Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo remarked once, "I suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down. The other accident is Diego." (Lucie-Smith) Born in 1907 in Mexico City, Kahlo was of Hungarian Jewish, Spanish, and Native American descent. Her life was, as described, a series of tragic disasters. Polio left her with a limp at age six, and, in 1925 at the age of eighteen, Kahlo suffered serious damage to her pelvis and right left due to a streetcar colliding with the bus on which she was riding. This accident, along with her prolonged recovery and resulting lifelong pain, originated her interest in painting and set the stage for the rest of her life (Lucie-Smith).

While confined to her bed during her lengthy recovery, her mother purchased a small easel that fit on her lap on which Kahlo began painting. Confined by her limited mobility while bedridden, Kahlo used a mirror and, thus, launched her focus on self-portraits, including her later piece, The Broken Column of 1944 (Buch).

In 1928, Kahlo reencountered Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whom she previously knew from her time at the National Preparatory School. Both artists found shared interests, including their communist militant political view, and fell in love. On the twenty-first of August of 1929, after the disintegration of his earlier marriage, Kahlo and Rivera married. As Kahlo later revealed, the second tragedy in her life was her relationship with Rivera (Lucie-Smith; Buch).

Even during his previous marriages, Rivera found remaining faithful difficult. He committed adultery with models and other women, including Christina Kahlo, the younger sister of Frida. Conceding to his infidelity, Kahlo eventually began a series of both heterosexual and lesbian affairs, the latter better tolerated by her husband. One of her many heterosexual relationships was with the Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, to whom she afterwards dedicated Between the Curtains, a self-portrait from 1937 (Lucie-Smith). Open female sexuality was previously unrecognised until female artist like Kahlo forced the concept into the public portraying the subject in paintings.

At the beginning of their marriage, Kahlo and Rivera travelled to the United States for a series of murals for which Rivera was commissioned to paint. The couple moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1932 where Kahlo discovered herself pregnant. However, because of her severe pelvic injuries from the bus crash in 1925, complications arose, and she suffered a miscarriage. Her first truly profound self-portrait, Henry Ford Hospital of 1932, illustrated the intensely painful emotions she suffered from the trauma of a lost child (Buch; Lucie-Smith).

Although her artwork was unlike the Mexican folk art based murals of her husband, Rivera perceived her paintings as unique and unprecedented in the history of artwork. No woman before Kahlo had ever accurately captured the condition of feminine truth and suffering on canvas with paint (Lucie-Smith). Although Kahlo pretended to deem her artwork as insignificant, her paintings were powerful symbols in the feminist movement.

The Broken Column can be considered her most important and influential work of art. Painted in 1944, The Broken Column portrays both the excruciating pain and vulnerability Kahlo felt during her life. In place of her spine, a broken column represents the source of her suffering, physical and emotional, and creates a body of combined flesh and material objects much like the metal bar that penetrated her abdomen in the bus accident of 1925. Stabbed into her body are nails, larger approaching her heart, which symbolize the physical pain Kahlo experienced, while the tears flowing from her eyes indicate the degree of pain, which is obviously agonizing. Her nudity insinuates a sense of helplessness, possibly due to the realization that little could be done for her anguish (Buch; Falini).

Like other female artists of the early twentieth-century, Kahlo also strived to render the female form as more than a sensual object of male sexuality (Fiero 45). The Broken Column is an atypical portrayal of the female figure. Although her figure is naked, Kahlo created a female image neither physically perfect nor provocatively posed. Instead, The Broken Column presents a woman uninhibitedly exposing her intense thoughts and emotions for any other woman, or man, to observe. Her nudity also symbolizes vulnerability rather than pure sexuality.

While Kahlo generally used herself as a subject, over one-third of her works are self-portraits, her paintings are significantly powerful in the fact that the conveyance of pain and strength not only applies to Kahlo but appeals to other women as a symbol of feminine power and suffering. The universality of The Broken Column, as well as other paintings of Kahlo, aids the greatness of the piece and offers a residence on a deserted island.

Buch, Fred. "Frida by Kahlo." 2 Sep. 2004. <http://www.fbuch.com/fridaby.htm>

Falini, Danielle. "Frida Kahlo and the Cyborg." Frida Kahlo & Contemporary Thoughts. 3 Sep. 2004. <http://www.fridakahlo.it/CYBORG2.HTML>

Fiero, Gloria K. The Humanistic Tradition: Book 6 Modernism, Globalism and the Information Age. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Lucie-Smith, Edward. "Frida Kahlo." Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists. 1 Sep. 1999. Artchive. 2 Sep. 2004. <http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm>