Surrealism as lived experience

by JULIE CYR, Editorial Assistant

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     Frida Kahlo embodied Surrealism and the lived experience in her art, political views, eccentric attire, but mostly through her circumstances of constant pain caused by polio and a trolley accident. Experiencing illness and pain from an early age, combined with her rebellious nature, made her open to blend reality with the illogical, creating a fertile environment for the seeds of Surrealism. The persistent misery she experienced caused her to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, further altering her relationship with common reality, but it also lead her to painting. She's reputed as saying, “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.” Kahlo wasn't attempting to shock with her actions or her artwork, but rather to express the truth of her life in which she touched the Marvelous--her idea of unadulterated beauty.

she often Saw death dancing around her bed

     Kahlo's painting, What the Water Gave Me, exemplifies surrealist art and shows connections between the tragedies in her life as well as her relationships and inability to have children. As one can imagine, being bedridden would lend to the mind’s drifting—from death to relationships and faraway places, as depicted in her paintings. Kahlo's brush with death thinned the veil of real and surreal as she “often saw Death dancing about her bed.”[1] As Death danced about her bed, she kept a papier mâché skeleton laced with fireworks on top of her canopy, bringing other-worldliness and her own mortality into close proximity.
     ​​Kahlo maintained that she wasn't a surrealist since she didn't paint dreams, but her work and her life explored the surreal elements of surprise and juxtaposition. She lived Surrealism: 

​I paint my own reality… and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.[2]

Her atypical life, with her constant pain and brushes with death, resolved the contradiction between dream and reality. So even though Kahlo didn't see herself as a surrealist, many view her as such since she had “a capacity to convoke a whole universe out of the bits and fragments of her own self and out of the persistent traditions of her own culture.”[3]
     ​In the following excerpt from Nicole Cooley's “Self Portrait: Frida Kahlo,” we see Kahlo playing a surrealist game while in the hospital. 

     In the hospital we fold paper into parts
     for the Exquisite Corpse game. Together we draw
     a body. I sketch a thorn necklace circling a pair
     of breasts, a monkey crouching on a woman's naked
     ​back.[4]

Kahlo's relationship to pain, Surrealism, and vision of herself as an artist unfold like a game of the Exquisite Corpse, expansive and unexpectedly. 

     ​Whether or not one believes her to have been a Surrealist . . . 

                                                            Frida Kahlo created art and gave us glimpses of the Marvelous.

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Julie Cyr
Editorial Assistant

Interact with Julie on Twitter: @SP_JulieCyr

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NOTES:
[1] Alcantara, Isabel and Egnolff, Sandra. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Munich: Prestel Verlag. 2008, Print. P.18.
[2] Herrrera, Hayden. The Paintings. New York. Harper Collins. 1991, Print. P.4
[3] Rotas, Alas. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. New York. Abrams Books. 2005, Print. P.15
[4] Cooley, Nicole. Resurrection. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. 1996, Print. P.