In The Broken Column, the cracked Greek pillar inside Frida Kahlo's opened torso stands in for her spine. Painted in 1944, the picture shows a back that could no longer hold her up, a corset that did the job instead, and nails driven into her skin as a picture of pain.
Kahlo, a Mexican painter, made it on a panel shortly after an operation on her spine. She stands alone on a barren, cracked plain. Her face is wet with tears, and she looks straight out of the picture.
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The story usually told about this picture starts on 17 September 1925. Kahlo was 18, riding a bus in Mexico City, when a streetcar hit it. An iron handrail pierced her body, and her spine, pelvis and right leg were broken. The painting, though, is dated 1944, nineteen years later. It shows no bus, no street, no handrail.
Her doctors never settled what was wrong with her back. In 1930, Dr. Leo Eloesser, who treated her, noted that she had less feeling in the lower half of her body and suspected she had been born with spina bifida, a gap in the bones of the spine. Polio in childhood had also left her right leg different in length from the left and in need of a built-up shoe.
So three causes compete to explain her back: the crash, the polio, and a spine that may have been flawed from birth. Doctors and biographers have argued over the order ever since.
Why did Kahlo paint The Broken Column in 1944?
Because she had just come out of an operation on her spine. Her doctors, who until then had used plaster casts, prescribed a steel corset instead, and the operation left her bedridden.
After the crash in 1925, the treatment had been a plaster cast over her whole body, a month in the hospital and two more months of recovery at home, according to a 2024 study by neurologists in Spain. Nineteen years after the crash, in 1944, her spine was in the hands of surgeons again.
What exactly was wrong with her back is still not settled. The same team, writing in the Journal of Neurology, proposed that the numbness Eloesser noted in 1930 pointed to cauda equina syndrome, a squeeze on the bundle of nerves at the base of the spine that causes pain and numbness in the legs and lower body.
They described their diagnosis as a retrospective one, drawn from her records, since no full neurological examination of her was possible.
They read the painting itself as evidence that her broken spine, not polio, caused her pain, and the steel corset was far from the first she had worn.
What You'll Discover
What the corset was really like.
Where the nails stop.
Why she refused the Surrealists.
Where the painting hangs today.