Water Graves 

Frida Kahlo, What the Water Gave Me, 1938

"I am what the water gave me, a smoke-ring in a jar, the braided rope, my ladder-to-the-light, my shivering bird heartcaught." Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo 

Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me renders simple child’s play in a bathtub into a grotesque scene with Bosch-esque miniature characters. Kahlo replaces toy boats and rubber ducks with skewered birds and nude women. The water supports floating memories of life and death, of love and loss, unable to stay permanently under the water. Images representing various periods of Kahlo’s past breech the surface and trap Kahlo in the tub. Every object appears solid and heavy, yet they all stay afloat—a volcano, a skyscraper, various flora and fauna. A miniature figure of Kahlo bobs in the middle of the tub, strangled by a tightrope connected to the other objects in the composition. Kahlo has become entrapped in the web of her subconscious, drowning under the weight of her own memories. This concept becomes more complex when we bring the Kahlo submerged in the bathtub back into the picture. These miniature bathtub scenes are projections of Kahlo’s mind. In this context, the image of Kahlo being strangled by her past becomes even more disturbing, as she is the one imagining this. This painting is ultimately an exorcism for the artist, a hope to escape from a haunting past by confining it to the canvas. Unlike Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the undesirable experiences and memories once forced under the water have resurfaced, and the subject must encounter them again.