Feminine Self Portraits Kahlo example essay topic

THE ART OF FRIDA KAHLO - A PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION The art of Frida Kahlo has been discussed at length by many art historians over the past twenty years since the publication of her biography by Hayden Herrera and the Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1982. Many journalists and authors reinforced the construction of Kahlo as a victim, and a psychoanalytical reflection of her persona and her work necessitates probing common feminine experiences which in Kahlo's case have been construed as suffering. David Lomas comments "the deluge of unabashedly lachrymose stories of her life and art lend support to the view that biography is a mode of trivializing art produced by women". However, I am not concerned here with her accident or other problems that she encountered with her health, but I am interested in the notion that factors from her infancy contributed to her work more significantly than her later experiences and were crucial to Kahlo's drive.

Sigmund Freud used psychoanalytic techniques to consider art and literature and many of his ideas have been developed throughout the last century by others. For the purposes of this essay I will consider his work and that of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan and apply their theories to Kahlo's work. Freud's investigations relied on fragments of information as he analysed ancient artists but we have the advantage of copious material on Kahlo's private and personal life. However the disadvantage is that much has been written from a biased perspective concentrating on her misfortunes and her sexual activity. In Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci the reader encounters different problems.

His work is gendered, emphasising the male and his perceived threat of castration which creates difficulties when applying his theories to the work of female artists. Allegedly women suffer from penis envy. Freud states "The assumption that all human beings have the same (male) form of genital is the first of the many remarkable and momentous sexual theories of children". This statement can obviously be argued from a contemporary, female point of view but we accept that Freud was writing from a middle-class background, at the beginning of the twentieth century when patriarchy was still almost unquestioned. Freud's analysis begins with the study of the psyche of the infant Leonardo in 1452. Freud concentrates on fragments of information he possesses, one of which is a note about an early childhood memory of vultures.

He reconstructs a scenario based on this memory from Leonardo's "suckling period". This "suckling period" also known as the "oral" stage is of fundamental importance and affects all further relationships throughout life. Melanie Klein pays particular attention to this stage and I think it is crucial to our understanding of Kahlo's work both of which we will come to later. Terry Eagleton explains that Freud's main concerns were the significance of infantile sexuality and the existence of an unconscious mind. Eagleton goes on to explain the basic notion of the Oedipus complex as signalling "the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle; from the enclosure of the family to society at large... ".

Freud, in his book "On Sexuality", expands these themes and describes how they affect the mother and daughter relationship. For Freud the components of infantile sexuality can be broken into four periods, oral, anal, phallic and Oedipal. In boys the oedipal stage manifests itself in the castration complex. In girls the development of penis envy accounts for the strong bond girls have with their fathers after the oedipal stage, having rejected their mothers. Freud acknowledges that the female's attachment to her mother can last for several years, postponing the oedipal stage, partly because "she acknowledges the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome state of affairs".

However, Freud goes on to stress other reasons for the female infant to turn away from her mother; a) because she was born a girl and b) because she was not suckled for long enough. Melanie Klein's more easily accessible text about the 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict' written in 1928 continues these theories about the oral stage and suckling. Klein built on the work of Freud but through her invention of psycho-analytic play techniques she was able to progress further in some areas of research. However, Klein's main theory is that we are born with two conflicting drives, love and hate. These binary opposites can also be transposed into the drive towards life and death or good and evil. For Klein, the oral-sadistic or cannibalistic stage follows the pre-oedipal and the oral stage.

Both these initial stages reflect the infant's bond with the mother and itself, unaware of anything outside these realms, as if the baby were still part of the mother. The following 'cannibalistic's tage is where the infant becomes aware of its individuality and feelings of anxiety begin, directed towards the breast as it is removed from the suckling infant. The 'good and bad breast' becomes the issue, eliciting love when it is there, providing nurture and gratifying desire and hate when it is taken away causing frustration by its withdrawal. Although Klein's work is more comprehensible, it is, like Freud's, controversial as she continues the theory of penis envy and the castration complex which some feminists have since tried to moderate or eliminate. Julie Kristeva for instance takes Klein's ideas but mainly builds on Lacan's work on the pre-symbolic stages of infancy and constructs the theory of semiotics. Semiotics is not gender biased as it is part of language formed before gender becomes specific and before language is learned.

Semiotics signify what is left out of language, but what has been accepted into language as code. Kristeva's work is particularly apt for feminist discourse as it concretizes the ideas of unspoken ideology as it has been constructed within a phallocentric society. Jacques Lacan builds on Freud's model but reinterprets his stages of infancy into the imaginary stage, the mirror stage and the symbolic stage. In the imaginary stage there is no specific sense of the self. This goes on to incorporate the mirror stage where the infant sees itself in the mirror but cannot truly differentiate itself from its mirror image. The importance of the mirror stage will become clear when we look later at Kahlo's self-portraits.

The child becomes for Lacan the signifier, and the other or the reflection, the signified, creating the self in terms of language. As the child moves fully into the world of language and away from the mother it enters the 'symbolic's tage and it is driven by the search for its original sustenance from its mother, which it continues to search for throughout life. This search or drive is summed up by Freud in his remark "No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life". So the drive is to find a replacement object / person who can sustain nourishment and this is linked to sexual drive. Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coy oac " an, Mexico City and was proud of her mixed heritage, illustrated in My Grandparents, My Parents and I 1936 (figure 1). Her mother, Matilde, born in Mexico, from Spanish / Indian descent, was the second wife of Guillermo, a German immigrant from Hungarian Jewish parents, whose first wife died during the birth of his second daughter.

Frida was the third of four daughters of Matilde, but Matilde had also had problems with pregnancy and had lost a son in infancy before the birth of Frida. Also Kahlo stated; "My mother was unable to breast-feed me because my sister Cristina was born just eleven months after I was. I was fed by a wet-nurse, whose breasts were washed immediately before I was suckled". Anyone with only rudimentary knowledge of conception and pregnancy would question this excuse. Nevertheless, after a short period the nurse was replaced by another and within eleven months as Kahlo stated Matilde gave birth to her last child. Salomon Grimberg comments "Kahlo's first two years of life... were shaped by her mother's illness and bereavement, faulty bonding, two nannies, and the self-absorption of Matilde's new pregnancy".

Kahlo's remarkably close relationship with her father, Guillermo, is important, for as well as the normal hatred and envy all infants feel for their mothers Kahlo's unconscious sublimation of her more complex situation would have resulted in her turning towards her father more significantly. Notably Kahlo never painted an individual portrait of her mother but painted Portrait of My Father, 1951, (figure 2). So we have established above by looking at Kahlo's early history that despite the reciprocation of her love for her father, she may have experienced bonding problems with her mother, and that these might have affected her development. However the next stage of psychological development produced particular anxiety and guilt as by over-compensating, she returned to a more obsessive relationship with her mother, which in turn caused a serious sense of rejection. Klein maintains that these anxieties are further compounded by concerns that her mother might take away the female's own latent motherhood, (she has already taken away the phallus) which is part of her acceptance of her lack of phallus. "Here we have also one root of the constant concern of women (often so excessive) for their personal beauty, for they dread that this too will be destroyed by the mother".

Kahlo was obsessed by her appearance. In her school days, she is reported to have arrived looking "unconventional" yet attracting positive attention from her peers who were fascinated by her originality. Later, during her marriage to Rivera one of the means they used to restore indigenous Mexican traditions as part of the revolution's move towards ethnicity was for Kahlo to adopt popular Pre-Columbian culture and imagery. She assumed the costume of Tehuanan women. Figure 4 Self Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on my Mind) 1943 shows her in this guise.

She chose this specifically because of the Tehuanan women's reputation for strength and independence, beauty and intelligence and their matriarchal society. She wore exotic costumes and hairstyles and Herrera notes "the elements of her dress were a kind of palette from which she selected each day the image of herself that she wished to present to the world". However Kahlo was from a bourgeois background and had very little to do with the real life of the Mexican Indian and it is possible that they found Kahlo's costume patronising. Kahlo's obsession also emerges in constant self-imagery. John Berger states: "When she died... she left behind 150 small paintings, a third of which are classified as self-portraits".

Her confirmation and re-examination of the self corresponds to Lacan's 'Mirror Stage' where the child constantly, critically seeks to re-assert herself through reinforcement or denial of the other. Freud calls it narcissism and equates it with types who "impress others as being 'personalities'... especially suited to act as support for others, to take on the role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or to damage the established state of affairs". This stage for Kahlo is extended with a more significant result because of her lack of bonding in infancy, but also suggests reticence in entering the 'symbolic's tage which Lacan explains is not only the stage at which the child discovers sexual difference, but also enters into language. As French feminist Luce Irigiray states: "How could discourse not be sexed when language is?

... Differences between men's and women's discourses are thus the effects of language and society, society and language... ". Language has not been constructed to fit women, we have had to fit in with it. Grimberg suggests the absence of a strongly formed link between the self and other at this stage means "We experience the self as un integrated, fragmented, unbalanced, incomplete, even empty, and we go about our lives self-absorbed, attempting to sustain a sense of cohesiveness in artificial ways by attaching ourselves to someone or something we believe will provide the means to keep us whole". In other words we try to recreate the memory of nurture, a fleeting memory in Kahlo's case, and this need creates our motivation and drive.

One of Klein's patients described this as "an empty space in me which I can never fill". Although Kahlo was for the most part self-absorbed, she was obsessive in her relationship with her first boyfriend, Alejandro G'omez Arias. The letters she sent him are testament to her neediness. In her marriage to Rivera they depended on each other in a relationship which was not only husband and wife, but mother / child and father / daughter. Through painting Kahlo created her own language adequate for her specific condition, but the extraordinary thing about her work is that she embraces fundamental experiences common to women that had never before been explored or exposed in art. In revolutionary Mexico, Kahlo welcomed modernism.

Her political role had been nurtured while at school, where she joined a group called the Cachuchas which supported the ideas of the liberally minded Jose Vasconcelos. The Cachuchas rebelled in the school calling for reforms in its organisation. Freud refers to these types of personality, people with leadership skills and rebelliousness that Kahlo possessed, as being typical of someone with her dysfunctional background. However, some of her ability to create such progressive work was clearly influenced by Rivera. Rivera's aim "was to reverse the current of art history so that instead of the exotic or the primitive feeding into European art the reverse would happen". These ideas formed the background of Kahlo's work, but Freud's theory establishes that she was already of this 'type' created in infancy.

Moreover enforced periods of bed-rest, her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage and her practice of self-reflection gave her the opportunity to scrutinize her role as a woman. Kahlo suffered throughout her life from the irony of her inability to procreate. The heritage that all female infants inherit while coming to terms with their apparent castration is made all the more difficult if they are unable to have children in adulthood. Kahlo uses symbols of nature and culture in her paintings. These symbols poignantly illustrate her frustration with her own body. The small scale of her work and elements of craft and folklore reflect the restrictions of traditional women's art, reduced to the realm of domestic.

Her resurrection of the religious retablo and ex-voto style connects her to established notions of Mexican femininity as nurturer of the family and links her work with popular imagery. Ex-voto paintings on tin were placed in churches thanking the Virgin for a miracle. Graphic images of suffering loved ones with an inscription below thanked God for alleviating their pain. But the subjects of Kahlo's work portray shocking aspects of femininity which subvert the construction of passivity and the idea of the submissive female body not only challenging the notion of acceptable women's suffering but challenging the men's gaze and objectification.

What male would want to accept responsibility for the tortures that Kahlo paints? She makes visible experiences of women that were considered taboo and redefines the stereotypical ideology of femininity (see for example figure 6). Lomas comments "actually to depict such events is tacitly proscribed. Scenes of childbirth are rarely portrayed in Western art and miscarriage never - they have been hived off into medical texts". Kahlo's self-portraits confront the viewer, challenging stereotypical notions of femininity. She confidently asserts herself as a modern woman independent, autonomous.

Whitney Chadwick states that women's self-portraiture "challenges in some way the complex relationship that exists between masculine agency and female passivity in Western art history". Figure 4 shows a photograph of Kahlo which can be compared to figure 3 Self Portrait as a Tehuana. The self-portrait illustrates Kahlo's fixation with Rivera (he is inscribed on her brow) and her fascination with costume and masquerade. Masquerade enables social conventions to be broken, crossing behavioural boundaries. Chadwick explains how Joan Rivi " ere in her 1929 essay 'Womanliness as Masquerade' describes "a defensive posture in which woman may adopt a mask of excessive femininity as a defence when entering professional spaces defined by male power and privilege. Caught in a trap in which masquerading womanliness is also defined as 'the essence of femininity', of what it is to be a woman, she manages only to signify that she is 'not-a-woman'.

For Rivi " ere... the motivations for the masquerade of femininity were unconscious defences against sexual anxiety". The mask reinforces the distance between Kahlo and the nurturer in figure 5, My Nurse and I or I suckle (1937). Kahlo pictures herself with an infant body being nursed by a wet-nurse in a Teotihuac " an mask. In view of her fascination with her ethnicity and the Pre-Columbian themes for re-building post-revolutionary Mexico, the nurse, whose skin is much darker than Kahlo's, may represent her nurture by the indigenous people? However, it is not her mother and could allude to the Indian wet-nurse who was employed after her birth because of her mother's illness. Rivera said "she painted her mother and her nanny, conscious of fact that in reality she did not know their faces".

The cold, functional aspect of the nurse's job is clear. The 'child' does not suckle but the milk pours into her mouth from a good breast containing the nectar of life from filigreed ducts. Equally the other bad breast wastes its product; it has no more value than as food. The child is held away from the body, looking out rather than at the figure who feeds her, there is no bond and she receives limited warmth or skin contact. This is confirmed by the milk which drips from the cloudy sky that nurtures the earth, yet appears like snow, adding to the coldness of the scene. Kahlo's white, lace-edged dress illustrates the child's purity and vulnerability.

Kahlo considered this one of her best paintings. Herrera interprets the nurse as "a concretisation of Mexico's Indian heritage... The raindrops in the sky are 'milk from the Virgin'... and... all express Frida's faith in the interconnectedness of every aspect of the natural world and in her own participation of the world". A psychoanalytical approach challenges this explanation. Kahlo had her third miscarriage or abortion in 1937. Melanie Klein clarifies: "the baby experiences depressive feelings which climax just before, during and after weaning" as the child is taken away from the breast for longer and longer period.

These depressive stages or mourning for the lost mother are repressed but although this is an expected stage of development, abnormalities cause deeper depression and repression which are re-established in mourning as an adult. For many women without regression to internalized emotions, pregnancy, birth or miscarriage create more poignant awareness of motherhood leading them to a closer affinity with their own mothers or a greater incredulity towards their own remembered experience. In My Birth (1932, figure 6) Kahlo expresses these memories, graphically depicting the subject of childbirth itself. She had miscarried shortly before this painting and was suffering from deep depression not only from the termination of her pregnancy, but also from the death of her mother.

Although Kahlo travelled to see her dying mother she could not face seeing her alive or after death. Her mother is represented with a sheet covering her head while giving birth to Kahlo. The room is bare and the focus is drawn to Kahlo's head as she enters the world from between her mother's legs. Alone on the wall is the Virgin of Sorrows, a reminder of the imagery her mother hung over the bed where her children were born. Kahlo said of this work "This is how I imagined I was born". The frigid atmosphere emphasised by the pale blue sheets and walls creates a contradictory illusion of the joy of birth.

It is shown as a painful, bloody, and humiliating experience which this mother has no part in, reducing childbirth from the romantic imagery of traditional painting to a primeval act of reproduction which women must bear. Grimberg comments that "The image condenses a fear and a wish... that her coming into the world had been a kind of death to her mother; that Kahlo could have been born only after her mother had died". If these feelings were genuine, then it is not surprising that she was ambivalent about her own pregnancies. She wrote to her friend and medical adviser Dr. Leo Elo esser explaining her anxieties and negative feelings about the birth, pleading with him to advise her to abort the child, yet later after several unproductive pregnancies her inability to give birth caused much distress. However, had Kahlo become a mother she would have been unlikely to have succeeded as an accomplished and well-known artist?

Meskimmon comments that during this period "ideologies meant that women who wished to be artists... were faced with a strange anomaly; on the one hand, birth was the ideal model of artistic creation; on the other, only men could engage in this sort of 'birth' as women's actual child-bearing capacity rendered them inadequate for artistic pursuits". It seems likely that her inability to have children allowed her to indulge painting as long as it did not distract her from caring for her husband who was the professional. However, Kahlo nurturing instinct was satisfied by the care of her husband, animals and birds and her creative instinct transferred to her paintings. She said "I lost three children...

Paintings substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing". Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940 figure 7) shows an aspect of Kahlo which is significant in terms of her psyche. Surrounded by the fetish ised object of her hair which has been cut off as a symbol of female castration, she focuses on the androgyny she capitalised on throughout her life subverting the feminine ideal. This was painted during the short period of divorce from Rivera, before they re-married.

The portrait carries the words from a song underlined by the score "Look if I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are bald, I don't love you anymore". Rivera was a serial adulterer and had affairs with, among others, Kahlo's sister, Cristina. Authors have written at length about Kahlo's revenge towards Rivera who adored her hair but I interpret this act as portraying her disassociation from both genders towards androgyny. The two people she loved the most had betrayed her. Would she want to be associated with either sex?

By cutting her hair and donning a large, male suit she takes on the male gender but she is still feminine as her earrings and shoes betray. She cannot become truly genderless but wants to be unlike her sister but is equally unlike a man. The painting portrays the violence with which Kahlo has cut her hair. It is no mere act of castration in the sense of just cutting it off for it is scattered all around her, dangling from each part of the chair frame and surrounds her totally in an act of profanity. Even in feminine self-portraits Kahlo emphasises her heavy eyebrows and moustached upper lip which in her photograph (figure 3) are not visible. Increased masculine hormones would cause these characteristics as well as a tendency to bisexuality, but as Simone de Beauvoir comments: "the 'true woman' is an artificial product that civilization makes, as formerly eunuchs were made" Experimentation with gender was fashionable at this time.

The 'bob' was in vogue and the 'flapper' look for women showed their burgeoning emancipation. Kahlo had rejected the new 'moderne's type for her traditional Mexican costumes but the use of androgynous imagery became synonymous with the New Woman, a cultural icon of the period. So although Kahlo's emancipation was contemporary it was only really shocking in terms of the reversal of her public profile she had created with long, decorative clothes, long, ornamented hair and excessive femininity. Kahlo was turning her back on Rivera and everything that he represented as well as rejecting her maternal body through her parody of masculinity. For Meskimmon "cross dressing and androgyny are strategies through which to challenge and / or unfix categories of gender and sexuality and introduce ambiguity and fluidity". But a deeper meaning can be constructed from this painting considering Kahlo's identity crisis from her infancy, resulting in her obsession with the mirror to determine her sexual identity and the social construction of femininity.

We know from her biography that she toyed with both genders as a child becoming a tom-boy and pandering to her father's wishes for her to take the place of his lost son. A photograph taken of her aged 19 shows her wearing a man's three piece suit, and she was bisexual, having numerous affairs throughout her adult life with both men and women. In this portrait she faces these issues head on. Curiously neither Freud nor Klein has much to say about female bisexuality. Freud acknowledges however that both genders are born with "a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism" but that society conditions the sexual traits of male or female. Kahlo's character craved attention and she used her exotic costumes, hairstyles and femininity to attract admirers.

The numerous monographs written are testament to her success. However many writers have reduced her status to victim, concentrating on her obsession with her partner and her health problems. But emphasising her suffering adds to a stereotypical notion of femininity as submissive and passive and this was not part of her personality. Kahlo's strength and drive was created within the first few months of her life.

We have seen how multiple aspects of her character were formed before adult events took place. Her narcissism, her powerful personality and excessive drive as well as her instinctive search for the realism of femininity determined her work. Mexican women in the first part of the twentieth century, like others around the world, were expected to create art only as an extension of their domestic duties, primarily as decorative objects for the home. Conventional subjects of children and other domestic themes such as flower paintings, or still lives were acceptable as they were connected with their role.

The work of a professional artist was the province of men. Kahlo broke these boundaries and the acceptable limitations of female representation disrupting the notion of women's place as adornment for the consumption of men. Meskimmon comments "In the early years of this century, it was nearly impossible for a woman artist to consider her own sexuality and sexual identity as topics worthy of representation". Kahlo led the way for female artists, breaking taboos and exploring the depths of her psyche obsessively and without censorship. Limitations of this essay have prevented me from further enquiry into the work of feminist psychoanalysis, but following the lifting of certain taboos by Kahlo's work it would be interesting to consider contemporary female artists from this perspective.

Until Kahlo's revolutionary work in emancipating women artists they were constricted by traditional beliefs that needed breaking down. How could women be considered great when they were not able to fully explore their individualism? The revolutionary spirit that permeated Mexico enabled Kahlo to re-examine established interpretations of society that questioned authority from both political leaders and patriarchy alike, demanding true democracy. Kahlo's self-confidence grew through her association with one of the most revolutionary Mexican artists of era who, being male, had greater opportunity to challenge the current artistic ideology. Rivera, and other artists, made sweeping political statements with his murals and changed the face of the city and brought art to the people, stamping out the elitism of easel art.

Kahlo created diminutive artworks in comparison but with no less power and with equal conviction. The turning point for great women artists has been made by artists who follow in Kahlo's footsteps, bringing women's art outside the private, domestic sphere and into the public forum. The private, fundamental search for sustenance and nurture was denied to Kahlo during faulty bonding processes with her mother. Perhaps more passionately than most she spent the rest of her life trying to recreate that moment of suckling that Freud described. Rivera adored her saying "For Frida, that which is tangible is the mother, the centre of all, the mother-sea, tempest, nebula, woman".

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