Frida: The Story of Her Life

By Aaradhana Natarajan

Vanna Vinci does justice to the fantastic imagery and vibrant earthiness of Frida Kahlo’s art in both the text and the visuals of her 2017 graphic novel Frida: The Story of Her Life. The pages hold a blend of recollections, history and conjecture that form a syncretic portrait of an artist most known for her heavily symbolic self-portraiture. The text is both biography and exposition for the lush art.

Vinci imbues her subject with the rich, often mordant and morbid sensibility Kahlo* is known for. I thought it was refreshing how, even as a child, Vinci’s Frida isn’t portrayed as a “perfect patient”. There’s a panel where she responds to her peers’ taunts of her post-polio limp by cursing at them, her young face grimacing angrily. While there is no lingering on the sense of isolation and alienation that resulted, it isn’t glossed over either. A single panel establishes these feelings as foundational to her self-concept, before allowing the rest of the story to suggest how their effects carried through time.

Vinci’s portrayal of the accident that would precipitate Kahlo’s chronic pain is similar. Her Frida jokes with a skeletal Death while on her presumptive deathbed, cheekily rebutting the entity she sees by her side during her surgeries and recovery; the reader was first introduced to this personification of Death on the first page, and we realize that from the accident onward, death has become Kahlo’s constant companion. The awareness of this bony being dances through the rest of her life story and appears to be the one inviting her to tell it.

The transition from tumultuous academic to tortured artist begins while Kahlo adjusts to the aftermath of the deep injuries and an inadequate surgery. She breaks up with her former lover, cancels travel plans, and is rendered bedridden by pain for long periods – which leads her back to the painting she’d studied when younger. Over time she finds new life and new loves, her iconic style coming into being after her marriage to Diego Rivera and continuing to develop as she travels the world (and has the world come to her doorstep). Her nature-inspired surrealism and statement outfits are represented as armor as much as art, a way to enliven and embolden a body that felt weakened by injury and pain.

There is a pulsing undercurrent of bodily dissatisfaction in the way Kahlo is depicted here. Her more unsympathetic, acerbic attitudes are untempered, biting observations that start off focused on intimate relations and later extend to art world geopolitics, class tensions, and racial ones. It’s an irrepressible energy that remains in the word balloons even as the pages bear testament to her pain, her intestines quite literally shown spilling out while recollecting “a nasty coli bacteria infection”.

The color red is a repeated motif, representing bloody injuries, lust and strivings for liberation/reclamation – all of which inspired her art. This is contrasted with the beigish-sepia-white of the devices doctors recommended she try to mitigate her ongoing pain and debilitations. There is less dignity, less pride in these images – we see Kahlo naked or mostly so, vulnerable, exposed, and in a sort of resigned distress. Tears, sometimes bloody, run down her face as her body is pulled and squeezed through a gauntlet of corsets, medications, and stretching devices. This violence becomes sublimated in part through her art at the time, and Vinci represents parts of it, juxtaposing the bright colors common in Kahlo’s paintings with the red, white and flesh tones that mark Vinci’s own interpretation of Kahlo’s bodily experiences.

Nonetheless, it must be observed that the visuals seem significantly more enamored with depicting women’s unclothed bodies compared to men’s – and locating that in the historical understanding of male v. female nudes raises some interesting questions for art historians and students of the medical humanities who might take a crack at this book. Though they might be a bit disappointed by the lack of citations or a bibliography, particularly since it is mentioned that some of the letters shown are not actual reproductions but summaries, and Vinci is quite literally putting words in Frida Kahlo’s mouth.

The final twenty or so pages were the most clinically oriented, depicting the slow waning of her physical abilities and the feelings of fatigue that were growing more prevalent and unavoidable. But there is no grotesque sensationalism here. The narrative is punctuated with frustration, anger, and a vivacity unsatiated by the limited scope for its exercise. But also, small delights, like her first major domestic exhibition – organized by Lola Alvarez – and what friends and paintings she was able to engage with even in her weakened state.

Summarily, what stood out the most was Vinci’s emphasis on Frida’s love for her life. How, despite the various injuries both emotional and physical she was subject to, she maintained her subjectivity and growing artistic sensibility. It makes for a compelling biography – one with a slight tendency toward embellishment, but considering the forcefulness of its subject, it’s a tendency that is well-warranted.

At its heart, Kahlo’s life was one filled with physical trials and medical complications, even as it was a full and rich one. Of course, her history and Vinci’s retelling are not inspirational tales – this is no glossy saccharine story of triumph over suffering, of making profound meaning from great anguish – but rather a story of a complicated woman trying to live with chronic pain and always, always according to her impassioned priorities.

*I use “Kahlo” to denote the artist herself as a historical figure, and “Frida” to refer to Vinci’s portrayal of her, or as she appears in the book.

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Aaradhana Natarajan is currently a student at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. She is interested in medical history, health policy, science communications, and the ways different experiences of embodiment are represented in written and visual mediums. You can find her other reviews on the Ripple Magazine, Rutgers University Libraries and the East Coast Asian American Students Union websites, while her science writing can be found on Medium @aaradhana.natarajan.