Frida Kahlo, My Nurse and I (While Nursing), 1937, oil on metal, 30.5×34.7 cm, Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City.
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter, wife of the famous artist Diego Rivera. Struck by polio at six and the victim of a very serious traffic accident at eighteen, she suffered pain and progressively reduced mobility for the rest of her life. It was precisely the prolonged forced immobility that followed the accident that led her to begin painting. With her husband Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1929, she had a relationship as intense and passionate as it was conflict-ridden: she loved him madly her whole life and could never break away from him, even after his most blatant and humiliating infidelities. Diego encouraged her artistic activity, which over time brought her wide fame and financial independence. Despite her precarious health and the severe abdominal injuries suffered in the accident, she tried three times to have a child, but suffered three miscarriages. Stylistically, Frida Kahlo defies easy classification: her canvases contain primitive, naïve, surreal, dreamlike elements, yet at the same time extremely concrete and realistic ones («I have always painted my reality, not my dreams»). Hers is an instinctive painting, with strong, contrasting colors, deeply tied to Mexico and to its nature, of which Frida felt an integral part, even though her father was a German immigrant of Hungarian and Jewish descent. It is telling that, to emphasize her belonging to Mexico, she preferred to give her birth year not as 1907, but as 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, marking the country's rebirth.
Most of Frida Kahlo's roughly 200 works are self-portraits («I am the subject I know best»), forming her pictorial autobiography and depicting the significant moments of her life: her birth, breastfeeding, the pain caused by her frail health, her family and family tree, her relationship with her husband, her miscarriages, her fear of death, her sense of belonging to her country, and her faith in communist ideology. Frida felt a strong bond with nature and creation, recurring themes in her work, used at times as backdrops, at other times as main subjects or decorative elements.
My Nurse and I (1937)
This 1937 work is, at first glance, full of contradictions, and can therefore seem quite hermetic.
Frida Kahlo was breastfed by her mother only briefly, since her sister Cristina (the same sister with whom Frida's husband, the painter Diego Rivera, had a passionate affair that became public knowledge) was only eleven months younger than her. An Indigenous wet nurse was hired to breastfeed Frida, with whom the child did not have a harmonious relationship: the nurse did not love the little girl, and was not loved by her in return. One might therefore think that, if Frida's physical suffering began at six, when she fell ill with polio, her emotional suffering tied to loneliness began much earlier.
The painting, like almost all of Frida's small-format works (30.5×34.7 cm), shows in the foreground the little girl suckling milk from one of the breasts of the nurse holding her in her arms. The nurse is monumental, bare-chested, her face concealed by a mask resembling the funerary attributes of Mexico's Indigenous peoples, which also hides her eyes. The visible lower part of her body is greyish in color, like rock. Frida has her adult face, with the typical thick black eyebrows and a slight dark down above her upper lip: her face is dissonant with her small body. No sign of emotional connection between the two figures emerges.
Another interesting element is the lack of temporal logic between the two figures: the nurse appears as ancient as rock, and Frida is a baby with an adult's face. Such dissonance is a typical feature of dreams, in which people appear as entities disconnected from time and age, and an adult can be «seen» as a child, and vice versa.
In the background, lush tropical vegetation. The sky is pale grey, yet somber, with large drops of rain as white as milk. The breast from which Frida suckles is depicted as a tree with fronds and flowers, recalling the tangled tree-like forms recurring in the painter's work.
As in other paintings, this one too highlights Frida's relationship with her land, which among its attributes carries precisely that of giving life and nourishing. The earth is by definition the «great mother», and this aspect could not fail to be emphasized in a work by Frida Kahlo, so intimately tied to the nature of her country that she depicted it endlessly in her paintings. The nurse resembles a rock or a tree — that is, a natural element of a macrocosm of which Frida feels an essential part, one she will never abandon, whatever happens.