug addiction that worsened with every yr thereafter. Various of Kahlo'southward friends and doctors in Mexico believe that the wrong vertebrae were fused. Others say that her spinal fusion came "unfused" when i dark, in a state of rage, perhaps because Rivera was off on i of his jaunts, she threw herself on the ground and attacked herself, thus opening her wounds. Kahlo was certainly tempestuous plenty for such behavior, and if she was in fact a Munchausen patient, the self-inflicted injury would have been in character.

Tree of Promise, 1946, which Kahlo chosen "zippo but the effect of the damned operation," paints the two aspects of Kahlo's view of herself equally a patient. One Frida in this piece of work is a passive victim laid out on a hospital trolley; the ii open incisions on her back and pelvis are precisely those she described and drew in her letter to Gómez Arias. The other Frida is the stiff, consoling i. She guards and weeps over the recumbent Frida, simply she sits bolt upright, supported by a steel brace. Equally if to reaffirm her restored vitality, this Frida wears a bright cherry Tehuana costume and a huge red bow in her pilus. Thus she takes the colour of her bleeding wounds and uses it to express her optimism. Indeed, as the years passed and Kahlo grew sicker, her wearing apparel became more and more than flamboyant. Information technology was as if she wanted the festive frills to camouflage the wearisome collapse of the body underneath. In her left hand this strong Frida holds an orthopedic corset painted, with an irony typical of her, bright pinkish. The flag that she holds in her correct hand is the real bailiwick of the painting. Emblazoned with Kahlo'southward motto, "Arbol de la esperanza mantente firme" (Tree of hope, keep house), information technology is her battle banner. Since the battle was bloody, the marching song is written in cherry-red. Even the tip of the flagstaff looks like a surgical instrument dipped in claret. "The landscape is day and dark," Kahlo said of this painting, "and in that location is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live." Kahlo must have painted the skeleton out, but the threat of death is present in the gravelike trenches that flank her and in the duality of the live and most dead Fridas below the greater duality of the sun and moon.

The Piddling Deer is some other 1946 painting that alludes to Kahlo'southward spinal fusion, though it may besides refer to injury in love. This time, Kahlo is a sort of pagan Saint Sebastian. Part deer, part man, she runs through a forest with 9 arrows piercing her body. Below her feet is a green branch, broken in youth like herself. Kahlo had a definite empathy for broken things, and several of her paintings employ croaky, cleaved woods as symbols for physical injury or decay. In The Little Deer, the slender, leafy branch is contrasted to old, dry out, scarred tree trunks, one of which has the stumps of broken limbs. The young deer cannot find her way out of that prison of trees and into the cooling waters beyond. Nor tin she shake off her arrows.

Miguel N. Lira, one of Kahlo'southward school friends, commented that the spinal fusion of 1946 began "the calvary that would lead to the stop." In 1950–51, Kahlo was in the English Hospital in Mexico Metropolis for a year, under the care of Dr. Juan Farill. In mid-April, later on ii operations, she had her oldest sis Matilde write to Dr. Eloesser on her behalf. Kahlo was undergoing, Matilde wrote, "a existent Calvary." Three more vertebrae had been fused, she said, "with a bone of I don't know who." Kahlo felt badly sick, and when the doctors enclosed her in a plaster corset, her pains grew worse. "Thus," wrote Matilde,

began this process and to calm her the doctors gave her a double injection of Demerol . . . and other things with the exception of morphine, because she cannot tolerate morphine. . . . there was a Council of the Indies pricking her with injections and medicines. The fever did not stop so I noticed that she was emitting a very bad odor from her back, I pointed information technology out to the Doctor and the next day they . . . opened upwards the corset and they found an abscess or tumor, all infected, in the wound and they had to operate on her one time more. . . . They put on some other new plaster corset. . . .

For all the injections and other treatments, the surgical incision still did not close. The doctors performed various operations in the hope of getting rid of the infected os. Matilde was furious at the doctors, and she could not empathise why Kahlo had consented to take "this stupid operation" in the beginning place. But, she said, "she is worthy of admiration for she is and so abnegating and strong and thanks to this she puts up with her misfortune." Whether it was infected or not, Kahlo liked her new bone. When she learned that information technology came from a donor named Francisco Villa, she felt as macho as the revolutionary bandit, Pancho Villa. "With my new bone," she cried, "I feel similar shooting my way out of this infirmary and starting my own revolution." Always a displayer of wounds, she delighted in having friends peek through the hole in her cast.

Kahlo fabricated herself and her room festive. With the assist of visitors, she decorated her plaster casts with feathers, mirrors, decals, and hammers and sickles drawn in lipstick or iodine. (Kahlo's surgical marathon beginning in the mid-1940s coincided with her return to the Communist Party.) The room was decked with candy skulls, dirt candelabras shaped similar the tree of life, white peace doves, and the Russian flag; friends came to eat, drink, and lookout man films. Frida adored the attending:

I never lost my spirit. I always spent my time painting because they kept me going with Demerol, and this blithe me and it fabricated me feel happy. I painted my plaster corsets and paintings, I joked around, I wrote, they brought me movies. I passed three years in the hospital as if information technology was a fiesta. I cannot complain.

Only sometimes she did complain. "The highs and lows of Frida while she was in the hospital," Dr. Velasco y Polo, one of her doctors, said recently, "depended on how Diego behaved." She was brave and happy if Rivera was attentive. Then her pains seemed to vanish. When he didn't turn upwardly for days and days, she wept with abandon and her pains increased. Rivera would be summoned. "She couldn't offer her pain to the Virgin," Dr. Velasco y Polo observed, "and so she offered it to Diego. He was her god." In a recent interview Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who met Kahlo in the late 1930s, saw her as a person bent on attracting others to her. "For Frida," he wrote, "pity was stronger than dear. She wanted to exist pitied for her misadventures with Diego. She wanted to be pitied for her physical disabilities, for a k things. She dramatized her troubles to brand sure that people were aware of them and responded to them sympathetically."

"When I go out the hospital two months from now," she told an interviewer, "there are three things I want to practice: paint, pigment, paint." And that is what she did. While convalescing at domicile in 1951, she painted Cocky-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, a secular retablo in which Kahlo, seated in her wheelchair, is the saved person and her dr. is the holy agent of salvation. Sober and dignified, the painting resonates with feeling. Out of gratitude to her surgeon, she paints him, and in doing so, she offers him her extracted heart set upon her palette. In her right hand are dripping paintbrushes which recall both the arrows in the little deer and the flagstaff in Tree of Promise. Once more, Kahlo is her ain surgeon. When she dips her brush into the palette of her middle, the color she finds is red.

Kahlo'southward childhood ambition to go a doctor became, in adult life, a fascination with medicine and with the functioning of the human body. She shared this interest with Rivera, who had health bug of his own and was something of a hypochondriac; he besides revealed this business organisation in his paintings. Kahlo kept informed about her ailments by reading articles and medical books and by consulting doctors. It could be said that Kahlo carried her curiosity nearly the workings of the body to the extreme of choosing to undergo surgery. Beingness a patient was role of her theatrical self-presentation; it went with her clothes, it went with her exotic personality, it went with the drama of her fine art. Also, by making doctors perform needless surgery, Munchausen patients outwit and control their surgeons, in effect triumphing over their surgeons/fathers by becoming their own doctors. Fifty-fifty if Kahlo was not a Munchausen example in real life, she was in her art, for there she cuts herself open over and over once again.

Most important, choosing surgical intervention was an act of faith. The next doctor, the side by side diagnosis, the next injection, the next operation, would be the ane that would save her.

Just nothing saved Kahlo. In the spring of 1953, when she had her first one-woman exhibition in Mexico, her doctors told her that she was too sick to nourish the opening. She went anyhow, arriving in a wailing ambulance among the roar of a constabulary escort. A thick crowd of assembled guests watched as she was carried into the gallery on a stretcher and placed in her ain four-poster bed with the skeleton on the awning. Kahlo held court for hours, and later, she gave this assessment of her situation to a Time mag reporter: "I am not sick, I am broken. But I am happy to be live every bit long equally I can paint."

The reporter mentioned the threat of gangrene and said that Kahlo's leg hurt so much, she could inappreciably stand up. In Baronial, Kahlo wrote in her diary:

It is certain that they are going to amputate my right leg. I know few details, merely the opinions are very serious. Dr. Luis Méndez and Dr. Juan Farill. I am very worried, but at the same time, I experience that it will exist a liberation. I hope I volition be able, when I am walking, to give all the strength that I have left to Diego, Everything for Diego.

The night before the amputation, Frida put on a brave face for a gathering of friends. Noticing their pained expressions, she tried to cheer them: "What's the matter?" she asked. "Look at your faces, it'due south as if there were a tragedy! What tragedy? They are going to cutting off my pata. So what?" Later, one of the friends recalls, Kahlo dressed herself in a sumptuous Tehuana costume and delivered herself to the surgeon's knife.

For a while the amputation nigh destroyed Kahlo. A prose poem in her journal welcomes the hand of death, a "very silent exit." After three months she learned to walk, and her depression lifted a little. She ordered some crimson leather boots trimmed with gold and bells. When visitors came, she twirled in front of them to testify off her boots and her new freedom of movement. But for all the joking, Kahlo was spiritually felled. Her leg mended; her mind did non. Kahlo's journal drawings chart her psychological ups and downs. 1 moment she is the heroine to be worshiped, the next moment she is the victim to be pitied. Now she is a 1-legged doll falling off a classical column—"I am DISINTEGRATION," says the caption. Side by side she is a pregnant cupid without arrows and surrounded past sperm. In another self-portrait every bit an affections, she is trapped in a thicket of lines. "Are you going? No," is written above her. Beneath she gives the reason: "Cleaved WINGS." A later diary drawing shows Kahlo disintegrating into the earth, her substance fertilizing roots. Far from the dream of fertility that she painted in Roots, 1943, this is a dream of death. "Color of poisonous substance," she wrote in the sky, and, near a disembodied (amputated) foot, she wrote "ALREADY?" and then said, "Everything backwards sunday and moon feet and Frida." On the facing page, a tree of trivial hope looses its leaves to the wind. And then her spirit rallied once more: she painted her amputated leg on a pedestal, surrounded it with a launder of scarlet ink, and wrote: "Anxiety what do I want them for if I have wings to fly. 1953."

In these last years, Kahlo replaced her stoic motto, "Tree of Promise, continue Firm," with the grim realism of "Night is falling in my life." Just still she painted life and low-cal in a serial of apocalyptic still lifes in which the sun and moon oversee fruits among which peace doves oftentimes nestle. In i 1954 Still Life, the sun'southward rays are transformed into a web of alive crimson roots or veins, the ends of which class the discussion "LUZ" (low-cal) and Kahlo'southward name. Because of the huge doses of drugs that Kahlo was now taking, her behavior, when she was not in a stupor, was often wildly out of control. Her paintings lost their technical precision. Brushstokes are messy, color is strident, forms are crudely drawn. Dr. Velasco y Polo observes that Kahlo'due south paintings showed the excitation typical of mescaline addiction, though Demerol was her favorite drug. Some of her last paintings are blatantly political. Communism, nature, and love of Diego were her religions now. Marxism Volition Give Wellness to the Sick, 1954, is like a retablo with Marx substituting for the holy paradigm, saving Kahlo by supporting her and so that she tin can bandage aside her crutches. In point of fact, she did endeavor to walk without crutches at this time, but roughshod, a autumn that some friends say hastened her death.

As her health and drug corruption worsened, Kahlo's unpredictable beliefs alienated most of her friends. She screamed at visitors, struck at them with her crutches, and even when she was feeling well, close friends felt that she was only a mask of her old cocky. Rivera withdrew from her, likewise. When he did so, Kahlo would accept what her nurse called a "crunch," and Rivera would take to come, because he was the only 1 who could calm her. In one case when the Riveras were having lunch in the garden, Kahlo threw a canteen of water at Rivera'south caput. He ducked in fourth dimension. The shattering of drinking glass on the rock terrace startled Kahlo out of her rage: "Why did I do information technology?" she wept; "If I continue like this, I would prefer to die!" Another fourth dimension her anger was turned on herself. While the fine art critic Raquel Tibol stood by watching, Kahlo took a self-portrait in which her caput was inside a sunflower and remarked that she looked as though she was drowning inside the bloom. Tibol recalls that the painting was full of vitality and joy, and that this provoked Kahlo to have a knife and, with tears in her eyes and a foreign grin on her lips, to scratch and scrape until her image was destroyed.

Later in June Kahlo'due south condition improved somewhat, and she was alight with exuberant plans. Early in July, while convalescing from bronchopneumonia, she disobeyed doctor'south orders and left her bed in order to take part in a Communist demonstration to protest the ouster of Guatemala's left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and the CIA'southward imposition of the right-wing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. At this, her concluding public appearance, Kahlo was a heroic spectacle. As her husband pushed her wheelchair through the streets, she held a banner with a peace pigeon in her left hand. Her right hand was clenched in a revolutionary fist. This was the Communist heroine that Rivera adored and had depicted in a number of his murals. For the crowd of leftists who followed in her wake, Kahlo'south fortitude was an inspiration. "Gringos asesinos, fuera!" (Yankee assassins, get out!) she yelled, and many echoed her cry. Pleased with the feeling of participation that the sit-in brought her, Kahlo told a friend: "I only desire iii things in life: to live with Diego, to continue painting, and to belong to the Communist Party." A few days later, on her birthday, she dressed and fabricated upwardly her confront with care and was then carried downstairs to her flower-filled dining room, where she entertained a hundred guests with a banquet of Mexican dishes.

Kahlo could only stand up her hurting for a few hours, however, and even then simply with the help of painkillers. In her diary her wish for transcendence is expressed in several self-portraits as a winged animal, but now these "angels" are plain-featured, breathless splotches. The journal'southward last drawing is of a blackness angel rising into the heaven. The final words are a last flourish of alegría and fatalism. "I promise the leave is blithesome—and I hope never to come back.—Frida."

When Kahlo died on July thirteen, 1954, the crusade of her decease was said to exist "pulmonary embolism," but her diary suggests that she killed herself. Knowing that she attempted suicide on various occasions, many of her friends believe that she took an overdose of drugs, thus outwitting doctors once and for all by taking the doctor'southward syringe, and her life, into her own easily. Kahlo's fighting spirit was expressionless. For all that, her last paintings of fruits and doves and suns show how much she loved the world she was relinquishing. And all her works, even the most painful ones, are a celebration of life.

Hayden Herrera is a New York–based fine art critic whose article "Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Art." was published in Artforum in May 1976. Her volume, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, has just been published by Harper & Row.

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NOTES

i. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from the writer'due south Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, published by Harper & Row, March 1983. Sources for quotations and for information are fully documented in the footnotes of this book.

2. My understanding of the Munchausen syndrome is based on the summary of factitious disorders in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition), Washington, D C.: The American Psychiatric Association, 1980, pp. 285–290.

3. Don R. Lipsitt, "The Munchausen Mystery," Psychology Today, February 1983, pp. 78–79.

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