Moses

Moses, also known as Moses (Nucleus of Creation), is an oil-on-masonite painting by Frida Kahlo, completed in 1945 and now in a private collection. The picture, 61 by 75.6 centimetres, was commissioned by her patron José Domingo Lavín, who lent Kahlo Sigmund Freud's 1939 book Moses and Monotheism and asked her for a pictorial interpretation; she had painted a portrait of Lavín's wife in 1942.

Kahlo left an unusually full statement about the work, published in 1945 in the magazine Así. She said she read Freud's book only once and painted from her first impression; on rereading it she confessed that she found her picture inadequate and quite different from Freud's interpretation — but by then there was no way to change it. In her account she enlarged the biblical theme into the birth of heroes and the human fear of life and death: the infant Moses floats in his basket on the water, a third eye on his forehead, beneath a blazing sun that contains a fetus inside a placenta-like oval.

Around that glowing centre she packed ranks of gods, heroes and historical figures, skeletons, crowds of ordinary people and two old trees putting out new growth; in the foreground a baby lies in a conch shell spurting water, which she called a symbol of love. The museum title for the picture is Moisés o Núcleo solar, while Kahlo herself spoke of 'Moses, or the Birth of the Hero'; it took a second prize at an annual exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.