Medical imagery in the art of Frida Kahlo.

D Lomas, R Howell - BMJ: British Medical Journal, 1989 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
D Lomas, R Howell
BMJ: British Medical Journal, 1989ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Frida Kahlo held her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938. Included were paintings that
narrate her experience of a miscarriage six years earlier in Detroit, where she had
accompanied her husband, the Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera. Reviewing the
exhibition Howard Devree, an art critic for the New York Times, dismissed Kahlo's workas"
more obstetrical than aesthetic."'Underlying this reproach is an attitude that art should not
concern itself with obstetrics, a view that any cursory glance at Western art would confirm. To …
Frida Kahlo held her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938. Included were paintings that narrate her experience of a miscarriage six years earlier in Detroit, where she had accompanied her husband, the Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera. Reviewing the exhibition Howard Devree, an art critic for the New York Times, dismissed Kahlo's workas" more obstetrical than aesthetic."'Underlying this reproach is an attitude that art should not concern itself with obstetrics, a view that any cursory glance at Western art would confirm. To describe artistic creation by using metaphors of gestation and birth is commonplace, yet to depict such events is tacitly proscribed. In Western art scenes of childbirth are rare and visual accounts of abortionor miscarriage non-existent. They have remained the province ofmedical texts. Openly flouting this conven-tion, Kahlo produced a unique body of images such that Rivera could proclaim her" The only human force since the marvellous Aztec master sculpting in black basalt who has given plastic expression to the pheno-menon of birth." 2
In the culture to which Kahlo belonged miscarriage was a source of shame: the abject failure of a socially conditioned expectation of motherhood and a travesty of creation in which birth yields only death and detritus. No rituals existto commemorate the loss associated with miscarriage, whichis thus relegated to aprivate domain of silent grief. 3 By speakingout Kahlo
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov