Analysis Of Frida Kahlo

As Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan once said, “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain”. Many of humanity’s greatest artists have been known to turn mental anguish into works of art that endure through time and in Frida Kahlo we find a clear example of this rule at work. Frida Kahlo’s life was one of both physical and emotional pain from a myriad of sources; polio at the age of six, a tragic bus/train accident at eighteen, an extremely tumultuous marriage, and a series of miscarriages to name only a few. Frida Kahlo’s The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Senor Xolotl, painted in 1949, is about herself and her relationship with famed muralist Diego Rivera, as well as an exploration of her views on duality and interconnectedness in a larger sense. These themes are quite common in Kahlo’s works but I feel that they are shown in this piece in a

In this painting, as in many of her others, we see two Fridas; one is the Frida holding Diego, the other is the Earth Mother statue. Both have the same wound running from the right side of the neck to the left breast. The Earth Mother figure’s wound resembles a dry gorge in the Earth. It ends in a drop of life sustaining milk perhaps symbolizing how Kahlo was able to turn her pain and suffering into the art that gave her a reason to live when nothing else did. As she once told Time, “I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint” (Herrera 211). On the human figure of Frida the wound is a deep bloody gash that ends in a fountain of blood. This Frida, though her face is set in a mask of stoicism, has tears flowing down her face showing that she is indeed in pain. Blood coming forth from where a mother should be able to feed her child can be interpreted as “a shocking symbol of her inability to create and nurture life” (Feldman) or perhaps a comment on Kahlo’s sacrifice for her