What the Water Gave Me (painting)
| What the Water Gave Me | |
|---|---|
| Spanish: Lo que el agua me dio | |
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| Artist | Frida Kahlo |
| Year | 1938 |
| Type | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 91 cm × 70.5 cm (36 in × 27.75 in) |
| Location | Collection of Daniel Filipacchi, Paris |
What the Water Gave Me (Lo que el agua me dio in Spanish) is an oil painting by Frida Kahlo that was completed in 1938. It is sometimes referred to as What I Saw in the Water.
Frida Kahlo’s What the Water Gave Me was her biography. As the scholar, Natascha Steed, points out, "her paintings were all very honest and she never portrayed herself as being more or less beautiful than she actually was." With this piece she reflected on her life. Kahlo released her unconscious mind through the use of what seems to be an irrational juxtaposition of images in her bathwater. In this painting, Frida paints herself, precisely her legs and feet, lying in a bath of grey water.
The painting was included in Kahlo's first solo exhibit at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in November 1938. It is now part of the private collection of Surrealist art collector Daniel Filipacchi.
Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon in Coyoacan, Mexico on July 6, 1907, Frida was one of four daughters born to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent. As a child Kahlo suffered from both polio and spina bifida of which she was not diagnosed until she was 23.
It was never her intention to become an artist; however, at eighteen, she was seriously injured in a bus accident in which her pelvis was smashed and a broken rail pierced her abdomen and uterus so she spent over a year in bed recovering. She always admired her father’s box of oil paints so as she lay in bed she decided to put that admiration to use. Frida’s mother had a carpenter make her an easel that stretched across the bed so she could begin painting during her convalescences, thus her paintings became her biographies. During her time confined in bed, Kahlo took the opportunity to take an intense study of herself.
Kahlo found it impossible to separate her life from her work which is what separated her from the contemporaries of her time. Despite the trouble she faced with her health that left her physically crippled, it was her marriage to famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera that crippled her emotionally. Frida once said: "I suffered two grave accidents in my life.. One in which a streetcar knocked me down and the other was Diego." Their stormy relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of careers, divorce, remarriage, Frida’s bisexual affairs, her health issues as well as her inability to bear children. Of her 200 some paintings, drawings, and sketches throughout her life, she related them all back to physical and emotional pain.
She mirrored all of this hurt into What the Water Gave Me.
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