Queen of the self-portrait, Frida Kahlo is instantly recognisable for her flamboyant Mexican-inspired wardrobe of bright blouses and colourful floor-length skirts, heavy jewellery and floral headpieces. However, in Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (1951) she sits in a wheelchair, dressed in a plain, loose white tunic and a floor-length black skirt. Beside her is an easel, upon which is positioned a large painting – it features her smartly dressed orthopaedic surgeon, Juan Farill, who performed seven surgeries on her spine. ‘Dr. Farill saved me. He brought me back the joy of life,’ wrote Kahlo in her diary.
But Farill is not the only doctor present in this small windowless room. Kahlo herself, having just completed his portrait, holds within one hand a bunch of paintbrushes; in the other she grasps a palette upon which – instead of paint – appears a realistic human heart. With droplets of bright red paint staining her white tunic, Kahlo appears to have been painting with her own flesh and blood, thus inviting viewers to see her as both muse and artist, patient and doctor. While Kahlo is today held up as a feminist fashion icon, in many of her self-portraits she pierces the site of her famous body, investigating herself beyond the surface, in the manner of a medic.
As a child, Kahlo dreamt of becoming a doctor: ‘Earlier on I wanted to get into medicine, I was so interested in curing people, relieving them of their pain.’ Perhaps this ambition was rooted in her own experiences as a patient: aged six, she contracted polio, leaving her right leg much thinner and weaker than her left, while many researchers also believe that she was born with spina bifida, a condition that affects the development of the spine. By the age of fifteen, she was the first girl to have enrolled on a premedical programme at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City.
But it was on her way home from this school, on 17 September 1925, that Kahlo was involved in a horrific bus crash. Lucky to survive, the eighteen-year-old suffered a broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, and fractured her right leg, which was eventually amputated. Kahlo subsequently underwent more than thirty orthopaedic operations, faced a lifetime of chronic pain and, immediately after the accident, was confined to months of bed rest in a constricting body cast. With her dreams of becoming a doctor dashed, Kahlo placed a mirror in the canopy above her head and began to create deeply introspective pictures.
‘I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident’, she later wrote to her art dealer, Julien Levy. “I was bored as hell in bed… so I decided to do something. I stoled [sic] from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel… and I started to paint.’
This was the beginning of an inextricable link between medicine, injury, art, intervention and survival for Kahlo. In an early sketch from 1926 she illustrates the accident: in the distance are the colliding bus and tram, surrounded by wounded passengers, while in the foreground Kahlo has focused on her figure, lying motionless on a Red Cross bed and wrapped in bandages. Having formerly intended to fix others, Kahlo now turned her attention onto her own broken body: attempting to regain control, express her suffering and find a way to treat herself, it’s as if she was taking on her hoped-for job of doctor – through art.
Some medical researchers, including surgical pathologist Dr Fernando Antelo, have concluded that the traumatic accident, which punctured Kahlo’s abdomen and uterus, likely also left her infertile. She later experienced several miscarriages and underwent a number of therapeutic abortions, including in Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital in 1932. Kahlo had been visiting the city with her husband, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, when she began to miscarry their child. After the pregnancy was terminated, Kahlo spent the next two weeks recovering alone in hospital.
The artist asked doctors to provide her with medical textbooks so that she could see what the foetus of her unborn child would have looked like. While she was denied such access – on account that such imagery might upset her – Rivera brought her a book, from which she sketched Frida and the Miscarriage (1932). Depicting herself in anatomical terms, Kahlo stands naked and cut open to reveal her womb, from which stretches an umbilical cord to a healthy foetus positioned by her side. In her left hand, she holds a heart-shaped palette, as if asserting her role as an investigating doctor and artist, who is painting from the heart.
From this first interrogative drawing, Kahlo then worked up her harrowing self-portrait, Henry Ford Hospital (1932): she lies naked and alone on the white sheets of a hospital bed, onto which her blood spills out, while in the distance looms the imposing, industrial skyline of Detroit. Once again, Kahlo has incorporated the imagery of obstetrics – she is encircled by six floating objects, including a pelvic bone, an autoclave machine used to sterilise medical utensils, an orthopaedic cast and a large male foetus; each is attached to a red umbilical cord-like ribbon which she clasps against her swollen stomach in one hand.
While dissecting the therapeutic abortion in the clinical manner of a medical illustration, Kahlo also narrates her subjective experiences as a patient. On the floor beneath the bed is a purple orchid, reflecting a flower which Rivera gifted her during her hospital stay, while above her head soars a snail, which she later revealed was to symbolise the slowness of the miscarriage she had endured. Moreover, she has disregarded each object’s correct proportions: the foetus, in particular, is painted on a far bigger scale than Kahlo, signifying her overwhelming sorrow at losing her unborn child.
By painting this scene, Kahlo was attempting to exorcise her grief. ‘My painting carries with it the message of pain… I painted my own reality,’ she notably declared. Kahlo had discovered the benefits of what we would today call ‘art therapy’. The term was first coined by British artist Adrian Hill when he discovered the health benefits of drawing and painting while under care for tuberculosis in 1942. Publishing his ideas in his 1945 book Art Versus Illness, Hill argued that by ‘releasing the creative energy of the frequently inhibited patient’ art could enable people to ‘build up a strong defence’ against their ‘misfortunes’.
Since the 1960s, art therapy has been used widely, providing individuals with the means to address painful feelings and difficult experiences through both verbal and non-verbal means. As practising art psychotherapist Kayleigh Ditchburn has explained, ‘Art therapy gives people a platform to share their life stories, explore their thoughts and feelings, and look at the self.’ Ditchburn invites clients to create artworks, including portraits, before exploring the symbols which surface in a discussion with them. She has subsequently discovered that ‘art therapy is particularly effective for people who don’t have the words to express their trauma; it gives people a voice where that voice has been taken away elsewhere. Art is a way of expressing the self when we feel isolated and that no one else understands.’
In Henry Ford Hospital Kahlo has given voice to a trauma which she would have been expected to keep private. Not only was baby loss a taboo at that time – as it still is in many cultures today – but as art historians David Lomas and Rosemary Howell also importantly point out, ‘in the culture to which Kahlo belonged miscarriage was a source of shame’. Kahlo, however, openly shares her experience, detailing both the physical and psychological pain it caused her. Her small body appears isolated within an empty landscape and, as Ditchburn analyses, ‘her body doesn’t look very secure on the bed, she’s right on the edge, it’s as if she might fall off’. By depicting her distress, Kahlo was attempting to express, expel and treat her grief.
Kahlo again articulated her infertility in the introspective self-portrait Roots (1943). Lying on a bed of cracked dry earth, and wearing a long orange dress, she has cut open her body. From a hole in her chest sprouts a vine with large green leaves. Kahlo is clearly portraying, in invasive terms, her identity as a barren woman who belongs to a parched landscape. The artist disclosed the pain of being childless in letters to her thoracic surgeon, Dr Eloesser:
‘Doctorcito querido: I have wanted to write to you for a long [sic] time than you can imagine. I had so looked forward to having a little Dieguito that I cried a lot, but it’s over, there is nothing else that can be done except to bear it.’
Developing a bond that went far beyond the normal patient–doctor relationship, Kahlo sought Eloesser’s medical opinion, confided in him, dedicated a self-portrait to him and also painted his portrait. Having once wanted to enter the medical profession, Kahlo identified with several of her doctors, perhaps even recognising herself as their equal as she continually treated herself through art. In Roots the artist has even illustrated the therapeutic power which painting gave her: the winding pattern of stems presents a route for her emotional pain to course out of her body, in the form of brushstrokes. While she could not procreate, Kahlo could transform her agony into art: ‘Painting completed my life. I lost three children… Painting replaced all of that,’ she once declared.
Kahlo also turned to painting to express the hurt caused by her husband, who was twenty years her senior: ‘I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me… The other accident is Diego,’ she famously told a friend. While the couple – who became mutual muses – offered each other much creative support, their relationship was also marred by tensions. Both partners had numerous extramarital affairs, but when Rivera began a relationship with Kahlo’s sister Cristina, he crossed a line; Kahlo was devastated.
In 1939 the couple divorced and, before they remarried the next year, Kahlo painted The Two Fridas (1939) in which two symbolic versions of Kahlo sit side by side on a bench. On the left she appears in a white European-style lace gown, while on the right she wears traditional Mexican costume, holding a small portrait of Rivera who encouraged her to dress in this manner.
While this double portrait evokes Kahlo’s sense of divided cultural identity – she had a German father and a Mexican mother – she has also torn both selves open to articulate her heartache. Beneath the skin are the exposed and anatomically accurate hearts of each Kahlo, connected by an artery, which has been cut off by surgical pincers that the European Kahlo holds in her lap. With blood dripping onto the white fabric of her dress, it’s as if she has decisively ruptured the connection between the traditional Kahlo and Rivera. Instead, the two self-reliant women proudly hold hands, comforting one another through, and sharing, the psychological pain.
This sense of self-support pervades another of Kahlo’s most iconic images, The Broken Column (1944). Painted shortly after she underwent spinal surgery to correct ongoing problems caused by the crash, Kahlo has again portrayed herself in incisive terms: a fractured ionic column is positioned in place of her spine and her exposed chest is pierced by nails. With the lower half of her body covered by a bloodstained white sheet, it’s as if Kahlo has just come out of surgery; she is crying in pain, and white tears fall from her eyes. But she is held in place by a sturdy metal corset, lined with white fabric, which acts as a self-contained cage around her chest.
Situating herself in a remote, cracked landscape, Kahlo also symbolises her acute sense of isolation: ‘I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best,’ she once stated. While she was undoubtedly referring to her material seclusion, during times of bed rest and hospital stays, Kahlo also experienced a deep sense of psychological separation from the world brought on by a range of complex mental health disorders.
The same year that she painted The Broken Column, Kahlo started to write, draw and paint in a personal journal. Never meant by the artist to be published, it reads as an outpouring of emotion. Covering its pages are hundreds of ink doodles, sketches of skeletons, severed legs, and haunting self-portraits of Kahlo crying. One distinctive page is covered in a mass of expressively drawn black roots, while others are scrawled with strokes of flaming red, evoking fires which can’t be extinguished.
‘The diary looks very raw. Kahlo didn’t hold back, there’s a lot of emotions – anger, frustration and lots of pain – it’s as if she’s trying to figure things out,’ Ditchburn has commented. It is also filled with stream-of-consciousness text within which repeated phrases reveal Kahlo’s troubled state of mind: ‘Madness sickness fear’, ‘my madness’, ‘anguish’, ‘despair and unhappiness’ and ‘A despair which no words can describe’ are among the declarations of Kahlo who was analysing herself as ‘the subject I want to know better’.
Kahlo suffered major depressive episodes and attempted suicide on several occasions. It was after one failed attempt in 1949 that her close friend Olga Campos, who was studying psychology at the Universidad Autónoma de México, interviewed her and performed a series of psychological tests on her. Campos had intended to write a book elucidating the creative process of artists, but she never completed it.
However, Campos’s findings were later published by Kahlo scholar and child psychiatrist Dr Salomon Grimberg in Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself (2008), in which he also invited psychologist Dr James Bridger Harris to interpret the results. Harris’s summarising report diagnoses the artist as suffering from depression, dysthymia (a chronic disquiet), substance abuse, a narcissistic personality and deficits in self-concepts. ‘She also had what we now know as chronic pain syndrome,’ he explains. ‘When people have chronic physical pain, they often suffer from social isolation, withdrawal, periods of depression, substance abuse… She had all of that.’
While Kahlo was treated continually for her many physical health problems, she received no such care for her psychological illnesses, many of which today would be treated through psychotherapy. ‘I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive,’ she mused, attempting to cure herself through art. Kahlo’s fifty-five known self-portraits undoubtedly illustrate her narcissistic personality disorder – a mental condition in which people have a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, and an inflated sense of their own importance. At the same time, behind this mask of confidence, narcissists suffer from fragile self-esteem, and this mask-like quality is apparent throughout Kahlo’s stoic self-portraits, in which she never smiles.
‘You have the polished paintings in which there’s a sense of keeping up appearances, and these contrast with the diary, in which we find the true sense of self, what she didn’t want people to see, what she felt too vulnerable to show the world,’ Ditchburn has contended. In this light, Kahlo’s colourful wardrobe can also be seen, in part, as a self-prescribed treatment through which the artist distracted people from her disabilities: ‘I must have full skirts and long, now that my sick leg is so ugly,’ she exclaimed at the opening of her first exhibition of paintings at New York’s Julien Levy gallery in 1938.
Kahlo’s weak sense of self would also have been compounded by her life-changing accident. As art psychotherapist Susan M. D. Carr has ascertained, chronic illness and social isolation can disrupt a person’s ‘sense of self-identity’. Carr co-creates portraits with, of and for her clients as a means of recalibrating a ‘stronger, more coherent’ sense of self in them. Likewise, Kahlo can be seen searching for and projecting her new identity, following the crash, in her paintings. Having formerly intended to become a doctor, she instead consolidates her identity through self-portraits in which she presents herself as her own surgeon.
Kahlo was also disrupting the dominant clichéd narrative of women’s madness which had so far been represented across the visual arts by men. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, male painters began to portray mentally ill women as either angry, dangerous and hypersexualised, or as sad and sobbing, tormented by romantic rejection. In stark contrast, Kahlo appears strong and in a state of composed control throughout her self-portraits. Despite her tears, in The Broken Column Kahlo has a steadfast gaze and dignified pose: ‘I can withstand this pain,’ she seems to be telling herself and her viewers. Kahlo’s firm metal corset further symbolises her resolve, in the face of both her physical and emotional suffering; for this reason, Mexican people refer to Kahlo as ‘la heroína del dolor’, meaning ‘the heroine of pain’.
Rivera, too, paid tribute to Kahlo’s anatomical-based depictions of her personal anguish, some of which he undoubtedly caused or exacerbated, describing her as ‘the only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings’. It’s as if Kahlo was using medical imagery not only to diagnose her psychological pain, but also to validate it as a real and tangible condition which needed treating in the same manner as her physical afflictions.
Kahlo’s introspective self-portraits have carved the path for numerous other women artists living with mental health disorders, who have used art as a cathartic vehicle for healing. Kahlo’s direct influence can be felt particularly in the confessional work of renowned member of the Young British Artists, Tracy Emin. Echoing Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital, Emin’s installation My Bed (1998) consists of a dishevelled, stained bed covered in condoms, underwear and menstrual blood. It was inspired by a period of four days during which Emin, while suffering from suicidal depression, didn’t leave her bed. In her 2005 autobiography, Strangeland, she explains, ‘I only survived thanks to art. It gave me faith in my own existence.’
Sadly, Kahlo’s diary charts a descent into despair supporting the theory that her death on 13 July 1954 was suicide by overdose. But her legacy undeniably lives on – she can be seen not only as an influential artist, but also as a pioneering doctor who has indirectly treated a multitude of patients, including other artists who use art as therapy. Kahlo seems to be asking for such recognition in her last signed, Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, in which she has positioned herself side by side with the painting she made of her surgeon. Just like Farill, who wears a dark suit, jacket and tie, Kahlo is smartly dressed, in black and white; the pair even have matching monobrows. Kahlo is demonstrating to the viewer their equal status – she has been just as important as this surgeon in attempting to heal herself. Throughout her self-portraits not only does Kahlo hold up a mirror to herself as someone who is in pain, but she also presents herself as someone who is in the act of trying to get rid of it, opening her body for investigation and operating on, in order to release her hurt through creative expression.