I have had two accidents in my life: the tram and Diego Rivera. Diego was the worst.” Frida Kahlo lived between pain and love. Her work also navigated between these two emotions, although it was her suffering that made her the most famous contemporary artist in Mexico and perhaps the first woman who shone and was recognized as a painter in her time.
The canvas shows a naked Kahlo, lying on the bed, her belly still swollen, blood between her legs, tears in her eyes, and umbilical cords that connect her to her unborn child, raised in the foreground, and to a snail, which it represents the slow passage of time after the immense loss. Frida herself painted Henry Ford Hospital in 1932 after suffering an abortion in Detroit where she had accompanied her husband, Diego Rivera, who had been commissioned to paint a mural in the city.
“This is the painting that makes Kahlo an artist because with it she showed that she did not need to fit into any school or artistic movement. It was a very risky painting and it was very scandalous, but it was also the way that Frida had to show her soulâ€, explains Ali Ray, director of the documentary Frida Kahlo, which delves into the life and work of the Mexican painter and who has participated at the BCN Film Fest.
Kahlo had started painting a few years earlier as a result of another painful episode: the one with the tram. It happened in 1925 when she was returning by bus from the University with her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias. A tram ran over the bus. Kahlo broke her spine, ribs, clavicle, and one leg. During her recovery process and after her fiancé left her, she took her brushes.
Soon after, she met Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, and married him in 1929. Rivera hurt her greatly by his infidelities. He even had an affair with her little sister, Cristina Kahlo, but Frida –although she was also unfaithful– always loved him and that love made her grow as an artist, because “Diego was the center of many of the emotions that she expressed in her paintingsâ€.
In A Few Piquetitos, “a prostitute is shown stabbed by a man, blood runs even down the frame, Kahlo painted it after learning that Diego had had an affair because she felt, thus, killed by life.” That’s why bleeding hearts are commonplace in Kahlo’s many self-portraits.
But his work was not only fueled by emotional pain, it also grew by physical pain. The aftermath of the tram accident was always with the artist, she had to undergo countless surgeries and she died at the age of 47: “Kahlo’s martyrdom is reflected in the canvas Broken Column. Never before has physical and emotional suffering been communicated in such an intense way in artâ€, adds Ray.
The filmmaker has also presented another documentary at the BCN Film Fest, Mary Cassatt: Painting the Modern Woman, and plans to continue making known through cinema the work of so many women that art history has kept hidden: “The National Gallery It has 2,300 pieces. Only 23 are of womenâ€.
