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THE MEXICAN PAINTER FRIDA Kahlo (1907–1954) underwent some 35 surgical operations between the ages of 18, when her body was crushed in a bus accident, and 47, when she died. “I hold the record for operations,” she announced in 1951, after spending a year in the hospital having nine operations, seven of which were on her spinal column.1 The public Frida dismissed pain with a full-bellied laugh, hiding her limp and her injured leg with long ruffled skirts from Tehuantepec, walking with a grace that turned lameness into an attraction. With dark devouring eyes beneath eyebrows joined like a swallow’s wings, she had a delicate yet savage beauty. Related ROBERT DOISNEAU’S OBLIQUE REGARD A PROJECT BY GIUSEPPE PENONE Mobile Computer Stand Cart
Kahlo took this beauty and made herself into an exotic creature, the perfect foil for her immense, Buddha-like husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. Both were celebrated personalities; their adventures, political and amorous, were reported by an avid press. During her lifetime, though, Kahlo’s painting was overshadowed by her husband’s fame.
Kahlo’s paintings show us the misery behind her facade of alegría—her particular brand of exuberance and wit. Psychological and physical pain are so intertwined that it is often difficult to decide whether the subject of a weeping self-portrait is rejection in love 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. One role brought pity, the other admiration.
Kahlo played these twin roles in a long series of self-portraits that began in 1926. Wounded, weeping, cut open 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 be from within and as 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 self-portraits, but in their disjunction Kahlo the sufferer becomes Kahlo the voyeur of her own sufferings. No doubt there was something heartening about this distancing. Painting self-portraits may also have been a form of exorcism: by projecting pain outward onto a replica of herself, she gave her agony to an alternate Kahlo, one whose stoic impassivity could put up with it. She projected pain 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 father was a sick man (he had vertigos every month and a half), he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter) and above all of understanding for all my problems.” Guillermo Kahlo was indeed attentive to his favorite daughter. When, at the age of six, Frida was confined to her room for nine months with polio, he made sure that she did the exercises that would strengthen her shriveled right leg. Hurt by the jokes that other children made about her leg, Kahlo hid it with several pairs of socks and defied her deformity by becoming a tomboy. But 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 Ask for Planes and Only Get Straw Wings, she showed herself at about seven holding a model airplane and wearing straw wings that are suspended from the sky by ribbons, and that clearly cannot fly; she too is tethered by a ribbon, but one that is fastened to the ground by nails.
In 1925, when Kahlo was well along in her studies to prepare for medical school, the bus in which she was riding home from school was rammed by a streetcar. Years later, she spoke of it with a typically gallant detachment:
A little while after we got on the bus the collision began. Before that we had taken another bus, but since I had lost a little parasol, we got off to look for it and that was how we happened to get on the bus that destroyed me. The accident 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 young man. When the trolley car went around the corner the bus was pushed against the wall.
I was an intelligent young girl, but impractical, in spite of all the freedom I had won. Perhaps for this reason, I did not assess the situation nor did I guess the kind of wounds I had. The first thing I thought 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 look for it, thinking that what had happened would not have major consequences.
It is a lie that one is aware 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 way 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 carrying a packet of powdered gold, and this fell all over Kahlo, prompting onlookers to cry “La bailarina, la ballerina!” as if she were a dancer.
None of the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital expected her to survive. Her spinal column was broken in three places. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her collarbone and two ribs were broken; one shoulder was out of joint. 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 later.
When she was strong enough, Kahlo wrote to Gómez Arias. Her letters tell him her condition in minute detail:
Alex de me vida, you more than anybody know how sad I have been in this piggy filthy hospital, since you can imagine it and also the boys must have told you about it. Everyone says I should not be so desperate, but they don’t know what three months in bed means for me, which is what I need, having been a callejera [person who loves wandering about in the streets]. But what can one do; at least la pelona [the bald one, Kahlo’s word for death] didn’t take me away. Right?
Kahlo recovered, but in less than a year she relapsed. A bone surgeon discovered that three vertebrae were out of place. As her letters show, several times she was not given certain treatments, such as X-rays, because her family could not afford to pay for them. Adding to the misery of being sick again was Kahlo’s rejection by Gómez Arias, who left her because 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 it, telling me how you are, yesterday I went to see the doctor and he told me that I cannot move my leg at all for a long time to come because it is worse than the other time, you can see how many hopes I have! but it is better, I think that with these sufferings I am paying little by little, for all that I did to you and maybe sometime you will think that I am good, that even if it is out of pity, you will come back—
This letter mentions a portrait that Kahlo had just finished. Like many of her self-portraits it was a token of love, a way of keeping herself in Gómez Arias’ heart and mind: “I entreat you,” she said, “to put it in a low place where you can see it as if you were looking at me.” This Self-Portrait, 1926, may well have been her first painting. During her convalescence, “bored as hell . . . with a plaster cast,” she took up painting as something that she could do in bed. “Since I was young,” she said, “this misfortune [the accident] did not at that time take on the character of a tragedy: I felt I had energies enough to do anything instead of studying to become a doctor. And without paying much attention, I began to paint.” Even though she sounds as if she picked up a paintbrush by mere chance, painting was in fact a matter of necessity: “Thus,” Kahlo once remarked, “as the accident changed my path, many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which everyone considers normal, and to me nothing seemed more normal than to paint what had not been fulfilled.”
Kahlo said that she could not paint her accident, but the accident led her to chart her state of mind not in terms of facial expression or gesture, but in terms of injuries inflicted upon her immobile body. Painting was a form of psychological surgery. She turned her body inside out, placing her heart on her breast or cutting open her chest to show her broken backbone. As an invalid, Frida did not travel far from the confines of herself. Looking into a large mirror affixed to the underside of her bed’s 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 past. She claimed, for example, that she had had the accident at 16, not 18, and that she had spent not one, but three months in the Red Cross Hospital.
Each year the pains grew worse, and Kahlo consulted more 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. There is, indeed, a possibility that Kahlo suffered from a psychological disorder called the Munchausen syndrome, after the name of the 18th-century recounter of tall 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 go from hospital to hospital in order 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 have a tendency 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 convincing way invented physical symptoms that appear to be under the patient’s voluntary control, with the result that the patient is frequently hospitalized. Some Munchausen patients bear a grudge against the medical profession which may stem from an earlier 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 Mount 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, as 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 only 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 help her draw the fetus as it should have looked when she lost it. Back in her apartment, she painted to combat depression. Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, shows her weeping and hemorrhaging on her hospital bed while she clutches against her belly six red ribbons resembling veins or umbilical cords; from the ends of the ribbons float objects symbolic of her miscarriage. Although the painting expresses nothing but desolation, its format might offer some hope. Henry Ford Hospital is the first painting that Kahlo based on Mexican retablos, small votive paintings on tin which depict a person saved from disaster together with the holy image 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’s own mother had just died); or in another reading, Kahlo herself is giving birth 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 death. There is a bit more optimism in Frida and the Abortion, 1932, a lithograph made soon after the miscarriage. It shows a tearful Kahlo with an embryo in her womb; attached to the embryo by a long umbilical cord which winds around Kahlo’s leg is a male fetus which sits at her feet. The blood from her hemorrhage drips down 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 it were a shield. In 1954 she told a friend: “My painting carries within it the message of pain. . . . Painting completed my life. I lost three children. . . . Painting substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing.” Another painting, Roots, 1943, depicts a childless woman’s dream of birth, yet it borrows a surgical metaphor, as Kahlo’s torso is opened up to reveal not broken 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 abortion because of “infantilism of the ovaries.” During this year 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 foot continues to be bad,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser, “but it can’t be helped and one day I am going to decide that they should cut it off so that it won’t annoy me so much anymore.”
These troubles were compounded by Rivera’s affair with her younger sister. In 1934 Kahlo was too unhappy to paint, and in 1935 she produced only two works. One is a bland self-portrait showing her cropped hairdo. (During Diego’s affair she cut her long black hair and forsook her beloved Mexican costumes for European-style clothes.) In the other, entitled A Few Small Nips, 1935, she projected her agony onto another woman’s violent death at the hands of her brutal lover, who stands over her holding his bloodied dagger. The subject came from a news item, and Kahlo said that she had needed to paint it because she herself had felt “murdered by life.” Kahlo’s hurt did not heal quickly. She painted her recollection of it in Memory, 1937, and Remembrance of an Open Wound, 1938. By this time, she was able to take the wounds of the stabbed woman in A Few Small Nips upon herself, but the imagery is less horrifying, and more distanced by 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 foot operations; Kahlo’s foot was operated upon in 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1938. But in Memory, neither the hole in her chest pierced by a metal 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 physical wounds. Rather they are vivid symbols of pain in love. In Remembrance and What the Water Gave Me, the long cut on Kahlo’s inner thigh is an invention—it points to her damaged sense of self as a sexual being.
This association of sex with injury has much to do with Kahlo’s induction by 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 self-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 first was at the Surrealist-oriented Julien Levy Gallery on 57th Street; the second was organized by Breton in Paris. In both cities she had severe health problems, and in Paris she had to be hospitalized for a colibacterial inflammation of the kidneys.
Her troubles did not end with her return to Mexico. By late 1939 Rivera had divorced her. If the reasons given were ambiguous, nothing could be clearer than the anguish revealed in Kahlo’s paintings and her letters, written in her idiosyncratic English: “Nick Darling,” she wrote to her ex-lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, on October 13,
I couldn’t write to you before, since you left [Muray had been in Mexico in September], my situation with Diego was worse and worse, till came to an end. Two 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 will 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 do, but of course it will be different I hope in a few months. . . . Let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live through it.
From this time on, Kahlo fell ill whenever she felt she was losing her grip on Rivera. The tugs and pulls and heartaches caused by Rivera’s philandering continued after their remarriage in December 1940. She now expressed them in a more sophisticated iconography, one full of complex psychological innuendo, and the themes of surgery and blood became even more central to the metaphor of heartbreak. Thus she might depict herself tearing out her heart to indicate the wounds of love, or cracking open her head to show how destructive rejection 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 20-kilogram weight be used to stretch her spine. A photograph taken by Nickolas Muray shows Kahlo’s head in an orthopedic contraption that pulls her chin away from her body. The constant physical pain, together with her longing for Diego, drove Kahlo to alcohol; she began to consume at least a bottle of brandy a day.
The self-portraits from this time are some of the most powerful paintings Kahlo ever 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 blood has intensified: the pincers do not 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 Hair, 1940, Kahlo wears Rivera’s suit and holds the scissors that have cut off her hair just 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 one step further and chooses a new mate, the skeleton that she actually kept on top of her bed’s canopy—Rivera called it 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 self-portraits. Borrowing a symbol of Christ’s 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 faith and salvation.
When Leon Trotsky was murdered in Coyoacán in August 1940, Kahlo, who had been his hostess, friend, and lover three years before, 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 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 crisis of nerves and needed rest and abstention from alcohol. Kahlo wrote to a friend:
I was very ill in Mexico. . . . Three months I was lying in an awful apparatus on my chin which made 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 bones due to the old fracture I suffered years ago in an automobile accident. I spend all the money I could afford to see every specialist on bones there, and all told me the same story. I got so 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 examination and found no tuberculosis, and no need for an operation. You can imagine how happy I was, and how relieved [sic]. Besides, I saw Diego, and that helped more than any thing else. . . .
They found 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 sound very scientific, but that is what I gathered from what the doctors told me. Anyhow I feel a little better and I am painting a little bit. 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 girl.) 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 Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1940. Now her face 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 later portrait the connection seems menacing. The lavender ribbon that loosely connected Frida to her pet in the 1937 painting is blood red in the 1940 one, and it circles her neck many times, threatening to choke her. In Self-Portrait with Small Monkey, 1945, Kahlo looks still older and more worn. This time the ribbon is yellow, a color that to Kahlo symbolized illness and madness, and it begins by looping around an illusionistically painted nail, an emblem of martyrdom whose point is driven into a cloudy sky.
The pain 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 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 confinement 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 cleaved open as if in surgery, revealing a crumbling Ionic column that replaces her own ruined vertebral column. The way the column thrusts from loins to chin suggests the link Kahlo made between sex and pain. Nails driven into her flesh underscore her agony, and she weeps, though her features are as unflinching as a pre-Columbian mask. A female Saint Sebastian, Kahlo displays her wounds and uses nakedness and sexuality to drive her message home. But unlike most Christian martyrs, her eyes do not beseech the heavens for salvation. 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 echo the rents in her body.
In 1945, Kahlo wrote a rhyme on the back of Without Hope, one of her grimmer self-portraits. In translation it says: “Not the least hope remains to me/ Everything moves in time with what the belly contains.” In it Kahlo lies in bed weeping. Held between her lips is a membranous funnel full of butchery. Kahlo has enlarged the scope of her personal drama by placing it between the opposite worlds of the microscope—seen in the cellular organisms that dot her sheet—and the solar system—seen in the sun 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 Dear Boit,” she wrote from Mexico to her close friend Ella Wolfe and her husband Bertram, Rivera’s biographer, on February 15:
Here the comet appears again! Doña Frida Kahlo, although you won’t believe it!! I write to you from my bed, because for four months I have been in bad shape with my crooked spine, and after having seen numerous doctors from this country, I have decided to go to New York to see one who they say is absolutely terrific. . . . Everyone here, the “bone men” or orthopedes, feel that I should have an operation that I think is very dangerous, since I am very thin, worn out and completely going to hell, and, in this state, I do not want to let myself be operated without first consulting with some high up doctor of Gringolandia. Thus I want to ask 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 show it to Dr. Wilson who is the one I want to consult with there. It is a question of a doctor specialist in bones whose complete name is Dr. Philip Wilson, 321 East 42nd Street, N.Y.C. . . .
You can tell him more or less what kind of a ranch-style cockroach your cuate Frida Kahlo pata de palo [peg leg] is. I leave you in complete liberty to give him any kind of explanations and you even may describe me (if it is necessary ask Nick [Muray] for a photo so that he should know what I look like). . . .
Tell him that as a sick person I am rather stoic, but that now it is a little hard for me because in this f . . . ing life, one suffers but one learns. . . .
In May she flew to New York. After extensive examinations by various doctors, it was recommended that her spinal column be reinforced. Early in June, at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Dr. Wilson fused four of her vertebrae. Kahlo was in the hospital for over two months and then confined to bed for another month. During these three months, her recovery was remarkable. On June 30, in her high-spirited vernacular, she wrote to Alejandro Gómez Arias:
They do not allow one to write very much, but this is only to tell you that the big operation already took place. Three weeks ago they proceeded to the cutting and cutting of bones. And he is so marvelous this doctor, and my body is so full of vitality, that they already proceeded to have me stand on my “puper” feet for two little minutes, but I myself do not believe it. The first two weeks were full of great suffering and tears so that I do not wish my pains on anybody. They are very strident and evil, but now, this week, my yelling diminished and with the help of pills I have survived more or less well. I have two huge scars on my back in this form. [Here she drew her naked body with two 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 it 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 will be able to flee from this terrifying city to my beloved Coyoacán.
Kahlo felt so renewed that she disobeyed doctor’s orders and began to paint. Back in Mexico, she did not follow Dr. Wilson’s instructions to lead a quiet 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:
It made me feel like an automatic rifle! He says that I can now paint two hours a day. Before I received his orders I had already started to paint, and I can stand up to three hours dedicated to painting and painting. I have almost finished your first painting [Tree of Hope] which is of course nothing but the result of the damned operation! . . .
Kahlo played “the strong one” and defied her doctor’s advice. She led a tense, active life and soon she was nervous, exhausted, 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 year thereafter. Various of Kahlo’s friends and doctors in Mexico believe that the wrong vertebrae were fused. Others say that her spinal fusion came “unfused” when one night, in a state of rage, perhaps because Rivera was off on one of his jaunts, she threw herself on the ground and attacked herself, thus opening her wounds. Kahlo was certainly tempestuous enough for such behavior, and if she was in fact a Munchausen patient, the self-inflicted injury would have been in character.
Tree of Hope, 1946, which Kahlo called “nothing but the result of the damned operation,” paints the two aspects of Kahlo’s view of herself as a patient. One Frida in this work is a passive victim laid out on a hospital trolley; the two 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 strong, consoling one. She guards and weeps over the recumbent Frida, but she sits bolt upright, supported by a steel brace. As if to reaffirm her restored vitality, this Frida wears a bright red Tehuana costume and a huge red bow in her hair. Thus she takes the color of her bleeding wounds and uses it to express her optimism. Indeed, as the years passed and Kahlo grew sicker, her clothes became more and more flamboyant. It was as if she wanted the festive frills to camouflage the slow collapse of the body underneath. In her left hand this strong Frida holds an orthopedic corset painted, with an irony typical of her, bright pink. The flag that she holds in her right hand is the real subject of the painting. Emblazoned with Kahlo’s motto, “Arbol de la esperanza mantente firme” (Tree of hope, keep firm), it is her battle banner. Since the battle was bloody, the marching song is written in red. Even the tip of the flagstaff looks like a surgical instrument dipped in blood. “The landscape is day and night,” Kahlo said of this painting, “and there 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 nearly dead Fridas beneath the greater duality of the sun and moon.
The Little Deer is another 1946 painting that alludes to Kahlo’s spinal fusion, though it may also refer to injury in love. This time, Kahlo is a sort of pagan Saint Sebastian. Part deer, part human, she runs through a forest with nine arrows piercing her body. Beneath her feet is a green branch, broken in youth like herself. Kahlo had a definite empathy for broken things, and several of her paintings use cracked, broken wood as symbols for physical injury or decay. In The Little Deer, the slender, leafy branch is contrasted to old, dry, 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 can she shake off her arrows.
Miguel N. Lira, one of Kahlo’s school friends, commented that the spinal fusion of 1946 began “the calvary that would lead to the end.” In 1950–51, Kahlo was in the English Hospital in Mexico City for a year, under the care of Dr. Juan Farill. In mid-April, after two operations, she had her oldest sister Matilde write to Dr. Eloesser on her behalf. Kahlo was undergoing, Matilde wrote, “a real Calvary.” Three more vertebrae had been fused, she said, “with a bone of I don’t know who.” Kahlo felt desperately 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 and then I noticed that she was emitting a very bad odor from her back, I pointed it out to the Doctor and the next day they . . . opened up the corset and they found an abscess or tumor, all infected, in the wound and they had to operate on her once more. . . . They put on another 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 bone. Matilde was furious at the doctors, and she could not understand why Kahlo had consented to have “this stupid operation” in the first place. But, she said, “she is worthy of admiration for she is 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 it 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 like shooting my way out of this hospital and starting my own revolution.” Always a displayer of wounds, she delighted in having friends peek through the hole in her cast.
Kahlo made herself and her room festive. With the help 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, clay candelabras shaped like the tree of life, white peace doves, and the Russian flag; friends came to eat, drink, and watch films. Frida adored the attention:
I never lost my spirit. I always spent my time painting because they kept me going with Demerol, and this animated me and it made 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 it was a fiesta. I cannot complain.
But 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 up 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, “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 love. She wanted to be pitied for her misadventures with Diego. She wanted to be pitied for her physical disabilities, for a thousand things. She dramatized her troubles to make sure that people were aware of them and responded to them sympathetically.”
“When I leave the hospital two months from now,” she told an interviewer, “there are three things I want to do: paint, paint, paint.” And that is what she did. While convalescing at home in 1951, she painted Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, a secular retablo in which Kahlo, seated in her wheelchair, is the saved person and her doctor 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 Hope. Once again, Kahlo is her own surgeon. When she dips her brush into the palette of her heart, the color she finds is red.
Kahlo’s childhood ambition to become 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 problems of his own and was something of a hypochondriac; he too revealed this concern 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 about the workings of the body to the extreme of choosing to undergo surgery. Being a patient was part of her theatrical self-presentation; it went with her clothes, it went with her exotic personality, it went with the drama of her 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. Even if Kahlo was not a Munchausen case in real life, she was in her art, for there she cuts herself open over and over again.
Most important, choosing surgical intervention was an act of faith. The next doctor, the next diagnosis, the next injection, the next operation, would be the one that would save her.
But 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 attend the opening. She went anyway, arriving in a wailing ambulance amidst the roar of a police escort. A thick crowd of assembled guests watched as she was carried into the gallery on a stretcher and placed in her own four-poster bed with the skeleton on the canopy. Kahlo held court for hours, and later, she gave this assessment of her situation to a Time magazine reporter: “I am not sick, I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
The reporter mentioned the threat of gangrene and said that Kahlo’s leg hurt so much, she could hardly stand. In August, Kahlo wrote in her diary:
It is certain that they are going to amputate my right leg. I know few details, but the opinions are very serious. Dr. Luis Méndez and Dr. Juan Farill. I am very worried, but at the same time, I feel that it will be a liberation. I hope I will 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’s as if there were a tragedy! What tragedy? They are going to cut 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 nearly 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 red leather boots trimmed with gold and bells. When visitors came, she twirled in front of them to show off her boots and her new freedom of movement. But for all the joking, Kahlo was spiritually felled. Her leg mended; her mind did not. Kahlo’s journal drawings chart her psychological ups and downs. One moment she is the heroine to be worshiped, the next moment she is the victim to be pitied. Now she is a one-legged doll falling off a classical column—”I am DISINTEGRATION,” says the caption. Next she is a pregnant cupid without arrows and surrounded by sperm. In another self-portrait as an angel, she is trapped in a thicket of lines. “Are you going? No,” is written above her. Below she gives the reason: “BROKEN 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 poison,” she wrote in the sky, and, near a disembodied (amputated) foot, she wrote “ALREADY?” and then said, “Everything backwards sun and moon feet and Frida.” On the facing page, a tree of little hope looses its leaves to the wind. Then her spirit rallied again: she painted her amputated leg on a pedestal, surrounded it with a wash of red ink, and wrote: “Feet what do I want them for if I have wings to fly. 1953.”
In these last years, Kahlo replaced her stoic motto, “Tree of Hope, keep Firm,” with the grim realism of “Night is falling in my life.” But still she painted life and light in a series of apocalyptic still lifes in which the sun and moon oversee fruits among which peace doves often nestle. In one 1954 Still Life, the sun’s rays are transformed into a web of live red roots or veins, the ends of which form the word “LUZ” (light) and Kahlo’s 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’s 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 Will Give Health to the Sick, 1954, is like a retablo with Marx substituting for the holy image, saving Kahlo by supporting her so that she can cast aside her crutches. In point of fact, she did try to walk without crutches at this time, but fell, a fall that some friends say hastened her death.
As her health and drug abuse worsened, Kahlo’s unpredictable behavior 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 self. Rivera withdrew from her, too. When he did so, Kahlo would have what her nurse called a “crisis,” and Rivera would have to come, because he was the only one who could calm her. Once when the Riveras were having lunch in the garden, Kahlo threw a bottle of water at Rivera’s head. He ducked in time. The shattering of glass on the stone terrace startled Kahlo out of her rage: “Why did I do it?” she wept; “If I continue like this, I would prefer to die!” Another time her anger was turned on herself. While the art critic Raquel Tibol stood by watching, Kahlo took a self-portrait in which her head was inside a sunflower and remarked that she looked as though she was drowning inside the flower. Tibol recalls that the painting was full of vitality and joy, and that this provoked Kahlo to take a knife and, with tears in her eyes and a strange grin on her lips, to scratch and scrape until her image was destroyed.
Later in June Kahlo’s condition improved somewhat, and she was alight with exuberant plans. Early in July, while convalescing from bronchopneumonia, she disobeyed doctor’s 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’s imposition of the right-wing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. At this, her last public appearance, Kahlo was a heroic spectacle. As her husband pushed her wheelchair through the streets, she held a banner with a peace dove 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’s 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 demonstration brought her, Kahlo told a friend: “I only want three 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 made up her face with care and was then carried downstairs to her flower-filled dining room, where she entertained a hundred guests with a feast of Mexican dishes.
Kahlo could only stand her pain for a few hours, however, and even then only with the help of painkillers. In her diary her wish for transcendence is expressed in several self-portraits as a winged creature, but now these “angels” are deformed, incoherent splotches. The journal’s last drawing is of a black angel rising into the sky. The last words are a final flourish of alegría and fatalism. “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.—Frida.”
When Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, the cause of her death was said to be “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’s syringe, and her life, into her own hands. Kahlo’s fighting spirit was dead. 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 art critic whose article “Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Art.” was published in Artforum in May 1976. Her book, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, has just been published by Harper & Row.
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1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from the author’s 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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