The Dream, by Frida Kahlo

The Dream is one of many self-portraits by an extraordinary 20^th-century artist, the Mexican Frida Kahlo.

  

Until relatively recent years the ranks of great artists have been almost entirely occupied by men, and most people would be hard-pressed to name any female artists of note who lived at any time before the present. However, an exception would have to be made for Frida Kahlo (1907-54), who was arguably the greatest woman artist of the 20^th century.

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico of mixed German and Spanish/Mexican Indian descent. She lived an adventurous life, being the wife of artist Diego Rivera and at one time the lover of Leon Trotsky, who had sought refuge in Mexico from the purges of Joseph Stalin.

At the age of 18 Frida Kahlo was a passenger on a bus that crashed, causing her serious injuries and leading to constant pain that she suffered throughout her life. She had to undergo numerous operations and the damage caused to her reproductive system led to at least three miscarriages.

The Dream

She used her talent as an artist to express her innermost feelings. This is not unknown for artists to do, but Frida Kahlo seems to have taken this trend to an extreme, in that she painted at least 55 self-portraits, all of which explore an issue of her identity.

“The Dream” (1940) shows her lying asleep in a four-poster bed, floating among the clouds, with a skeleton-like figure reclining on the bed’s canopy above her.

It was while lying in bed as she recovered from her injuries that Frida Kahlo learned to paint, so the bed was a symbol of creativity for her. However, beds are also places where people die and babies are both conceived and born, so there are all sorts of other messages here.

The skeleton is based on a papier-mâché one that was made for a Mexican celebration, and so it might therefore be a reference to her culture. However, the skeleton in the painting holds a faded bunch of flowers, such as a bride might carry. Could this therefore be a reference to her own troubled marriage? Kahlo and Rivera had divorced in 1939, but re-married in December 1940.

Vine tendrils grow up from the foot of the bed and encircle her head. These are matched by wires that entwine the skeleton, but link to cylinders of dynamite. The sleeping woman is therefore entwined by life but her dream image is bound by death. The irony here is that Frida Kahlo was incapable of producing life, for the reason mentioned above.

There are many ways in which a painting of this nature can be interpreted. One possibility is that Frida Kahlo was incorporating a reference to Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in 1940 not far from Kahlo’s home.

What is difficult to doubt is that “The Dream” is a personal statement in which Frida Kahlo is expressing her innermost feelings about life and death, accepting the latter as an inevitable future companion who is not to be feared.

© John Welford