on canvas, 65 × 55 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The scene of the accident was gruesome. The iron handrail had stabbed through her hip and emerged through her vagina. A gout of blood hemorrhaged from her wound.
Nude of Frida Kahlo
Diego Rivera, 1930
Lithography, 44 × 30 cm
Signed and dated on bottom, right hand corner: D. R.30
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City
In the chaos, one bystander insisted the hand rail be removed from her. He reached down and tore it from the wound. She screamed so loud the approaching ambulance siren could not be heard.
The devastation to Frida Kahlo’s body can only be imagined, but its implications were far worse once she realized she would survive.
Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser
1931
Oil on masonite, 85.1 × 59.7 cm
University of California, School of Medicine, San Francisco
This vital, vivacious young girl on the brink of any number of career possibilities had been reduced to a bed-bound invalid. Only her youth and vitality saved her life. Her father’s ability to earn enough money to feed his family and pay Frida’s medical bills had diminished with the Mexican economy. This necessitated lengthening her stay in the overburdened, undermanned Red Cross hospital for a month.
Window Display in a Street in Detroit
1931
Oil on metal plate, 30.3 × 38.2 cm
Private collection
After being pinned to her bed, swathed in plaster and bandages, she was eventually allowed to go home. Gradually, her indomitable will asserted itself and she began to make decisions within the narrow view she commanded.
By December, 1925, she regained the use of her legs. One of her first painful journeys was to Mexico City.
Frida and Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
1931
Oil on canvas, 100 × 79 cm
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, bequest of Albert M. Bender, San Francisco
Shortly thereafter, she was felled by shooting pains in her back and more doctors trooped into her life. Her three undiagnosed spinal fractures were discovered and she was immediately encased in plaster once again. Trapped and immobilised after those brief days of freedom, she began realistically narrowing her options. As days of soul searching continued, she passed the time painting scenes from Coyoacan, and portraits of relatives and her friends who came to visit.
Portrait of Eva Frederick
1931
Oil on canvas, 63 × 46 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City
The praise her paintings elicited surprised her and she began deciding who would receive the painting before she started. She gave them away as keepsakes. With this painting, she began a remarkable lifetime series of fully realized Frida Kahlo reflections, both introspective and revealing, that examined her world from behind her own eyes and from within that crumbling patchwork of a body.
Nude of Eva Frederick
1931
Crayon on paper, 60.5 × 47 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico
By 1928, Frida had recovered enough to set aside her orthopedic corsets and escape the narrow world of her bed to walk out of La Casa Azul once again into the social and political stew that was Mexico City. She began reexploring the heady world of Mexican art and politics. She wasted no time in hooking up with her old comrades from the various cliques at the Preparatory School. Soon, as she drifted from one circle to another, she fell in with a collection of aspiring politicians, anarchists and Communists who gravitated around the American expatriate, Tina Modotti. During the First World War and the early 1920s, many American intellectuals, artists, poets and writers fled the United States to Mexico, and later to France, search of cheap living and political idealism.
Paisaje con cactus (Landscape with Cactus)
Diego Rivera, 1931
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Study of the Portrait of Luther Burbank
1931
Crayon on paper, 29 × 21 cm
Collection of Juan Coronel Rivera, Mexico
They banded together to praise or condemn each other’s works and drafted windy manifestos while participating in one long inebriated party that lasted several years, lurching from apartment to salon to saloon and back. These expatriates fashioned a sentimental vision of the noble peasant toiling in the fields and promoted the Mexican view of life as fiestas y siestas interrupted by the occasional bloody peasant revolt and a scattering of political assassinations.
Portrait of Luther Burbank
1931
Oil on masonite, 86.5 × 61.7 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City
Into this tequila-fueled debating society stepped the formidable presence of Diego Rivera, the prodigal returned home from 14 years abroad and having been kicked out of Moscow. Despite his rude treatment at the hands of Stalinist art critics and the Russian government’s unveiled threats of harm if he did not leave, Diego embraced Communism as the world’s salvation.
Portrait of Lady Cristina Hastings
1931
Red chalk on paper, 47 × 29 cm
Museo
