Course:Frida Decorates her Corset (Juan Guzman 1950)
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Content warning: graphic imagery
Frida decorates her corset (Juan Guzman 1950)
By Jessica Harvey
Painted flowers never die - Frida Kahlo
What violence the body must contain.Armoured with mirrors, she defies the world
To take away her paintbrush and her pain.
The plaster chafes her, bone-white, stiff and plain.She cuts a window, behind which is curled
the absent child her body can’t sustain.
The oldest colour, this magenta stain,Dark arteries in ribbons all unfurled,
Still spilling from her paintbrush and her pain.
A broken column, but she don’t complain.She paints a revolution (Trotsky’s girl?):
Bright violence that will not be restrained!
Now slumped to black and white, monochrome chained,Her gaze turns inward as the nurse returns
To confiscate her paintbrush (and her pain).
The lipstick and the iodine remain,(As Ishtar’s corpse hangs in the underworld)
A violence her canvas-flesh reframes,
Though she has lost her paints and brush and pain.
I leave weeping. - Frida KahloJust kidding. - Frida Kahlo
In answer to Bronwen’s ekphrastic prompt early this term, I wrote a non-traditional villanelle about Juan Guzman’s 1950 photograph of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo decorating her plaster corset. The villanelle form is very constraining, which I felt was appropriate for the image, but also presented a significant challenge. I’m not exactly satisfied with the draft as it exists, but I’ve shared it here anyway as a tribute to Frida and the influence she’s had on my work.
In 1925, at the age of eighteen, Frida’s body was shattered by a streetcar accident (broken spine, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, leg and foot), and between then and her death in 1954 she had thirty-two operations. From 1944 onward she wore these corsets daily, which held upright a spine that was too weakened to support itself. This photo was taken in hospital, and in September when I first saw it, I was deeply moved by Frida’s fierce gesture towards reclaiming her body from the pain, suffering and limitation that seemed to define it. As long as she had paints and a brush, she was a painter, even if plaster was the only canvas available. When the nurses took away her brush and paints? She used lipstick and iodine.
I’ve long been a fan of Kahlo’s work, having studied it in art history during undergrad, but now I view it through a new lens. Over the past fifteen years I have struggled with chronic illness, pain and infertility. I’ve undergone countless invasive tests, multiple surgeries, injected medications weekly, taken drugs that made me forget the joy of life and haunted every sleep with violent nightmares. Whether I like it or not, my artistic practice has been shaped by these experiences. But I often wonder: does writing about the specifics of my life in my body (with my relationship to pain), make my work more or less impactful for my readers? Is it self-exploitative? Self-indulgent? Alienating? Disrespectful to the greater suffering of others? Will it bring me any closer to the shared understanding that I am looking for when I reach out through language?
Frida was not only a disabled artist. She was queer, she was gender non-conforming, she was indigenous, she was a communist, she was a spouse and, although she wanted to be, she was never a parent. There are so many facets of her lived experience that I will never be able to fully understand. I wonder if anybody can ever really understand anybody else. But paintings like ‘The Broken Column,’ ‘The Two Fridas,’ and ‘Tree of Hope’ make me feel, viscerally, the shared experience of being human and embodied in this vulnerable flesh, blood and bone. Frida turned her body, and its brokenness, into art. In her self-portraits she looks directly at the viewer: hiding nothing. Her art gives me courage, which is an incredible gift. If I can do that for my readers by writing honestly about my life, I will be satisfied.
