The Broken Column
…even the most painful of the self-portraits are never maudlin or self-pitying, and her dignity and determination to “put up with things” is evident in her queenly carriage, her stoic features. It is this blend of directness and artifice, of integrity and self-invention, that gives her self-portraits their peculiar urgency, their immediately recognizable steely strength.
Of all Frida’s paintings, the one that most powerfully illustrates these qualities is The Broken Column (plate XXVIII), painted in 1944 soon after she has undergone surgery and when she was confined, as she had been in 1927, in an “apparatus.” Here Frida’s determined impassivity creates an almost unbearable tension, a feeling of paralysis. Anguish is made vivid by nails driven into her naked body. A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her torso, the two sides of which are held together by the steel orthopedic corset that is a symbol of the invalid’s imprisonment. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida’s feeling that without the corset she would literally fall apart. Inside her torso we see a cracked ionic column in the place of her deteriorating spinal column; life is thus replaced by a crumbling ruin. The tapered column thrusts cruelly into the red crevasse of Frida’s body, penetrating from her loins to her head, where a two-scrolled capital supports her chin. To some observers, the column is analogous to a phallus; the painting alludes to the link in Frida’s mind between sex and pain, and it recalls the steel rod that pierced her vagina during the [bus] accident. A disjointed entry in her diary reads: “To hope with anguish retained, the broken column, and the immense look, without walking, in the vast path . . . moving my life created of steel.”
The corset’s white straps with metal buckles accentuate the delicate vulnerability of Frida’s naked breasts, breasts whose perfect beauty makes the rough cut from neck to loins all the more ghatsly. With her hips wrapped in a cloth suggestive of Christ’s winding sheet, Frida displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; a Mexican Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of her spiritual suffering.
Frida is no saint, however. She appraises her situation with truculent secularism, and instead of beseeching the heavens for solace, she stares straight ahead as if to challenge both herself (in the mirror) and her audience to face her predicament without flinching. Tears dot her cheeks, as they do the cheeks of so many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico, but her features refuse to cry. They are mask-like as those of an Indian idol.
(pg 76-77)
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- The Broken Column
