Interpreting Frida

In 1953, Frida Kahlo’s doctors informed her that the gangrene on her right leg would necessitate amputation below the knee. This operation was to come two years after Kahlo had been released from a yearlong inpatient stay at the British Hospital in Mexico City. She underwent at least seven procedures to repair her spinal column. When Kahlo heard the news, she quickly painted an image of a broken doll, dismembered body parts, and an ionic column in place of a leg in her diary. Just above the doll’s head, in Kahlo’s characteristic handwriting, are the words “Yo soy la DESINTEGRACIÓN….”—I am disintegration. The loss of her leg seems to have been the beginning of Kahlo’s demise, where her stoic and humorous nature no longer provided the relief they once did for living a life of chronic pain. Her nurse at the time, Judith Ferreto, “stated that after Kahlo’s leg was amputated in 1953, she lost her will to live” (Ankori 158). There is speculation that Kahlo committed suicide or had assistance from her husband, Diego Rivera, all of which points to her final year of life being the most challenging and trying year than any other previously. Kahlo coped with her pain and loss through art, often portraying her inner turmoil in graphic, bloody detail while maintaining a stoic demeanor. Nevertheless, that pain became too much at some point, and the will to achieve a permanent reprieve grew more significant than the will to live.

A life defined by pain and suffering may be considered a life not fully lived, one where the person inhabiting a body wracked with agony is somehow less alive, less truly who they could be. Pain becomes a constant, defining source of life and creates a lack of freedom, movement, and exploration. Frida Kahlo endured constant pain due to her polio contraction in early childhood and the trolley accident, resulting in “chronic pain, infertility, and depression” (Antelo 461). Even so, Campos writes that she “never saw Frida cry in physical pain” (43). Instead, Kahlo turned this pain and suffering into art, perhaps as her coping method. One could argue that Kahlo’s cries of pain took shape in her paintings and diary. Although Kahlo “did not like to speak seriously of […] her illnesses, or even of her painting, which she considered unimportant” (Campos 38), hints of her pain are in every painting. It is this vulnerability and consistency across her career—the portrayal of a woman’s body as less than ideal, unable to have children, unable to be fully engaged with the world hindered by sickness, which reflects the lived experiences of many women—that provides Kahlo a legacy and agency she may not have experienced fully during her life.

Continuing to look at the painting in Kahlo’s diary, below the words is a doll-like figure painted crimson, placed on a bright blue background. The doll has a large, muddled, greyish-green splotch covering the bulk of her body, a visual representation of Kahlo disintegrating right before the viewer. A dismembered head and hand fall from the doll’s left hand, and an Ionic column protrudes from the bottom of the doll’s dress, standing in for her left leg, a similar thread found in Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944) almost a decade earlier. In the center of the page spread, a rudimentary example of a woman’s naked body stands with what appears to be a two-headed face; the one facing right looks eerily like a bull, with red lips and white teeth, the other a dark side-view of a more clearly defined face, the eye glaring out toward the left. Some images of the painting online only include the right page in the spread, but in others, the left page is also included, where another side-view face peers outward to the edge of the page, a dark green-black oval encircling the left eye. Could this be a “mask”? The dark oval resembles the Masked Dancers spread in her diary pages. Red lines shoot out from behind and at the top of the face. Below it, a solitary foot, the thick black outline holding in a putrid green color, most likely representing the gangrene that had developed in Kahlo’s own right foot.

There is a technique that cancer patients use in “visualizing the source of pain – and then ‘extracting’ it” (Zarzycka 81) that resembles what Kahlo did in many of her paintings, such as in Remembrance of an Open Wound (1938), a response to learning about Diego’s affair with her sister. Or in the painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932), which was created after what was considered her most traumatic miscarriage, of which there were many. In many of these paintings, there is a sense of endurance and perseverance, but in I am disintegration, there is only resignation, perhaps the beginning of acceptance. Red, crosshatched lines layered behind angry green marks indicate the state of mind Kahlo was in when she rendered the spread. Since the painting is in her diary, it appears that these are Kahlo’s initial thoughts and not the result of careful planning or thinking through the painting. This is authentic, vulnerable Kahlo, alive on the page.

I chose this spread because I see the raw emotion jumping out at me. Kahlo’s choice of the word disintegration and how she embodies it—I AM disintegration—breaks my heart. Life is hard, and of this, there is no doubt. Just living, trying to rise above the detritus of bad decisions, uncontrollable events, and unexpected turns, proves to be too much for many. Considering that life is immensely more complicated and harder with chronic pain, whether that pain is physical, emotional, or psychological, it is a wonder Kahlo maintained her stoic visage across her numerous paintings, indicating a sort of detachment from what was happening to her. In this diary spread, however, I can glimpse the turmoil in Kahlo. I can glimpse the struggle she must have been going through. I can understand that she fully engages with her predicament, loss, and hopelessness. And it crushes me.

Kahlo suffered and, in her suffering, created works of art that both inspired and challenged, even being used by a New York psychologist in her therapy sessions to help other women discuss the same issues Kahlo experienced (Antelo 463). It is Kahlo’s truth that resonates with us as viewers. Nevertheless, for all of us, there is a breaking point. When the fight leaves us, we resign ourselves to the current state of affairs. I am disintegration might just have been Kahlo’s breaking point when enough had been for too long already enough.

Works Cited

Ankori, G. (2013). ‘I am the Disintegration’: The Waning of Life. In Frida Kahlo. Reaktion Books, Limited.

Antelo, Fernando. “Pain and the Paintbrush: The Life and Art of Frida Kahlo.” AMA Journal of Ethics, vol. 15, no. 5, 2013, pp. 460–65, https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.5.imhl1-1305.

Campos, Olga. “My Memory of Frida.” Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself, translated by Salomon Grimberg. Canvas, uploaded by Dr. Maria Luisa Parra, https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/112840/files/16119164.

Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. 1991.

Kahlo, Frida. I am disintegration. 1953. Google Arts and Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/p%C3%A1gina-del-diario-de-frida-kahlo-frida-kahlo/XgEuN8afpPttDQ?childAssetId=KQEWyOz6Br6Hsg.

Valcárcel, Marina. “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” Alejandra De Argos, 6 July 2018, https://www.alejandradeargos.com/index.php/en/artp/41593-frida-kahlo-appearances. Accessed 7 Apr. 2023.

Zarzycka, Marta. “Now I Live on a Painful Planet.” Third Text, vol. 20, no. 1, 2006, pp. 73–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820500472555.