Frida Kahlo gets no points for subtlety here, but that’s not the point of Frida.  

The power of her work lies in her unflinching ability to lay it all on the table.  She distinguished herself from the label of “surrealist” by pointing out that she painted not from dreams, but from her own reality.  It doesn’t get any more real than this.

Frida painted The Broken Column later in life after spinal surgery...one of many painful procedures resulting from a bus accident in her teens that shattered much of her skeleton and left her in agony for the rest of her life.  The constrictive body brace is entirely literal, since Frida was perpetually bound by a steel corset.  A fragmented column appears between a fissure in her flesh, standing in for her broken spinal column.  Frida said at this stage of her life, “I am disintegration.”

Despite the somewhat in-your-face symbolism, this is a favorite subject for bad art theory papers, identifying the column as everything from her fragmented marriage to a giant phallus penetrating her body. While such interpretations could be partially true, we think that sometimes a spinal column is just a spinal column.

The nails puncturing every inch of her flesh reflect the Catholic iconography of martyrdom, though Frida was never one to play the martyr.  She referred to her medical ordeal as her “punishment.”  She also took her tragedy in good humor, saying of this painting, “You must laugh at life...Look very very closely at my eyes...the pupils are doves of peace.  That is my little joke on pain and suffering…”  Some claim the larger nails over her heart reflect her tortured relationship with Diego Rivera.

This is unique among Frida’s many self portraits in that it portrays her in complete isolation, without the lush foliage and comforting monkeys that lend color and life to the characteristic undercurrent of suffering.  Here she stands desolate in an apocalyptic landscape, naked and vulnerable. Originally Frida painted herself entirely nude, but felt that her exposed bottom half distracted too much from the central column, so she improvised the drapery.

This painting hangs in the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico City.  Dolores Olmedo was a flamboyant socialite, lifelong friend and some say lover of Diego Rivera.  She was intensely jealous of Frida and hated her art, but bought a large portion of it after Frida’s death as a personal favor to Diego.  Some say she bought the paintings to deliberately keep them out of the public eye.  If that was her intention, she obviously didn’t succeed.

Julie Taymor featured this painting in a signature surrealist montage in the film Frida (2002), with Selma Hayek playing the artist.  It also appeared on a 2013 African postage stamp from Ivory Coast.