Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932

In one of her most touching works, Kahlo places her internal struggles and pain on display. Henry Ford Hospital, painted in 1932 after a residency in Detroit with Diego Rivera, is a comment on the mechanical nature of medicine, the fragility of the female form, and the pain that accompanies the loss of life. Trying to rein in six escaping, floating images, Kahlo rests on a hospital bed in the Henry Ford Hospital of Detroit. With bleak metal factory contraptions lining the horizon, Kahlo paints herself terminating her second attempt at conception in an unfamiliar land. The floating fetus represents her unborn, now dead, son.

Anchored by the heavy machinery in the bottom left and upper right corners, the fetus has undergone an unnatural, man-made process. The two anatomical images in the upper left and bottom right corners allude to Kahlo’s past. As a teenager, Kahlo was injured in a car accident, breaking her pelvis and puncturing her uterus, inhibiting her reproductive capability. The pelvis and uterus in Henry Ford Hospital represent the inescapable memories that Kahlo must carry. Finally, Kahlo paints the orchid given to her by Rivera in the lower half of the composition. However, she paints what was a fresh, turgid flower as flaccid and pale—perhaps a reference to her less-than-perfect marriage to the flower’s donor.

These images-within-an-image certainly mystify the painting and add a bizarre aurora, but in the context of the life and struggles of their creator, they seem as commonplace as red in a Rothko.