The Broken Column

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Frida Kahlo de Rivera is a Mexican painter most well known for her self-portraits. Her life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home known as La Casa Azul. She was born in the early twentieth century, and despite her early death at the mere age of 47, she manages to live a wild and creative life. She was an independent thinker who claims she “was born a painter.” All of her pieces are incredibly emotional and powerful. She allegedly desired her work to be associated with the birth of modern Mexico, so even though her birth certificate states she was born July 6, 1907, Kahlo claims to have been born July 7, 1910 (birth of Mexican Revolution). Her portraits are often described as folk art due to the heavy influences of Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition, yet some categorize Kahlo’s paintings as surrealist, The reason her work has been coined as being traditional of the figures and as surrealist work is mainly due to the fact that the subjects of her pieces took the traditional form of the female body and face, but they were distorted. She “never painted dreams. I painted my reality.” She transpired her reality onto the canvas through biographical reflections of her own life, and these reflections most often resulted in unique self-portraits. One self-portrait that really resonated with me is “The Broken Column” (1944). This painting is a rather blatant and disturbing expression of the pain she felt resulting from a traffic accident. When she was eighteen years old, Kahlo was riding in a bus that collided with a trolley car. This accident resulted in a broken spinal column, broken collarbone, several broken ribs, broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, a dislocated shoulder, and it compromised her reproductive capability due to an iron handrail piercing her abdomen and uterus. After the accident, Kahlo
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