Exploring Frida Kahlo’s Relationship With Her Body

Throughout Frida Kahlo’s life she suffered severe, chronic illness that impacted her in numerous ways. The story and details of her suffering often romanticize the artist’s pain in a way that only adds to the myth that surrounds her, rather than understanding the very real physical impact it had on her work and how it manifested itself in her paintings.

By working through the events that took place in Kahlo's life with the help of archive images and her artworks, we can begin to understand the relationship the artist had with her body and the ways in which her artistic career was sparked by her afflictions.

At 18 years of age on September 17, 1925, Kahlo and her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, were on their way home from school when the wooden bus they were on collided with a metal streetcar. Several people were killed and the artist suffered near fatal injuries from an iron handrail impaling her through her pelvis, fracturing the bone. She also fractured several ribs, her legs and her collarbone.

The accident meant she spent a month in the hospital and two months recovering at home. Though she tried to go back to normal life, Kahlo continued to experience fatigue and back pain and after x-rays, it was revealed that the accident had also displaced three vertebrae. Her treatment included wearing a plaster corset, which confined her to bed rest as part of her recovery.

Before the accident, Kahlo had dreams of becoming a doctor. While those plans had to be abandoned, her parents encouraged her to paint while on bed rest and it sparked a new passion within Kahlo.

The artist had a specially-made easel that enabled her to paint in bed, and a mirror was placed above it so she could see herself. As well as painting portraits of her sisters and school friends, she often turned her eye to herself, once saying: “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best”.

The artist continued having to wear plaster corsets for most of her life but took to painting intricate murals across them, turning herself into a canvas. Just as detailed as her paintings, the painted corsets were often covered in scraps of patterned fabric with drawings of tigers, monkeys, birds and streetcars like the one involved in her accident. The corsets remain in Kahlo’s house, and now museum dedicated to her, reminding us of her unique character.

In order to cope with the pain day to day, Kahlo resorted to a combination of strong prescription and non-prescription medication and alcohol. The artist's suffering was so extreme it not only manifested itself physically, but also mentally and emotionally. Painting proved to be an outlet for this, a way to separate herself from the pain and emotional stressors of her life, and create representations of her experiences of these traumas.

The impact of her illness allowed the artist to explore her ideas of feminism and womanhood and develop her own personal philosophy from a perspective different from her peers. It's important not to identify Kahlo by her pain, but rather celebrate the ways she used her afflictions to understand life and build a career as an artist.