Blogspot: Frida Kahlo – An Unlikely Saint
Agnita M. Stine Schreiber Curator, Linda Johnson, Ph.D., August 20, 2025
As a Mexican Surrealist painter, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), is best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that dealt with such themes as identity, the human body, and death. But what is less known about Kahlo is how Catholicism may have influenced much of her art. While Frida Kahlo’s life and legacy make her an unlikely saint in terms of traditional religious doctrine, many of her paintings embody faith in healing and are pictorial representations of belief and gratitude toward a divine and universal force. Although her paintings cannot be considered specifically religious in their subject matter, many express symbols of diverse religious traditions and philosophical beliefs. Moreover, they illustrate the subjects and styles of Christian iconography that can be viewed as heirs to a longstanding Mexican art form known as a retablo. Retablos, or devotional paintings can be traced to devotional paintings derived from traditional Catholic church altarpieces that flourished in Mexico during the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fig.1). These large altarpieces were a combination of paintings and sculpture in elaborate wooden frames that parishioners would spend time gazing upon as they looked high above the altars of most churches and cathedrals throughout Mexico. Similar to European and pre-Colombian icons, many altarpieces were painted on tin, wood, copper, and canvas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and were thought to carry messages to and from the spirit world to the profane.
By the late eighteenth century, these images became popular in the form of smaller religious paintings that were more intimate in their design and content. Artists and assistants, working together in local workshops, created thousands of retablos, providing a steady supply of affordable religious images to the people of Mexico. More modest than retablos, ex-votos, meaning “from a vow,” depicted dangerous or life-threatening narratives in which the patron typically survived an assault or an illness (Figs.2& 3). Largely the work of Mexican folk artists, each ex-voto related to a personal crisis that would also include a prayer that could be kept at home or deposited at a particular church and shrine. Moreover, they were tokens of gratitude for assistance with rain, harvests, or other personal blessings that were offered to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and a long line of Christian saints. Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera are known to have owned over 400 ex -votos which lined the walls of their home, Casa Azul in Mexico.
Like so many descriptive images of ex-votos, Kahlo herself survived many precarious situations and painted provocative and graphic depictions of her suffering in art. Like the patrons and artists of ex-votos, Kahlo typically used the visual symbolism of physical pain (facial grimace, contorted limbs, bleeding, bruising, and weapons, as well as assault and death), in a lifelong attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Thus, retablos and ex-votos, can be seen as cathartic and were no less so for Kahlo. Much like the crucified Jesus and many martyred saints, she portrayed her exposed interior organs and body in powerless, bleeding, and broken states, (Figs. 4 &5). A Few Small Nips, painted in 1935, mimics the retablos’ approach to narrative and medium as well as its stylized treatment of color, symbol, and form. Here, doves float naively and purposefully across Kahlo’s work. Other paintings by Kahlo depict fishes, nails, thorns, stars, crucifixes, whips, and knives, obvious choices related to Christian symbols.
Born to an areligious German father and a devoutly Catholic Mexican mother, Kahlo was raised Catholic but later on rejected dogmatic Catholic ritual. However, despite this, her work is the product of a deeply Catholic imagination that revered the body. The Catholic elements of incarnation -the notion that the word of God was made flesh, noted in the broken body of Jesus of Nazareth, must have resonated with Kahlo, as she suffered tremendous physical pain throughout her life. Kahlo endured polio as a child and then the traumatic injuries to her spine, pelvis, and legs brought on by a bus accident in 1925. She also underwent more than thirty surgical operations over her lifetime, including a leg amputation, which prolonged her recoveries and continued the cycle of heartache and pain. However, in New Testament Scriptures, Jesus’ early death and suffering physically maimed his figure but did not alter his body’s holiness. It ultimately became the catalyst for love, forgiveness, and transformation in a resurrected state. While Kahlo painted and sketched herself in many disturbing physical scenarios, many of her self-portraits are transformative, exuding a self-knowledge, that is frank, tender, and hopeful, attributes that are fully evident in ex-voto representations of saints and martyrs. Take, for instance Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column, painted in1944, a graphic and gruesome example of bodily agony depicting Kahlo’s body crucified with nails. Yet similar to an ex- voto where Jesus is held upright on a wooden timber, Kahlo’s body is kept erect by a vertical column where horizontal straps of her corset mirror the up/down binary of Jesus’s cross. In a hopeful portrayal she has wrapped her lower torso in a white winding sheet, as an optimistic emblem indicative of resurrection (Figs.6 &7&8).
In Kahlo’s industrious painting The Nucleus of Creation, more commonly known as Moses, painted in 1945, the motifs she uses encompass many of the symbols and characters in retablos (Figs.9 &10). Three sections divide the canvas into multi layered representations of diverse religions and mythologies such as pre-Columbian, ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Judeo-Christian traditions. In a bold mix of contrasting colors Kahlo synthesized a wide array of imagery into a cosmic and universal depiction of divine oneness. Similar to retablos and ex-votos, major religious and historical figures, are incorporated while iconic saints fly high into the heavens in smaller rondels. The golden rays of the orb-like deity of Kahlo’s sunflower have been transmuted, mimicking the haloes worn by saints. A blue sky centers the composition where raindrops appearing like tears fall upon the infant Moses, paralleling Kahlo’s self- identification with the mourning Virgin of Sorrows. Similar to Kahlo’s Moses, the ex-voto, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, mirrors the floating and naïve style of the Byzantine like icon of the Virgin and Child in Moses, as yet another archetypal embodiment of the agony accompanying maternal loss.
The life of the Virgin Mary unfolds as the quintessential female disciple. Most retablos depict her as a Madonna with the Christ Child, or in a sovereign state as Queen of Heaven, a persona derived from apocryphal gospels that follow her death and Assumption into eternal life. In keeping with the theme of suffering she is most often portrayed in ex -votos as Mater Dolorosa, a common character whose story expands on Jesus’ passion and suffering from the Crucifixion to the Deposition. Comparing La Pieta La Piedad, with Kahlo’s painting Wounded Deer, painted in 1946, Kahlo’s work become a Pieta in its own right, where emotional and physical suffering is dually embodied, as she becomes both the suffering Madonna and the crucified Christ in the form of an impaled female human and male deer (Figs. 11 &12 &13).
Skeletons feature prominently in retablos along with bed ridden penitents who are seeking last rights and forgiveness before dying. Beds are common tropes which symbolize the dying in sick beds and funeral caskets, that hover over purgatory, an intermediary space between heaven and hell. Similarly, Kahlo painted several scenes of herself bedridden. But she digresses from the memento mori tradition commonly noted in ex-votos and incorporates instead a skeletal body in a more hopeful way. While In Dream of The Bed Kahlo reminds us about mortality in the skeleton on the bed’s canopy, her skeleton remains awake. Moreover, the bony framework mirrors Kahlo’s position lying toward the left with “her” head elevated on two pillows. As Kahlo’s proxy, her skeletal body does not remain on earth, but rather accompanies Kahlo on her journey to the heavenly realm albeit in a floating “bunk -bed” scenario (Figs.14 & 15 & 16).
The “blanket of green vines” encircling Kahlo further the narrative of everlasting hope in new life. Vines are used throughout the New Testament parables to signify conversion and resurrection themes expressed in Christian belief (Fig. 14&17&18).
Kahlo appears in many of her paintings, but she did not portray herself in a naturalistic way. Instead, she often “re-created” herself through symbols that convey the profoundness of interior human life. She inherited many of her ideas from a beloved Mexican tradition of folk art where she drew inspiration. Whether painting herself as an “unlikely” saint mirroring Jesus complete with thorns or the lives of wounded Christian martyrs to depict her personal crises, Kahlo embraced this form of folk art as means of creating beauty in the face of affliction. (Figs. 20 & 21& 22& 23).
In comparing the photograph of Kahlo as Senora of Mexico by Toni Frissell, she becomes the quintessential saint dancing among the flora of her beloved Mexico, she mirrors the posture and movement and dress of El Santo Nino de Atocha, (A holy child of Atocha) in this nineteenth century retablo (Figs.24 & 25). So too, Kahlo becomes a resurrected holy child indeed.
Vogue, October 1937, Photograph
