Was das Wasser mir gab

Frida Kahlo painted this in 1938, the year her work first went on show in New York and the year André Breton decided she was a Surrealist, a label she never accepted. The picture looks down the length of her own body as she lies in the bath, her feet breaking the surface at the far end. Floating in the grey water are scenes from her life: her parents, a dead bird, a skyscraper rising from a volcano, a small figure strangled by a cord. She called it an image of passing time and of childhood games in the tub, mixed with the losses that had piled up since. One toe pokes through, cracked and bleeding, from the foot that had troubled her since a childhood bout of polio.