Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick

Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (El marxismo dará salud a los enfermos) is an unfinished oil-on-masonite self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, painted around 1954 and held by the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, Mexico City. One of her last works, it is also her most overtly political self-portrait, joining a personal wish for physical relief to a vision of global ideological struggle.

Kahlo stands almost frontally in a long green skirt, her torso bare around a leather orthopaedic corset. Two enormous hands sustain her — the museum identifies them with Karl Marx, whose bearded head appears above — while her crutches angle away as if she could now let them go. An eye shows in one palm; in her own hand she holds a red book. To one side a pale dove flies over a globe whose red regions have been read as the Soviet Union and China; on the other, beneath Marx, a black bird attacks a top-hatted figure identified as Uncle Sam, beside a pale mass read as a mushroom cloud.

The picture was painted as Kahlo's health collapsed and her politics grew more explicit: she had been collecting signatures for the peace-congress movement — Rivera showed her doing so in his 1952 mural Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace — and a 1953 diary passage transcribed in scholarship records her wish to put painting at the service of the Communist Party. The panel, 76 by 61 centimetres, was left unfinished at her death.