Moses a.k.a. Nucleus of Creation by Frida Kahlo, 1945. Oil on canvas, 61.5 x 76.2 cm.
From FridaKahlo.org1:
This painting was commissioned by Don Jose Domingo Lavin. Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read Sigmund Freud’s book Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion and to paint her understanding and interpretation of the book. […] This painting was drawn as a miniature mural, perhaps influenced by her husband, Diego Rivera, who is famous as a muralist.
In this painting, in the center is an abandoned baby which has a third eye in his forehead. The baby’s face resembles Diego Rivera. Frida always painted Rivera with the third eye of wisdom in her other paintings. The birth is under a sun flanked by heroes, gods, other people, and the hands of death. In the foreground there is a baby in the womb, which is leaking into the shell. Frida referred to that as a “symbol of love”. There are branches extending out from the dead tree trunks. In many of her other paintings Frida would use dead limbs to refer the life and death cycle in the world.
A quote from Kahlo:
“I read the book only once, and started the painting with my first impression. Later I read it again, and I must confess I found my work most inadequate and quite different from the interpretation Freud analyzes so marvelously in his [book] Moses. But now there’s no way to change it.”
I cleaned up the English a bit. ↩
surrealism