The Broken Column

The Broken Column

The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo

1. Introduction

This essay will analyse the picture “The broken column” (1944) by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. “The broken column” is one of the most famous paintings done by this artist. The dimensions are, like most of Frida Kahlo’s pictures, very small (40 x 30.7 cm). It is oil on canvas. Currently it is located in the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City. The time era in which it was done is the surrealism. Surrealism is defined as “a 20th century style and movement in art and literature in which images and events are not connected but put together in a strange or impossible way, like in a dream, to try to express what is happening deep in the mind.”

2. Main Body

2.1 Biography of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo’s father was the German immigrant Guillermo Kahlo who had come to Mexico in 1891. After the death of his first wife, he married Matilde Calderón y González who gave birth to Magdalen Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón on the 6 July 1907 in the “Blue House” in Coyoacán, Mexico. With her three sisters, Frida had a happy childhood which was suddenly interrupted when she became ill with polio at the age of six. The only remain of this disease was that her right leg was shorter than her left one.
Frida attended the “Escuela Nacional Preparatoria” as one of the very few girls. Her intelligence was already remarkable.
On the 17 September 1925, Frida was on the trip back home when a tram caught the bus and pressed it against a wall. Frida was wedged between the broken bus and the wall. An iron pole had penetrated her lower body causing several fractures and serious injuries of her spine and her organs. Frida was accompanied with pain and health troubles for the rest of her life. During the numerous times she had to stay in bed, she started drawing her first pictures.
On the 21 August 1929, Frida married the twenty-one years older Diego Rivera who was one of the most famous Mexican...