The celebrated twentieth-century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was married to muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship with numerous affairs, the most significant of which was Rivera’s relationship with Frida Kahlo’s sister, Cristina. Memory (or The Heart) was painted partly in response to this adultery.

Kahlo’s chest is represented here as pierced, revealing that the interior of her body has been hollowed out. She is now empty and punctured: a two-dimensional husk of her former self. Tears stream down her face but she is unable to wipe them away as her hands have disappeared. She has been strung up from the sky by fragile vein-like threads, suspended in grief.

The painting subtly communicates the deep despair and helplessness of marital and wider familial breakdown, and the emptiness which comes with the most intimate of relationships being betrayed and broken. Her heart has been ripped from her body and has swollen up in grief: it now leaks out blood which seeps into the landscape and drains into the ground underneath.

The piercing of Kahlo’s chest is thought to allude to the ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila, and her experience of the intensity of God as lover as she describes being pierced in the heart ‘by the arrow of Divine Love’ (Grimberg 1990–91: 3). She describes an angel or cherub plunging her body with a hot spear and ‘[w]hen he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and left me all on fire with the great love of God’ (ibid).

Hosea 1 centres on this idea of YHWH as lover (of Israel), using the metaphor of marriage to convey the pain inflicted by Israel’s unfaithfulness. YHWH has bound himself to Israel in an intimate, covenant union of enduring love. Yet Israel has betrayed this love and committed adultery through idolatry (worshipping other Gods). They have rejected and abused the love of the God who created, sustains, and protects them; who rescued and fought for them. As God was faithful, they have been faithless. And generations of later readers of this text may recognise this faithlessness as theirs too. Hosea 1 metaphorically describes God’s withdrawal of love from Israel because of this unfaithfulness and their breaking of the covenant relationship, but with the final promise of mercy and restoration.

References

Ankori, Gannit. 2002. Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport: Prager)

Grimberg, Salomon. 1990–91. ‘Frida Kahlo’s “Memory”: The Piercing of the Heart by the Arrow of Divine Love’, Woman's Art Journal, 11.2: 3–7

Kettenmann, Andrea. 2003. Kahlo 1907–1954: Pain and Passion (Cologne: Taschen)