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Frida Kahlo's bus crash was central to her artistry
When you work in a compensation claim company, as I do, you come into contact with an inordinate number of personal injury cases, but there are some that my bosses did not handle that are still important to me. Such as the bus crash that was responsible for Frida Kahlo taking up painting.
It's incredible to think that such distinctive and well-known paintings could easily have been lost to the world; if she had not been on that bus when the street car accident occurred, she would never have been trapped in a body-cast in hospital with only a lap-easel for entertainment. Or if the bus had been going just a little faster, she may not have survived.
This is because it was in hospital, with her only model being her reflection in a mirror set up above her head, that she began to develop her individual style, and it was there that she chose to leave her original career idea of medicine for art.
Two of her recurrent themes, her pain and her inability to have children, were also a result of her passenger accident, in which a metal rod pierced her body, damaging her spine and uterus and breaking many bones.
This can be seen in a 1944 painting, 'The Broken Column', which shows a self-portrait of Kahlo in a barren landscape, wearing only surgical straps and a sheet. A wound is hacked vertically through her torso to reveal a fractured marble pillar, and her body is studded with nails. It's one of the most striking representations of pain I know, yet the face, while weeping, is painted with a stoicism and a steady gaze that invites understanding rather than pity.
No-one, of course, would wish pain or personal injury on any artist; yet if the bus crash could be taken out of history, it would take away one of the most important artists of the last century. Her funeral drew hundreds of admirers, and many people since have cited her as a powerful influence - sometimes as an example of what can be achieved as a woman, as a Mexican person, as a survivor.
And she is also celebrated as an artist, whether that refers to her understanding and use of symbolism, surrealism and her own culture, or her technical skills in composition and brushwork, and artists since have borrowed from her techniques.
So is that belief that we would not wish pain on anyone more difficult than it first seems? Or is it more that we are celebrating the good that can come out of a bus crash, however horrific? I hope it is the latter.
Kahlo herself, after the long-term injuries eventually led to the amputation of her foot, showed the kind of fortitude that suggests she found the good to celebrate in her situation. While the paintings that she continued to work on took on darker themes, embracing the Mexican tradition that can face death squarely in festivals like el Dia de los Muertos, she wrote in her diary "Feet, what do I need them for, if I have wings to fly?"
