Frida Kahlo painted her own face so often that her pictures can look alike at first glance. What changes from one to the next is everything around the face, and each time it records something that had just happened to her, sometimes down to the month.
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How These Were Chosen
Kahlo painted her own face and body again and again, and one reason is practical. A self-portrait needs no sitter and no commission, so it is a subject a painter can take up in almost any condition, even from a hospital bed.
Two threads run through her work. One is her marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, broken off and then mended. The other is her body, broken in an accident at eighteen and operated on again and again, which she painted with the corsets and hospital beds that came with it.
Each picture here was chosen because what surrounds her face, more than the face itself, tells what she was living through in the months she painted it. They run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (1954)
Two large hands reach down from the top of the panel in Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick and hold Frida Kahlo upright, while her crutches fall away beneath her. The hands belong to Karl Marx, the nineteenth century German philosopher, painted as a white bearded man above her. Behind her the background splits in two, one half filled with images of peace, the other with symbols of evil and destruction.
Kahlo needed that support in 1954, the last year of her life. She painted the panel in Mexico City, in the house where she had been born. Since 1951 she had depended on a wheelchair and on nurses, and in 1953 surgeons had amputated her right leg below the knee.
The title promises a cure, and the picture shows it working, since Kahlo no longer needs her crutches once Marx's hands hold her.
One detail holds the miracle back. Kahlo still painted the leather corset around her body, and the corset is exactly what the promised cure has not taken away.
Eleven days before she died at the Casa Azul, Kahlo took the same convictions into the street. On July 2, 1954, she joined a march in her wheelchair, beside Rivera, against United States intervention in Guatemala, holding a sign with a white dove and the words Por la paz.
At a Glance
Artist: Frida Kahlo (1907 to 1954)
Painted: 1954
Medium: Oil on Masonite
Size: 60 × 76 cm (23.6 × 30 in)
Where to see it: Museo Frida Kahlo (Casa Azul), Mexico City
About This Painting
Was Frida Kahlo a Marxist?
She was a communist activist for years. She joined the Young Communist League in 1927 and the Mexican Communist Party in 1928, then resigned at the end of 1929 in protest at Rivera's expulsion from the party, and rejoined it in 1948.
11. Roots (1943)
A leafy plant grows out of the open torso of Frida Kahlo in Roots, painted in 1943, while she reclines across bare, dry ground in an orange dress. Its roots and branches pass straight through her body, and she lies there calmly, as if she had chosen it.