Frida Kahlo

Concerns with identity construction and meaning in the face of suffering also are prominent in the work of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter who lived from 1910-54. As a communist, atheist, and bohemian, her spirituality is not immediately apparent. Yet Frida can be considered a deeply spiritual person, explains biographer Jack Rummel (2000). One way of understanding spirituality, he asserts, is the coupling of a quest for self-understanding with an outspokenness against injustice and political oppression. In that sense, her work represents an unending search for oneself and one's place in the world. Rummel states: "Through her paintings she found the language that would eventually impel her to tell her story, unflinchingly, charting her personal and spiritual quest and suffering" (pp. 15-16). Kahlo was married to the well-known painter Diego Rivera, and she has come to occupy an important role in discussions of constructions of identity among individuals and groups.

Frida Kahlo's life was plagued by physical suffering. She had polio as a child, which affected her foot and caused a shortening of one leg. In 1925 Frida suffered an accident when a bus she was riding was hit by a trolley. A metal rod grazed her spine, cracking several vertebrae and fracturing her pelvis. She also suffered broken ribs, multiple fractures of her right leg, and a crushed right foot. Throughout her life Frida experienced enormous physical pain and had numerous operations.

In her art Frida held fast to an aesthetic of emotional openness. Her paintings are pictorial constructions of her evolving self, and her honesty about her fears and needs gives her work a poignancy (Rummel, 2000). Henry Ford Hospital, painted in 1932, marked a breakthough in Frida's art. Bleeding and lying naked on a surreally floating bed, Frida placed herself at the center of the painting. In the background one sees Ford Motor Company's rouge plant in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Six objects are floating in space, attached to Frida by red ribbons or veins: the fetus of her baby, a snail, a stylized drawing of a woman's torso mounted on a

48 Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

pedestal, a mechanical device that looks like a lock, a purple orchid, and a drawing of the pelvic bones (which, because shattered, Frida believed was the cause of a miscarriage).

Henry Ford Hospital portrays Frida's miscarriage in Detroit, and all the objects had significance for her. The snail represents the slowness of the miscarriage; the drawing of the woman's torso shows her damaged spine and sperm going to the uterus; the mechanical lock could be a symbol of an instrument of torture or of denial of motherhood; the orchid represents the flower Diego Rivera gave her while she lay in recovery. Rummel (2000) writes:

What marks this painting with greatness is the completely unsentimental and breathtaking originality with which Frida investigates this moment in her life. Her body is not portrayed as an object of desire or in a flattering way; her stomach is distended by pregnancy and a tear comes from her eyes. A viewer can see the truth to the remark she made later that she - unlike the European Surrealists - painted her life, not her dreams, (p. 94)

The mix of hard clarity and dreamlike symbolism, for Rummel, gives this work a spiritual power, shining a light into Frida's soul. Henry Ford Hospital and the works that followed it were the essence of her spiritual path. Frida, using a visual vocabulary, grappled with the universal problems of pain, suffering, and death. In Kahlo's work, one sees creative expression as a way to express deep emotion and to explore spiritual questions such as the meaning of suffering and one's identity in the world. I also suggest that through her art, Kahlo tried to make sense of her harsh world. Kahlo's creative expression is a source for theology as a locus of secular experience, associated with the sacred in that it concerns identity, oppression, and her place in the cosmos. Moreover, if aesthetic experience is a means of striving towards something beyond the moment, one can see in Kahlo's work a struggle to find meaning in her existence. To draw from Viladesau, she uses a pictorial language to embody, formulate, and interpret the historical revelation of her life. Her art depicts her life and who she is in relation to Rivera and her culture. While "religiously speaking" an atheist, her work suggests a search for the sacred as broadly defined in its outspokenness against injustice and political oppression.