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The Broken Column

Oil on masonite by Frida Kahlo, 1944. Self-portrait in which Kahlo depicts her torso as split open, revealing a crumbling Ionic column in place of her spine. Her body is punctured by nails; she wears a medical corset. Tears stream down her face but she stares defiantly forward. The painting was made in 1944, following Kahlo's spinal surgery and her enforced period in a medical corset. Held at the Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

Scholarly Significance

Kahlo's The Broken Column — canonical self-portrait of physical suffering; joins The Two Fridas in documenting Kahlo's body-as-subject.

Notes

  • ·Painted after Kahlo's bone fusion surgery (1944), during which she was encased in a full body cast.
  • ·The crumbling Ionic column is a direct visual metaphor for her degenerating spine.
  • ·The nails studding her body recall the Passion of Christ — a recurring Catholic iconographic template in Kahlo's work.
  • ·The landscape behind her — cracked, barren — echoes the fissured body and perhaps the ravaged post-colonial Mexican land.
  • ·The Ionic column has been interpreted as both a reference to classical Western civilization's dissolution and to classical anatomy (the vertebral column as body's architecture).