the face and the composition of the portrait are reminiscent of Western representations of Christ: the hummingbird that she wears hanging from her neck is the traditional symbol of the Holy Ghost; Christ’s Crown of Thorns has become a bloody wreath of thorns. The painting, however, is more than just a traditional representation of Christ. In a Mexican context the crown of thorns that tears open Kahlo’s neck (and draws blood) refers to the Aztec priests who mutilated themselves with agave thorns and stingray spines. The dead hummingbird is sacred to Tenochtitlan’s supreme deity, Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war and representing for the Aztecs the soul or the spirit of the warrior fallen in battle.1 Thus not only did the artist, by means of the self-portrait, engage in a traditional Christian discourse on the Passion, she also placed herself in a Mexican cultural framework. Drawing on the work’s cultural and spiritual markers of “the original Mexico,” the self-representation visualizes the colonized other, Mexico’s historical sacrifice. When faced with a portrait like Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, it is not very hard to understand why Frida Kahlo’s art has been intricately linked with her personal story of suffering, wherein she is the suffering woman redeeming her artistic triumph through pain and passion. Already in 1939 the Surrealist artist André Breton described Kahlo’s art as “a ribbon around a bomb.” 2 Her husband Rivera followed
the same line of thought four years later in the article “Painting Her Own Life” (1943), in which he wrote, “Frida is unique in the history of art, ready to tear open her own breast and heart to arrive at the biological truth and express how this feels to her.”3 Until today the reception of Kahlo’s self-portraits have—with a few exceptions 4—pursued a biographical path. The self-portraits have been interpreted as fragments of a life story that is more colorful than a pulp novel: a dramatic traffic accident followed by lifelong chronic pain and equally painful treatments, unhappy love (for that special someone), countless extramarital affairs with prominent cultural personalities, miscarriages, speculations about her being a victim of Munchausen syndrome, a political revolutionary with a circle of acquaintances who killed and got killed for the cause. The biographical approach is the obvious choice when it comes to Kahlo. It is, however, evident that her production cannot be reduced to mere illustrations of one of art history’s more colorful biographies. The works are more than that. Kahlo’s art is at once ruthlessly selfrevealing and profoundly theatrical, fictional accounts of a life lived. The staging becomes evident when Kahlo writes ironically somewhere, “Did you know that I’ve never seen a jungle? So how am I supposed to paint a jungle background full of insects?”5 And seeing how Kahlo ages in the photographs while remaining comparatively youthful in her painted self-portraits ... Read more in the printed catalogue 11
1 Janice Helland, “Culture, Politics, and Identity: Frida Kahlo” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York, 1992), p. 405. 2 André Breton, “Frida Kahlo de Rivera” (in French), foreword to Frida Kahlo (Frida Rivera), exh. cat. Julien Levy Gallery (New York, 1938); translated in English in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York, 1972), p. 144. 3 Diego Rivera, “Painting Her Own Life,” October 1943, quoted in Christina Burrus, Frida Kahlo: Painting Her Own Reality (New York, 2008), p. 129. 4 For example, Margaret A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo (Hannover, 1999); and Gannit Ankori, Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport, Conn. and London, 2002).
Anonymous, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at a Rally, 1940s. Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art (72)