Cynthia Freeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, Texas. Her new book, Portraits and Persons, shows that portraits have served two fundamental fuctions throughout the ages. Firstly, they preserve identity, bringing us closer to loved ones who are either absent or dear. And secondly, they tell us something about the subject being portrayed: not just external things, but also the subject’s emotions and inner state. In the excerpt below Freeland analyzes self-portraits, specifically the work of Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) is another artist particularly known for creating an extended series of studies of herself in her art. There are 55 self-portraits among the total of 143 of her known paintings. We can notice many of the same concerns in her work as those addressed by the previous artists: social status, artistic success, identification of a core self with key psychological traits, and concerns about mortality. There are, however, a few additional factors that arise in Kahlo’s work. For one thing, she is notably concerned with issues of national and ethnic identity. Kahlo is also concerned with her status as a women and with her troubled partnership and marriage with her teacher and fellow artist Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s concerns about mortality were intensified by her childhood polio and by the bus accident that left her damaged and in need of multiple operations. Her wounded and suffering body became a persistent theme in Kahlo’s work. Ironically, perhaps, the concern with mortality does not seem to be much reflected here by paintings that show self ageing. Frida’s face looks remarkably the same across her works (unlike the faces of Rembrandt of Cézanne.) She is always recognizable with her coal black hair, uni-brow, and intense dark gaze, even when she pictures herself as an infant suckling at her nurse’s breast!
Kahlo’s paintings, like those of the previous artists, show an awareness of art history and reflect linkages with predecessors she admired, often those from the Spanish tradition or from distinguished Italian portrait artists. For example, in her Self-Portrait with a Velvet Dress (1926), she alludes through both the red dress and the slender elegant fingers both to Botticelli and Bronzino.
Many of Kahlo’s works feature the wounded self/damaged body, which is specifically a female body. She is shown dealing with the pain and loss of miscarriage and infertility in Henry Ford Hospital, and with pain stemming from both physical and emotional wounds in paintings such as Broken Column, and Wounded Deer. Despite the female identification Kahlo can also play upon and invoke identification with male saints: with St Sebastian (in Wounded Deer), and with Christ (in Broken Column).
Kahlo’s repeated experiments in the self-portraits with clothing and accessories such as jewelry, native plants, and animals, shows a preoccupation with defining and embracing her ethnic heritage (European German-Jewish, Mexican, Indian). Writing about Kahlo’s works, Sharyn R. Udall remarks, ‘She is trying on identities, both personal and artistic: from the melancholy aristocrat of her first self-portrait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her mixed Euro-American and Indian heritage. She is also concerned with political and national issues about the distinctive identity of Mexico as it emerges from colonialism into independence, and in particular with its identity vis-à-vis its northern neighbor, the United States. She resists comparisons that rank the two countries by showing th progressive, industrial, wealthy northern country as superior to its poor and ‘prim
