POST 9

EVERYONE: Do a mini research project on a work of art or architecture from the late 20th century.When writing your post, please include a link to an image (or the actual image, if possible) within your post. Including a link or image will help other readers to follow your discussion.
After finding a work of art that captures your interest, you should use scholarly websites or an academic journal online) to learn more about this specific work of art. For example, look for ways that art historians have analyzed or discussed this specific work of art. Or, you may be interested in researching the history about the patronage, creation, or function of the work itself.

FRIDA KAHLO- The Broken Column

 “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” – Frida Kahlo. 

When Frida was a young child she was part of a horrible bus accident, which left her with lifelong pain and suffering, and she incorporated this into a lot of her works. She also went through a numerous amount of other things that made her render her physiological and physical pain, of these things is included a miscarriage, but she also depicts herself as non-human merged with different things, sometimes she is doubled, or distorted and fragmented.

This painting was done shortly after she went through a surgery on her spine. The column signifies her spinal cord and the opened portion of the chest could be how she feels her body is falling apart, and not holding itself together anymore. Frida is a Hispanic woman, which leaves the viewer wondering why she may have chosen to render a Greek column rather than her own cultures column. In this sense it is a cliché, which almost anyone, can identify right away as a column, which happens to be placed where her spinal “column” would be. The pins and needles that are all over her skin, show how she felt on a consistent basis. I know this for a fact because I was in a car crash and spinal cord injuries leave you feeling like your skin is being stabbed all over the place. Another thing that brings focus into the painting is the bright white cloth that is draped on her lower torso, with pins that go into what we would assume to be her right leg. After the crash she had some sort of deformity in her right leg, and always covered it up with long dresses, and in this sense, we can take it that she is bare on top because she can’t control how she feels on her torso, but she can hide the deformities that haunt her. As well as, she is also covering her womb area, which is another thing she is embarrassed by and chooses to hide this in her painting. The one thing that I’m attracted to is the bonds that hold her together like a corset, it seems to be the only thing that is holding her body together, but I can’t find any articles about why she made this choice. But upon looking at this painting I realized that I was only looking at her since she is the main focus but then I noticed the barren waste land behind her, and what does this stand for. It symbolizes the feeling of aloneness and how she feels like no one knows the pain that she is going through, and there’s no one there to help her out of this pain and misery. The background highlights the vulgarity of her, more so her wound, as the background is more cool colors with her warm colors on her body.

The way that Frida paints, is considered Surrealist, but she said, “that it dealt not with dreams worlds, but rather with her own lived reality”.

sites used:

http://www.pbs.org/weta/fridakahlo/life/index.html

http://www.learner.org/courses/globalart/work/57/index.html

http://www.streetsie.com/spinal-injury-art-frida-kahlo/

Hardin, Terri, "Firda Kahol; A Modern Master", April 1997, New Line Books Limited, Singapore, used 5/22/2012.