Frida Kahlo Broken Column

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Frida Kahlo painted her life and herself again and again. Her paintings are about how it was to be Frida – perhaps one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. In this essay I will focus on her most repeated theme “pain” and examine how the theme is presented in the painting “The Broken Column”. She went through tremendous emotional and physical pain during her lifetime, in which she managed to express through art. In 1925, when she was a young medical student, she was riding a bus that collided with a tram. A metal handrail pierced her abdomen, exciting through her vagina. Her spinal column was broken in three places. She broke her clavicle, ribs and pelvis. Additionally, she got eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed foot and a…show more content…
He was Mexico's most famous artist, 20 years older than her and a great womanizer. You can undoubtedly assume that the pain after the accident and the love for Diego filled af large part of her life – good and bad at the same time. Bad, because she wasn’t able live a normal life, she was unable to have children and had to undergo 32 painful operations, and good, because she turned that pain into art, which has influenced the world, and inspired and touched many…show more content…
The foreground consists of Frida, the middle ground lies a vast empty landscape, and in the background consists of more landscape and a sky. We see the picture straight from a neutral perspective, which is one of the dominant elements Kahlo uses on her self-portraits. This effect contributes to her particularly intense eye contact with the viewer. Frida is placed within the golden ratio. Furthermore the painting has many horizontal lines such as the landscape behind her and her corset. I noticed that the closer the ground is to Frida, the more uneven the ground is. There is a sense of turmoil surrounding her. These deliberate diagonal nails also contribute to the turmoil around her whole body and face. The choice of color of the landscape and sky in the background are quite neutral colors. Though they are still rather cold colors, which only contributes more to the picture’s torment. The sun shines from the left side and you can se the sky is a tad lighter than the right side. Frida’s body and face are the elements that have the most natural color of all. It is very clear that it is intended to make the body the central element because of the particularly strong skin color. The open flesh in the middle of upper body is painted in a dark deep red, which represents her bloody flesh together with the cold metal color of the column. These two colors are seen again

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