The Bus

The Bus (El camión) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Frida Kahlo, made in 1929 — the year she married Diego Rivera — and held by the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City. The Museo Frida Kahlo connects the picture with the traffic accident that nearly killed her in 1925, when a streetcar struck the bus she was riding; the painting itself shows no collision, only the interior of a crowded, wooden-benched public bus.

Six passengers sit shoulder to shoulder: a woman with a shopping basket, a workman in blue overalls holding a tool, a barefoot campesina mother nursing her baby, a child turned toward the window, a well-dressed man with a tied bag, and a young woman in a pale dress. Museum catalogues describe them as types from the different classes of Mexican society — a housewife, a worker, a poor mother, an affluent foreigner — and the girl at the end has often been taken for the painter herself, though no record confirms it. Through the posts behind them appear factory buildings, an open road and a red cantina signed LA RISA ('laughter').

At 26 by 55.5 centimetres, the unusually wide little picture is one of Kahlo's earliest treatments of public Mexican life rather than of herself or her circle. Writers have compared its assembled social types — the Madonna-like mother beside the capitalist-looking passenger — with the concerns of contemporary mural painting, while its relation to the accident remains retrospective: the bus she painted is a cross-section of the city, not a re-creation of the crash.