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La Columna Rota/The Broken Column, 1944, Frida Kahlo
Kahlo was 18 years old when she was involved in a horrific traffic accident, in which an iron rod pierced her abdomen, right foot was crushed, and two vertebrae were fractured, as well as a number of other bones, including eleven fractures in her right leg. As she recovered in a full body cast, her mother brought her a small lap easel, and, with a mirror over her bed, began painting self-portraits. This self-portrait embodies many elements that were in Kahlo’s artwork, including the themes of isolation, a broken body, and intense suffering and pain. This painting also embodies another one of Kahlo’s themes, that of two bodies, one of which she is a complete and full bodied woman, and another, reflecting broken insides.
(via monkeyknifefight)
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Thinking About Death by Frida Kahlo, 1943
(via queersforfearz)
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Frida Kahlo in drag, with sisters Adriana and Christina and cousins Carmen and Carlos Verasa, photographed by Guillermo Kahlo, 1926
(via liminal-zone)
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Frida Kahlo in a hospital bed, drawing her corset with help of a mirror by Juan Guzmán, 1951
Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old. The corsets remain to this day in her famous blue house—their embedded mirrors reflecting back our gazes, their collages bringing the whole world into stricture. In one, an open circle has been carved into the plaster like a skylight near the heart.
Frida’s corsets hardened around unspeakable longing. They still frame an invisible woman, still naked in her want, still calling to deaf men in the rain. I find them beautiful. She would have given anything, perhaps, to have a body that rendered them irrelevant. [ftp]