The Broken Column

Frida Kahlo’s self-reflective works are well known for their complex themes and often tradition-breaking attributes, making them key components of the feminist movement, and The Broken Column is no exception. Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column expresses her self-reflection on her own body and past experiences as well as challenging classically held ideas about the male gaze and the role of female artists in the sublime. The Broken Column, an oil on Masonite painting at 39.8 by 30.6 centimeters, provides a detailed self-reflection on the impact of her injuries she sustained many years earlier and how those injuries impacted her both physically and emotionally. The painting features Kahlo standing partially nude in a desolate, crevice ridden landscape beneath a dark sky, which represent her isolation in her suffering. Kahlo is alone in the painting, unlike many of her other paintings, and she is wearing only a sheet over her lower body and a corset, which
Instead of portraying the painting as if it were to be viewed by a male, Frida instead painted purely out of self-reflection, and painted herself how she saw herself. This self-perspective completely eliminated the ideals of the male gaze, and the ideas of male superiority that came with it. As well as this, Kahlo’s painting challenged the ideals of “masculine” and “feminine” traits of a work, the idea that “feminine” works focus on beauty and “masculine” works on sublimity. The Broken Column turns this idea on its head, considering the work’s ideas of suffering and physical stress that are entirely incongruous with the fragile concepts of beauty, instead paralleling with the more rough “masculine” concepts of the sublime. This shattered the boundaries between male and female works, as well as the boundary of who could appreciate those