Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column

An essay on the Mexican artist's painting from 1944

Dear Great Women Art Lovers,

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been looking closely at Frida Kahlo’s Broken Column, 1944. One of, I think, the monumental works of the artist’s oeuvre. Last night I narrated it on BBC Radio 3, as part of The Essay. Listen here, or read on below. As always, I’d love to hear what you think. Katy Xoxo

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A woman stands alone. Set against a barren landscape, she looks straight out at us. Tears like white crystals pour from her eyes and her body is pierced with 54 nails. To keep her straight, she is strapped into a metal corset that tightens around her shoulders and clutches at her waist. Her chest is exposed and her bloody insides visible, with a near-shattering fluted column that thrusts through her body as a stand-in for a spine, keeping her head held high, queen-like, and alive.

The painting I’m talking about is Broken Column, from 1944, and the woman in the painting (as well as its author) is Frida Kahlo, the Mexican-born artist synonymous with her self-portraits, who favoured this subject, in her words – “because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best”.

I first saw this portrait when I travelled to Mexico City aged 21. It’s about 30 x 40 cm, a bit larger than a shoebox and smaller than a desktop screen. Whenever I witness a painting by Kahlo I’m always amazed, and surprised – by how small they are because of how much power they omit. They feel like relics or jewels, and companions too. Although she painted herself alone, somehow, she makes us feel less alone. Full of emotion – it’s like she’s telling us that, whatever we might be feeling, she too has been through it before.

I haven’t seen many of Kahlo’s paintings in person; they’re rarely on view in the UK. The most recent one was Diego and I, from 1949, – a close up of her face with an image of her husband, Diego Rivera, tattooed on her forehead – at Sotheby’s in London, just before it was sold for $34million. Installed at eye height, I remember so vividly the tears falling from her eyes. I noted them down as, “almost sculptural” – and remember feeling the love, grief, desire and pain that so strongly emanated from her image. I also noticed the thin green sparkling headband she was wearing: a band that although kept her hair out of her face, could also untie in a flash, as if a metaphor for the precarious nature of love or life – something that Kahlo constantly referenced in her work. 

Broken Column, though, hits harder. It’s a different sensation: your body tenses up, and, drawn to the brace that keeps her body in check, you immediately think about that one bone – the spine – that keeps your body in place. But despite the emotional and physical pain that transmits from her image, having been made in the aftermath of dozens of operations, Frida appears strong. Standing stoically and proudly, as if an emblem of survival who says, “I am here. I am standing. I will persevere and achieve what I can as a woman and as an artist”. Because, for Frida Kahlo, no matter how ambitious and brave she was in her painting, life was a constant battle: in love, in her physicality, and her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman and as an artist.

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Born in 1907 – although she always claimed it as 1910 to be a “child of the Mexican Revolution” – Kahlo was the third of four girls, and a brother who died young, to a homemaker mother and photographer father. Especially close to him (Frida and her father saw themselves as sharing certain intellectual affinities), Frida spent her days helping him out in the studio, learning how to frame an image, and how to touch up photographs. From him, she had access to his vast library of books on European Old Masters – from Giotto to Tintoretto, Holbein to Cimabue – that he passed down to her, and which she kept for the rest of her life. They can still be found today in Museo Frida Kahlo, her former home, Casa Azul, in Mexico City.

But Frida and her father were also close due to their shared empathy with each other’s suffering – he from epilepsy, and her with Polio, a disease she contracted when she was six years old, that left her with one leg shorter than the other. The bullies would nickname her “pegleg” at school. But Frida, as much as it would have pained her, never played the victim. She was strong and, if she was going to be picked on, then she better learn how to talk and fight back. 

Fast-forward a few years and she’s one of 35 girls amidst multiple years in a school of 2000 boys. Driven by progressive leaders, La Prepatoria was the best; most-academic school in Mexico City, and Frida was at the centre of it. A post-Revolution era, it was a time when Mexicans were forging a new identity and rejecting European traditions. Although a woman in a man’s world, she made herself heard, did well in class, and selected studies that set her up for medical school.

But on 17 September 1925, everything changed. The sky was clouded with light rain, and Frida, now aged 18, with her boyfriend Alejandro, took a bus trip. Soon after the journey had started, it collided with a heavily constructed electric train, causing the bus to stretch and swerve and burst into 1000 pieces. The handrail had thrusted through Frida’s pelvis – something she claimed is how she lost her virginity – and she was found by Alejandro who recalled her lying in the street, unclothed, coated not just in blood but shimmering in gold powder from a tub that someone on the bus had been holding; her screams louder than the sirens from the Red Cross ambulance.

Her spine was broken in three places, her collarbone, ribs, pelvis, leg, shoulder and foot, too. It was a miracle that she survived. But her greatest fear, more than pain or her medical dreams, was the prospect of being bound to her bed, away from the action, away from the revolution.

To keep her occupied, Frida’s mother, affixing a mirror to the top of her bed, gave her some paints. She began decorating the plaster corsets that kept her body intact, with images of butterflies and, at other times, messages with unfulfilled wishes. But she soon turned to herself. Fabricating beauty out of pain, she painted herself into art history, using her body – fearlessly and honestly. This was her vessel for fuelling discussions about being a woman – and an artist, her battle with death, the trauma of her life-threatening miscarriage from 1932… not to mention her ardent Communist beliefs, and as a way to show off her profound intelligence.