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It is not surprising that Frida Kahlo became a feminist icon in the early 1980's. Her paintings and her life vividly captured much of what many women were struggling with at that time, and continue to explore today. In “I Made a Picture of My Life—A Life from the Picture: The life of the body in the pictures and writings of Frida Kahlo”, Pirkko Siltala examines an important facet of the infinitely complicated tapestry of Kahlo's work and life: the interweaving of the threads of her physical, emotional and creative experiences. To a great extent, it is, I believe, this aspect of Kahlo's essence that continues to both intrigue and attract viewers today. As Riding (1) recently put it, Kahlo was “an artist whose unflinching portrayal of her own physical and emotional pain spoke not only to a new generation of feminists but also to an era more concerned with feeling than ideology”.
Dr. Siltala has provided us with a very interesting examination of the ways in which Kahlo's body, as portrayed in her paintings and in her writings, symbolizes psychological struggles around the loss of mother (or mothering functions) when a younger sibling was born, when mother withdrew and became depressed, and when a beloved nurse was also lost. The body can, as we know, represent both physical and psychological aspects of the self in a number of different ways. As I have discussed elsewhere (2) bodily representations of unverbalized or unformulated experience can simultaneously communicate, obfuscate and render tolerable unthinkable thoughts and unbearable emotions. To my mind, these issues are ongoing themes in Kahlo's work.
One of the difficulties that accompanies any attempt to understand the unconscious dynamics of an artist through her art and her recorded biography is the fact that she is not available to help translate some of the symbolic meanings of her visual imagery into the different symbolic language of words. Even more of a handicap, to my mind, is the fact that one cannot lea