As A Tehuana Kahlo Analysis

Her broken heart lies at her feet; its enormous size symbolizes the intensity of her pain. She illustrates her feelings of helplessness and despair through her lack of hands. Her face, though tearful, is expressionless. Her hair is cropped to spite Diego who greatly admired her long flowing hair. She wears the European-style clothes she favored when she was separated from Diego who much preferred her in Tehuana costume. The foot placed over water wears an apparatus that looks like a sailboat and may refer to a recent foot operation. The school uniform that hangs in the background may remind her of when she, as a young school girl, first met Diego. The Tehuana dress is a reminder of how much Diego admired her when she adorned the native costume. …show more content…
Although Frida knew Diego would still have affairs with other women and could never be the husband that she wants him to be. In this self-portrait named “As a Tehuana” Frida painted Diego’s face on her forehead, in place of the third eye. Frida wears an elaborate tehuana Mexican dress (Diego’s favorite) perhaps in an attempt to recover his admiration. Around her face the whole painting is full of cracks, symbolizing the marks in her soul.
There’s a way to know when a painting by Kahlo expresses a feeling of unbearable pain — in those cases, Frida was unable to replicate the suffering in her own body and therefore she used other images. In this case, she drew a deer with her face on it...
The poor animal’s body is fully pierced by arrows. It is alone and injured in the middle of the forest. Frida painted this picture after a spinal surgery that would supposedly lessen her pain, but on the contrary, it brought even more backaches. In the lower left corner of the work, Frida scrawled the word “karma,” meaning