Frida Kahlo: Unveiling Disability, Veiling Femininity

Talisha Ward

Today in pop culture when viewers are introduced to a person who identif ies as disabled the introduction is of ten accompanied by an overcoming narrative. This is the belief that their disability holds them back. So, in order to be as successful as a person with a normative body, they must overcome their disability. Scholars from different disciplines f all prey to this thought. Gerry Souter, author of various books about inf luential artists, is no exception, as seen in his 2005 book, Frida Kahlo: Beneath the Mirror. In the introduction he writes that, “her paintings, with their symbolic palettes, kept madness (yellow) and the claustrophobic prison of plaster and steel corsets at arm’s length. Her personal vocabulary of iconic imagery reveals clues as to how she devoured lif e, loved, hated, and perceived beauty”.3

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican surrealist painter born in 1907. She is known f or her self portraits that exude her understanding of what it means to be a woman, to be Mexican, and to experience chronic pain. As a child Kahlo had become disabled af ter contracting polio which resulted in one of her legs being shorter and thinner than the other. At the age of eighteen, Kahlo suffered many injuries due to a bus accident where she was impaled by a handrail through her pelvis. Souter reviews Kahlo’s body of work asa way to distance herself f rom her lived experience; he claims that her art allows her to escape orovercome the hardships of being disabled, a woman and Mexican. However, in rejecting the overcoming narrative, it is plausible that her artwork, specifically My Birth (1932) and The Broken Column (1944), disrupts the starer-staree relationship and the male gaze by prioritizing displaying the pain and suf fering caused by her disability in order to protect her f emininity, seen in the repeated motif of the white sheet and the conscious choice to paint herself as nude instead of naked. In the self-portrait The Broken Column (Figure 1), Frida Kahlo paints herself upright in a nondescript landscape. Her head is in the blue sky while the rest of her body is against a cracked green

3 Gerry Souter, Frida Kahlo: Beneath The Mirror (Parkstone International, 2005), 7.

jagged environment. Frida’s hair is down and out of her f ace to clearly reveal a silent sadness. Underher unibrow her eyes stare at the viewer as tears well up inside. Tears drop down her cheeks but do notreach her lips which are held tightly closed in def iance. Frida’s chin seems to sit atop a silver ionic placed on a column. This is the broken column the piece is named f or. The column is set in a bloody wound that isthe length of Kahlo’s visible body; it has taken the place of her spine. The column and its wound partitions Frida’s body into two halves. The distance between her breasts is exaggerated by Kahlo’s choice to paint herself almost f ully nude. Her shoulders carry the burden of thick metal straps that descend into f our metal belts. The f irst strap goes across Kahlo’s chest right above herbreasts, the second is directly under her breast, the third across her midsection, the f ourth across her hips. The metal belts hold Kahlo together while binding her to the column that threatens her wholeness. Kahlo is also painf ully adorned in nails that pierce her skin, f ace, breast, column and even the white f lowy sheet that hides her vaginal area f rom the audience. Kahlo’s choice to depict herself as starring places viewers of the artwork in a starer-stare erelationship with Frida Kahlo herself. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor of English with af ocus on disability studies and f eminist theory at Emory University, extrapolates on this relationship in chapter seven of her work: Staring: How We Look. Here she writes: “our ocularid, in other words, jerk our eyes toward a stimulating sight and our ocular superego guiltily retracts them...Sometimes, however, truncated stares come f rom our distress at witnessing f ellowhumans so unusual that we cannot accord them a look of acknowledgement”.4 When applying this concept to Kahlo’s The Broken Column, the stimulating sight must be Frida Kahlo. She purposefully is against a bland background so that viewers are consumed by her being. Viewers’ ocular superego is f orced to pan the length of her body trying to f ind a part of her being that does not make them uncomfortable. But that is not possible because the adornment of nails, due to their angled insertion and shadow, evokes the real pain that Kahlo is accustomed to. To avoid f eelings of discomfort, viewers can only f ocus on the metal straps and the column that sits within her gaping wound. Garland-Thomson reveals Kahlo’s strategy when she concludes that, “the starer-whether stunned, tentative, or hostile—responds to the staree, who guides her visual interlocutor toward the self-representation of her choice. An amazing person, the eyes explain, is what you see”.5 The column is Kahlo’s choice of self-representation. The column is juxtaposed with the metal straps, the directionality of the two materials speaks to how her wholeness is both threatened and secured by the injury that led to her being disabled. The pain that she will always experience is a direct ef fect of her injury but also a direct effect of the medical operations shehad undergone in hopes to improve her quality of lif e. To uphold the power that the starer has over the staree or disabled person, viewers of The Broken Column could attempt to only f ocus on the f oreground of the painting where they assume Kahlo’s waist and

4 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” in Staring: How We Look, (Oxford University Press, 2009), 79. 5 Garland-Thomson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” 94.

vagina would be. However, she chooses to cover that area with the white sheet to discourage sexualizing her body thus disrupting the male gaze. In an article titled “Feminist Philosophy of Art”, author A.W. Eaton at the University of Illinois at Chicago, provides a concise description of the concept of the male gaze. They write that, “‘the male gaze’ usually refers to the sexually objectifying attitude that a representation takes towards its f eminine subject matter, presenting her as a primarily passive object forheterosexual-male erotic gratification”.6 Kahlo does not paint herself as a passive object. In The Broken Column her own personal lif e happenings inspire the content presented but viewers are not privy to the actual occurrence of the injury. Instead, Kahlo is actively communicating her pain, most evident in the decision to paint herself crying. Kahlo refuses to be passive or to allow f or objectificationby actively covering her vaginal area. She will not let viewers assume anything sexual about her. This is reiterated when she chooses to paint herself partially nude withher exposed breasts. Her breasts also carry the burden of pain seen in how the nails almost tower over her nipples. The white sheet in the f oreground creates a barrier that does not allow viewers to visualize her sexual organs therefore not allowing herself to be sexualized or objectified.Kahlo also uses the motif of the white sheet with its purpose of disrupting the male gaze in an earlier artwork titled My Birth. Twelve years before The Broken Column, in 1932, Frida Kahlo painted My Birth (Figure 2). In the f oreground of this experimental selfportrait there is a beige baseboard that simultaneously f rames the painting while also elevating the depicted room to act as a sort of stage. A bed is centered on top of horizontal wearied wooden f loorboards. The bed is quite large despite the length of the headboard. Between two white pillows a nondescript f igure lies motionlessly. Their f ace and chest are covered by a white sheet which is wrapped around the topof their torso then positioned under the rest of the exposed, partially nude body. In this barren room the nondescript person has spread her legs while planting her f eet on the white bedsheets. The angled thighs unveil the pubic area and vagina. Protruding through the vaginal orif ice is the neck and bald head of what is understood to be Frida Kahlo. Her head is turned to the right, eyes closed and f ace unexpressive. Her head covers the anus as it meets what was once a white sheet but has now been tainted by brownish blood. Above the bed a f ramed portrait of a woman dawning a head covering, who is understood to be the Virgin of Sorrows, hangs centered on the ash blue wall, presiding over the birth.

6 A.W. Eaton, “Feminist Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Compass 3, no. 5 (September 2008):878.

My Birth is contextualized by understanding Frida Kahlo’s own relationship with birth. In her article, “Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading”, Liza Bakewell describes and explains My Birth by stating: The Mater Dolorosa, who weeps f or the loss of her child, suggests the sorrow Frida f elt atthe time she painted this canvas, when shortly before, Frida had to terminate a pregnancy.Yet this seemingly dead mother, covered f rom the waist up, is naked f rom the waistdown, and is giving birth to a child, a child whose protruding head is unmistakably that ofFrida. The mother is both Frida and Frida’s mother, Matilde Kahlo, and the child is both Frida and the child she lost.7

Kahlo’s choice to use her own experience of an unsuccessful birth as inspiration f or this piece directly makes viewers question her f emininity. Blakewell describes the depicted body as a dead mother, because of the white sheet, raising the question did the birth kill her or did the inabilityto birth a child kill her. Kahlo rejects both of these thoughts by commenting on the circle of lif e, albeit in a morbid manner. While the white sheet does give the depicted body privacy it also obscures the identity, which is why Blakewell reads the body to be both Kahlo’s and hermother’s and the head exiting the birth canal to be both Kahlo’s and her lost child’s. Frida Kahlo has given birth to herself not an actual baby which introduces the belief that a f emale or woman’spurpose is much more than producing the next generation f or a man. Here Kahlo is disrupting the male gaze because her nude body is not f or the gratif ication of the heterosexual male. She acknowledges she cannot birth the next generation, but she can birth herself . While Kahlo’s self-birth is lamentable, hence the presence of the Virgin of Sorrows, it is also revolutionary. The Virgin of Sorrows is f ramed to be presiding over the birth. However, if viewers f ollow her eyeline it becomes clear that she is staring at the body on the bed, introducingthe starer-staree relationship. While the Virgin of Sorrows does not understand how the body is being construed, she does understandthe emotional toll of losing a child, making her an empathetic starer. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains how empathy can make the relationshipbetween the starer and staree positive when she recounts a dif f erent approach to staring: She understands her role in the staring encounter as one of ‘defiance’. Her aim in that def iance is to ‘reflect back to them that (1) they are staring at someone, (2) that someone KNOWS they are staring at them, and (3) that person they are staring at is an amazing person. Then they walk on with something to think about...they MIGHT be thinking that… we’re not so dif f erent after all. The Virgin of Sorrows knows that Frida Kahlo and herself are not so dif f erent af ter all because they relate on an emotional level. The Virgin of Sorrows and the viewers do not need to f ully understand the pain Kahlo f eels about having a body that

7 Liza Blakewell, “Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading,” Frontiers: A Journal ofWomen Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 176.

cannot birth a child as long as they acknowledge her humanity and do not think less of her.8

Kahlo’s consistent choice to portray herself as partially nude is an important component to both The Broken Column and My Birth. In the f irst chapter of The Nude. A Study in Ideal Form, art historian Kenneth Clark explains the dif ference between being naked and being nude. He writes that: to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us f eel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and def enseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and conf ident body: the body re-formed.9 Frida Kahlo intends to paint herself as nude and not naked in order to contest how society understands and reacts to the normative or non-normative body. In both pieces she is deprived ofclothes not f or the purpose of sexualization or objectif ication but to insert the claim that her body, no matter the pain and discomfort, is also an ideal body. In My Birth she protects the depicted body f rom embarrassment by veiling the f ace. With this she is asking the viewers to respect the privacy of the body while she herself is conf ident in the vulnerability required to show her seemingly catastrophic birth, confidence is seen in how her legs are willf ully open f or observation. In The Broken Column, Kahlo is balanced literally due to the placement of her chignon the ionic and the sense of symmetry created by the partitioning column. However, the true balanceis seen in her ability to cry while also standing proudly in the pain induced by injury. Later in the same chapter, Clark includes thepopular assumption that, “the naked human body is in itself an object upon which the eye dwells with pleasure and which we are glad to see depicted”.10 Kahlo ensures that the depiction of her body is not pleasurable. She willingly does this by having the Virgin of Sorrows, not the Virgin Mary11 , preside over My Birth. The Virgin Mary (Figure 3) characterizes the ideal woman or the ideal f emale body to be morally virtuous. Kahlo cannot be morally virtuous because depicting her ownbirth in order to allude to her miscarriages and inability to carry a child to term implies

8 Garland-Thomson, “Looking Away, Staring Back,” 94. 9 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study In Ideal Form (Princeton University Press, 1972), 3. 10 Clark, The Nude: A Study In Ideal Form, 5. 11 The Virgin of Sorrows is how The Virgin Mary is referred to when her life events are sorrowful.

that she is a sexual being. However, as seen in The Broken Column, Kahlo does not offer her sexuality to the viewers. This places Kahlo and her body in opposition to the alternative ideal f emale body, Venus (Figure 4). If Kahlo’s naked body is neither a manif estation of the Virgin Mary or Venus, how can we understand her being? Kahlo consciously chooses to portray both her disability and f emininity,but they are not at the expense of one another, this allows her to of fer up her physical f orm as an ideal body. With The Broken Column and My Birth Kahlo asks viewers to consider her being as a disabled person, then as a woman and f inally how those two identities come together to create Frida Kahlo. She did not overcome her disability, as some claim in their writings, her disability inf orms the way she moved through the world as a woman. 

References

Bakewell, Liza. "Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 165-89. Accessed April 18, 2021. doi:10.2307/3346753.

Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton University Press, 1972. Eaton, A.W. “Feminist Philosophy of Art,” Philosophy Compass 3, no.5 (September 29,2008): 873-893. Accessed May 5, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17479991.2008.00154.x

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Looking Away, Staring Back.” In Staring: How We Look. Oxf ordUniversity Press, 2009. Hayek, Salma, Sarah Green, Jay Polstein, Lizz Speed, Nancy Hardin, Lindsay Flickinger, Roberto Sneider, et al. Frida. HBOMAX . HBO , 2002. https://play.hbomax.com/feature/urn:hbo:feature:GYFn80QxQHYW8wwEAAAAT? reentered=true&userProfileType=liteUserProfile.

Polinska, Wioleta. "Dangerous Bodies: Women's Nakedness and Theology." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 16, no. 1 (2000): 45-62. Accessed April 19, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002375. Souter, Gerry. “Introduction.” In Frida Kahlo: Beneath the Mirror. Parkstone International, 2005. Udall, Sharyn R. "Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration." Woman's Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2003): 10-14. Accessed April 18, 2021. doi:10.2307/1358781.