Semiotics of flora in the works of Frida Kahlo

Kargovskaia Elena Senior Educator, Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, People's University of Friendship of Russia 117198, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Miklukho-Maklaya, 10-2 elenkarg@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Tuzina Ol'ga Evgen'evna Graduate student, Department of Theory and History of Culture, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Miklukho-Maklaya, 10/2 tuzina.olga@gmail.com

The world around us is full of symbols. Semiotics, the study of signs and sign systems, has taken over the task of interpreting symbols, one of the areas of humanitarian knowledge aimed at rationalizing and mastering the information flow received from outside. Semiotics developed into an independent science with a pronounced philosophical content in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the teachings of C. S. Pierce and C. Morris.

Considering logic primarily as the logic of scientific research, Peirce proposed its new understanding as the doctrine of signs, or "semiotics." According to Peirce, all thinking has a symbolic character. Pierce defined a sign as "something that means something to someone in a certain relationship or scope." ^{[1, p.27]} He divided signs into 76 types; he proposed a classification of signs in relation to an object into icons, indexes and symbols, which, according to his concept, are created by cultural custom, rule or norm, since the relationship between the sign and the referent is arbitrary.

Subsequently, semiotic research acquired the character of various parallel directions tied to various sign systems or ways of sign transmission. Among these areas, visual semiotics is becoming increasingly important.

By visual semiotics we mean semiotic research, the subject of which are systems of iconic signs (according to the classification of Peirce), or systems where the role of such signs is predominant. It is the iconic signs that are important in our research, since Frida's paintings convey the artist's ideas through images of objects familiar to us in life: trees, flowers, fruits, people, etc. However, behind each object of reality there is a meaning that was formed both individually for Frida Kahlo and collectively. The latter includes signs that are formed with the development of culture.

It is worth noting that visual semiotics is often understood as a set of studies devoted to the analysis of works of cinema, a new genre of art that was so much of interest to humanitarian knowledge in the last century. Among the leading representatives of the trend, we can name R. Barth, P. Pasolini, Y. M. Lotman, the founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic school, and U. Eco. Only the last of the listed outlined the development paths for the analysis of the semiotics of paintings in his book "The Missing Structure". ^{[2, p.144]} B. A. Uspensky also contributed, who carried out an exhaustive semiotic analysis of Russian icons. ^{[3, c.298]}. The problem of developing a rigorous methodology is one of the key issues in modern visual semiotics. In most scientific works in this field, a significant emphasis is placed on the biography of the creator, and we did the same by examining the work of Frida Kahlo from the perspective of her life path, hobbies and peculiarities of perception of reality, which were later reflected in her works.

Few people today are unfamiliar with the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, while interest in her personality in research often prevails over attention to her work. In this regard, the authors of this study have set themselves the task of focusing primarily on the analysis of Frida's paintings, namely, on the symbolism of the flora represented by them. Frida Kahlo began her career in the 1920s, at that time she was just mastering painting, looking for her own style, which would be the subject of numerous controversies for a century. Many still lifes and, for example, portraits with vegetation were "practicing" techniques and mastering new skills. For this reason, the works of this period depicting plants will not be considered in this article, with the exception of one thing: we will pay attention to the most rarely mentioned and most famous sketch of this period, "Little Life" (Fig.1), dating from 1928. What's so remarkable about it? First of all, "Little Life" is the only signed sketch by the artist. Formally, it follows that there are no more authentic sketches in the legacy of Frida Kahlo. Already in this work we can trace the artist's interest in botany. Spruce needles, blades of grass, leaves and other vegetation are depicted scientifically accurately. A. Zavala notes that on frequent walks with her father, Frida collected "exhibits" in her herbarium, which she then studied under a microscope for a long time ^{[4, p.58]}.From the very beginning of Kahlo's creative career, nature has been her key inspiration.

Automatically created description" width="201" height="290" align="left" hspace="6" vspace="6" />Among the paintings of the early period, we were also interested in the "Portrait of Luther Burbank" (1932, fig. 2), which depicts the American agronomist Burbank, famous for his innovative practices of plant crossing. The scientist was presented by Frida as a hybrid of a human and a tree, for which the artist in the last century art historians used to classify her as a surrealist, although the artist herself did not consider her work to be surrealistic. In this film, Frida Kahlo touched upon the topic of the agronomist's research, which was close to her, since she considered herself a "hybrid" of European and Mexican cultures ^{[4, p.76]}. The roots of the hybrid in the painting grow from the dead body of Burbank himself. In this way, the artist displays one of her favorite themes – the theme of the unity of Man and Nature. Perhaps Frida also refers us to the beliefs of the Mexican Indians, according to which everything on earth is deeply and inextricably linked: plants are food for people living on earth, and people turn into food for plants after death. In the background, we can observe the fruits of Luther Burbank's breeding: in the early 1930s, he was more interested in citrus fruits. At the same time, there is no doubt that the agronomist is not holding the result of his scientific research in his hands, it is a philodendron, which quite often appeared in the paintings of the artist and was highly appreciated by the Aztecs for its "thirst for life", which they associated with fertility. It is also known that some members of the Araceae family are poisonous and capable of provoking hallucinations. The fact is that part of the famous agronomist's belief in progress was the theory of creating a new human species: if crossbreeding and cultivation work so well on plants, why not apply the same to humans? Eugenics considerations were alien to Frida, probably, this science was already associated with the nascent Nazism in the 1930s, which probably prompted her to include the potentially poisonous philodendron as a symbol of two-face in the composition of the painting. Another interesting detail: the fact that two leaves of the plant are depicted on the wrong side may also indicate the ambivalence of the views of the agronomist.

Frida Kahlo herself actively and quite deeply studied botany. And as proof of this, consider the work "Dream" (1932, fig.3). This sketch was drawn shortly before the miscarriage, so all the numerous mini-plots are devoted to only two main themes for the artist: the theme of dualism and the idea of human unity with nature. In this sketch, American "dead" skyscrapers are contrasted with living plants painted in a surreal manner. And the theme of man's hybrid with nature can be read in the image of Frida's hair, turning into roots that spread throughout the lower part of the painting, and in the images of plants growing from human limbs. Despite the fact that these plants do not really exist, we will nevertheless pay attention to them in this work. In analyzing Frida's work, it is not a specific representative of the flora that is important, but the artist's own in-depth knowledge of all cycles of its development. Thus, the image of a plant on the right side of the sketch with roots extending into a human foot looks like a professional botanical illustration: the object growing from these roots is nothing more than a completely real cotyledon hook (the first leaf of any plant's development). According to A. Zavala, it is by the "curvature" of this cotyledon that it is possible to determine which specific stage of plant development it is, up to a day. ^{[4, p.64]} At the time of the sketch's creation, Frida was still pregnant, so most of the signs and symbols, including the plants described, are images of the artist's doubts about the possibility of a successful resolution of pregnancy. At work, the desire for self-development and a sense of anxiety for one's future were mixed at the same time.

And the alarm was justified, because in 1932 the artist suffered a second miscarriage, which dozens of works will be devoted to in the future. For example, the notorious painting "Henry Ford Hospital" (fig.4) is the artist's first work on metal. She took the format of the Mexican retables as a basis: the image was applied to a small metal plate, pre-primed, the artist's hand moved from left to right, diagonally, completing one fragment before moving on to the next. According to K. Burrus, Frida Kahlo rediscovered for the general public the votive images with their unique themes and naive manner and used them in paintings with the directness and ruthlessness characteristic of this format. ^{[6, p.94]} Diego and his wife collected votive subjects, as well as artifacts dating back to the pre-Columbian era. The German art critic P. Westheim, analyzing the connection between Kahlo and votive images, wrote: "In addition to the life-affirming motive inherent in ex-voto, Frida took from them sincerity, childish naivety of form and such a story about events that actually happened that it seems to carry a grain of fiction, because there are no boundaries separating the rational, habitual, objective world from the imaginary, symbolic, unreal world." ^{[6, p.96]} If in traditional votive images the defender against life threats in most cases appears in the image of Christ, the Virgin or some saint, then Frida replaced these figures with objects with symbolic content that seem to float in zero gravity, as in the painting "Henry Ford Hospital": from the belly lying in Six red threads emanate from the artist's blood, tied to objects that reveal her state of mind. Obviously, they are all dedicated to the miscarriage that happened. We can see an embryo – an unborn child, a part of the female body, a snail, signifying slow healing after loss in the upper part of the picture. At the bottom, we see an image of a human pelvis carefully copied from medical books – one of the causes of miscarriage (damage caused by an accident), some kind of iron mechanism (possibly due to the breakdown of which the accident occurred) and an orchid, the symbolic meaning of which is not so easy to reveal. There are three versions of the meaning of her image. Firstly, the flower of this plant vaguely resembles the female reproductive organs, according to N. Gordeeva ^{[7, p.61]}. Secondly, the researcher also notes that the orchid was a gift from Diego and that at the time of painting, Kahlo "had the idea to mix sex with sentimentality." Finally, in the works of the Aztec and Mayan tribes, this plant possessed medicinal properties specifically in the field of female reproduction. Most likely, the artist combined all these connotations in the image of a single orchid flower, but one way or another, any of the described meanings confirms the idea that each object in the work refers us to the tragedy associated with the loss of a child.

Despite Frida Kahlo's fascination with botany, she did not always fill her images with deep symbolism. In many works, vegetation signs can be called indexes rather than symbols, and their meaning lies on the surface, as we can see in the first full-fledged lithograph of the same year "Frida and Abortion" (Fig. 5), which is divided into light and dark parts for a more explicit interpretation of the theme of duality in the artist's work. The left part is devoted to the topic of fertility: it shows the process of cell separation and a fully developed embryo, the umbilical cord of which wraps around Frida's leg, connecting mother and child. The right side of the composition depicts a grieving moon, the artist's third hand with a palette (the writing of which was clearly inspired by the images of Indian deities), creatures resembling sperm cells (possibly worms or snakes) and three plants, the soil of which is fertilized by Frida's blood, thus the artist again focuses on the theme of unity with nature. The first plant vaguely resembles an agave, the second is a fig tree (ficus carica), despite the fact that the leaves are extremely similar to human hands, and the latter is clearly not created on the basis of an existing analogue: it has two stems, and the flowers are male and female genitalia. Frida used this method of "direct" reflection of the topic of fertility both in her early and later works. For example, in the work "Xochitl" (1938, fig.6). The word "Xochitl" in the Nahuatl Aztec language means "flower". This wild Mexican plant in the picture clearly consists of two parts – images of male and female genitalia. Apart from the aforementioned meaning, "Xochitl" also means "delicate thing". This painting was painted for Kahlo's lover and friend, photographer Nicholas Maray ^{[4, p.66]}, and therefore the underlying meaning is really easy to read. This work is also noteworthy because it is the first independent image of a single plant in the artist's work, because it would be incorrect to call it a still life.

A similar work was created a few years later, namely, "The Flower of Life" (1943, fig.7), which depicts a hybrid of a bell–shaped plant, brugmansia, and the leaves of an ancient Mexican plant – milkweed. For this mixing, the artist used the most recognizable parts of these plants to create a fantastic picture based on references to their medicinal properties and associations with the female and male reproductive organs. Adriana Zavala suggests that brugmansia was chosen by Frida because of its narcotic and hallucinogenic properties: thanks to the alkaloids in its composition, the plant has been used as an analgesic. ^{[4, p.72]} Perhaps it was for this reason that brugmansia attracted the attention of Frida, who lived with incessant physical pain for most of her life. In addition, the mentioned plant is deadly poisonous in large doses, and, knowing about this detail, Kahlo once again touches on the topic of the inseparability of life and death. As for milkweed, it also has remarkable properties in medicine: in the Florentine Code, milkweed appears as a plant that helps improve lactation in nursing mothers ("A nurse should not eat avocado, but should drink boiled broth from cilacayotli, or drink water from boiled white pumpkins, or from an herb called cuetlasucitl (milkweed), and there is a fried reproductive organ of dogs, or there is iscauitli") ^{[5, p.39]}. In other words, the "Flower of Life" can be confidently called a self-portrait of the artist, since all the mentioned meanings of images, or signs, icons, plants in the painting simultaneously hint at her passion and regret about the impossibility of having children.

The automatically created description" width="391" height="285" align="left" hspace="6" vspace="6" />Reveals this theme more widely in "Magnolias" from 1945 (Fig.8). According to some art historians (E. Hayden ^{[8, p.232]} and A. Zavala ^{[4, p.22]}), the artist was inspired to write the painting by the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, who devoted most of her own works to flowers. It is noteworthy that magnolias appear for the first and last time in Frida Kahlo's paintings. It is known that in the east, the birthplace of magnolias, where the white color and its shades are considered a symbol of death, the buds are often used as the main flower of funeral ceremonies. The symbolism of death is present in many of Frida's works. This topic is not of primary importance, but its disclosure helps to understand the development of the artist's views, emphasizes involvement in the cultural life of her native country. ^{[11, p.1]} Let's pay attention to the flower in the center of the composition: this is a prickly pear that we already know, and it is depicted at the most important moment – at the moment of flowering. The fact is that the flower of this cactus blooms for a very short period of time, only a few hours, then its petals instantly fall off. Thus, it lives less than one day in its heyday, and it will bloom before the magnolias bloom. Probably, the prickly pear in this work plays the role of a symbol of the brevity and transience of life in contrast to the symbolism of death enclosed in the image of magnolias. With the same degree of probability, we can assume that we are talking about the transience of love passion. This assumption was prompted by a close examination of the painting. The presence of prickly pear in the bouquet already indicates that, contrary to the name of the painting, this is not a monobucket of magnolias. However, if we look more closely at the right side of the bouquet, we will find another flower there – a whitefly, better known as calla (alcatraces), it is hidden from the untrained eye. What is the meaning of the image of this flower? Calla is an extremely toxic, poisonous flower, its juice can cause vomiting, drowsiness, and in some cases can be fatal. For a semiotic interpretation of this symbol, let us turn again to the biography of the artist: calla is the favorite flower of Diego Rivera, Frida's lover. Thus, the interpretation of the appearance of this flower in a bouquet of magnolias is ambivalent: on the one hand, it may only be a manifestation of attention and love for her spouse, on the other hand, it may be an allusion to the grief and suffering that Diego brought to Frida's already difficult life.

Returning to the topic of fertility in its narrow meaning, Frida Kahlo wrote "The Sun and Life" in 1947 (Fig. 9). This is a rather unusual still life for both the artist and the genre as a whole, since almost every plant represented is a fantasy on the theme of merging the structure of plants and the process of human fetus development. The theme of human unity with nature reasserts itself. Probably, the real plants here belong to the aroid family already described earlier, whose representatives produce a special type of flower, an ear, usually covered with a special covering leaf. In the picture, such sheets open slightly to show us the ears, each of which represents a sign-the index of the female or male organs of the reproductive system. The flower on the far left, associated with the female uterus, is almost completely closed, while the more developed representative "explodes", releasing a seed. In turn, the flower located directly behind the sun almost completely covers the fruit, the human fruit, but it is still possible to see the tears flowing from its eyes, which echo the crying third eye on the face of the sun plant, the prototype of which was the face of Diego Rivera. This plant, according to A. Zavala, is written in the image of the sun, since the sun's rays give life to both plants and people, without it neither of them could exist. ^{[4, p.74]} Once again we are faced with the theme of the cycle of life. In addition, it is believed that the color scheme of this sun is not accidental at all. Thus, G. Ankori states that this work was written under the impression of Buddhist customs and traditions, which Frida Kahlo's interest in increased during this period of her life, therefore, the green and red colors, representing the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, reflect the duality of women and men. ^{[9, p.126]} The concept of duality is renewed. Thus, this painting is literally saturated with symbolism, it combines all the ideas, themes and experiences characteristic of Frida Kahlo's work.

As for late art, the "Still Life with a Parrot and fruits" (1951, fig.10) is no less interesting from the point of view of semiotic analysis, which was quite typical of the late period, as was the set of fruits on it. The first thing you should pay attention to is the unusual image of oranges in the painting. We remember Frida's obsessive and unhealed wound due to her inability to have children. Here we can fix another reference to this pain: oranges, like other fruits, are associated on the canvas with the female body, this variety of orange is called navel (navel orange), because they have a small "crater" formed due to the appearance of a second, small orange inside. Frida probably refers us in this way to the traditional technique of determining pregnancy in Mexican midwives: the woman's stomach was palpated in an attempt to identify a hard area, if the pregnancy was confirmed, the midwife pronounced: "The belly is as hard as an orange" ^{[4, p.103]}. In addition, this variety of oranges is known for the absence of pits, and there are two in the picture, and they are not exactly where they tend to be. We can assume that by depicting these symbolic bones, the artist conveyed her own experience, since throughout her life doctors stubbornly insisted that with her state of health, even conceiving a child, especially two, was physically impossible, however, it still happened. Thus, both life events and the image of an unusual fruit can be interpreted as a "miracle of nature."

We cannot fail to mention Frida's last self–portrait, "Self-Portrait inside a Sunflower" (1954, fig. 11), as the final work analyzed in this article. This painting differs from the entire legacy of the artist: if in her earlier works the strokes were difficult to distinguish, almost invisible, then on this canvas thick layers of paint seem to be laid with a palette knife. During these years, Frida returned to the theme of her own physical pain in her paintings. Shortly before writing the self-portrait, a leg amputation operation was performed, after which the artist felt chronic pain until her death and tried to drown it out in all available ways. Most likely, it was the unbearable physical pain that caused the nature of the paint application: Frida probably simply could not more painstakingly portray herself. In addition, here we come across the theme of human unity with nature again. This time, Frida depicted herself sitting in a traditional Tehuan dress with a sunflower-shaped headdress. This flower is native to North America and northern Mexico. Usually, as you know, it is grown in gardens, its seeds are edible and oil is produced from them. In ancient Indian cultures, sunflower seeds were believed to boost libido. Based on the manner of execution, the nature of the brushstroke and the mentioned sunflower property, we can assume that Frida saw herself exhausted, unable to ever give birth to a child and be attracted to a man. In other words, she felt the imminent approach of death.

Every artist's work is more or less connected with his biography. For Frida, this connection is inextricable and can be traced in all her works without exception, and this is her identity. It is impossible to analyze her work in isolation from her personality and life path. In such a life situation, it is really difficult to paint pictures not about yourself. Absolutely every picture considered in this article has a specific episode from the life of Frida Kahlo. By far the most frequently recurring episodes are an accident, the loss of a child, divorce from Diego, and breakups with lovers. Frida found a unique way to convey her own experiences by encoding them into surprisingly vivid images of Mexican flora, which we tried to decipher using semiotic analysis with an emphasis on studying her biography.

After studying the artist's paintings of plants, we were able to identify three main themes of Frida Kahlo's work: fertility, human unity with nature, and duality (in several of its manifestations: the connections of a woman and a man, life and death, light and darkness). Since Frida saw plants primarily as reflections of her life and herself, all images of plants, even fictional ones, are peculiar self-portraits or symbols of herself, executed in the form, as it turned out during the research, of signs-icons and indexes. For this reason, it is possible to dispute the statement that the artist had three favorite genres: self-portrait, portrait and still life. In fact, the latter can be safely identified with the former.

A less obvious conclusion, due to the exceptionally narrow focus of the topic, was the identification of Frida's rarely mentioned hobby, botany. Even if we ignore the fact that she met and corresponded with prominent botanists in the United States and Mexico, the way in which various kinds of vegetation are depicted can already be judged to be far from an idle interest in this science, because most of the plants in Frida's paintings seem to be copied from botanical illustrations from various encyclopedias and specific scientific articles. It is this detail that has given us more opportunities for semiotic analysis.

Frida Kahlo has taught us a lot: to be resilient, to enjoy life no matter what, even with so many obstacles on the way, to overcome them worthily, to fight to the end, to live an eventful life until the last second, to laugh at sorrows and illnesses in the face, to splash out on the canvas everything that is inside and create until your last breath. But the most important lesson lies elsewhere – this artist taught us to look into the very essence of everything we see, to look at things more broadly, to realize that even a still life that is uncomplicated at first glance can hide a lot of encrypted messages.