What the Water Gave Me

What the Water Gave Me (Lo que el agua me dio) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Frida Kahlo, completed in 1938 and held in the Daniel Filipacchi Collection in Paris. André Breton saw the canvas while Kahlo was finishing it during his 1938 trip to Mexico and wrote about it in the invitation essay for her first solo exhibition in the United States, which opened at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in November 1938; Nickolas Muray photographed the picture that same year. It has often been read as a painted autobiography, the bathwater holding images from across her life.

The viewer looks down into a bathtub from the bather's own position. Two feet break the grey water; between the toes of the right foot runs a bleeding crack, a reference to Kahlo's chronically injured right leg and foot. Around them floats a miniature world at contradictory scales: a skyscraper erupting from a volcano, a dead woodpecker on a bare tree, a skeleton resting on a hill, an empty Tehuana dress, a seashell pierced by bullet holes, and a reclining nude woman whose neck is tied to a rope held by a lounging faceless man. A couple resembling Kahlo's parents from her 1936 painting My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, and two female lovers who reappear in Two Nudes in a Forest of 1939, drift in the same water.

Breton's enthusiasm helped attach the label Surrealist to Kahlo's art, a designation she did not claim for herself. The painting has since had a second life in popular culture: Pascale Petit drew on it for her 2010 poetry collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, and Florence Welch titled a 2011 Florence and the Machine song after seeing the picture. Measuring 91.4 by 70.5 centimetres, it remains in private hands.