Without Hope

Without Hope (Sin esperanza) is a small painting by Frida Kahlo, made in 1945 in oil on canvas mounted on masonite; it belongs to the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City. It dates from a period when her health had deteriorated, she had lost her appetite and was losing weight severely, and doctors had prescribed a fattening diet that she experienced as torment.

Kahlo lies in bed with tears on her face while a jointed wooden structure — identified in the museum's account as an easel — carries a huge funnel where a canvas would normally sit; the funnel narrows toward her mouth and holds a dense mass of fish, fowl, animal heads and meat, with a pale skull near the top that the museum describes as a sugar skull bearing her name, a gift from Diego Rivera during a hospital stay. Behind the bed stretches a cracked, barren landscape beneath a pale moon and a burning sun, and small round forms the museum calls microscopic organisms float across the sheet.

On the reverse Kahlo wrote a rhyme explaining the title: it begins 'A mí ya no me queda ni la menor esperanza' ('Not even the slightest hope remains to me') and ends with everything moving as the belly dictates. The critic Teresa del Conde read the funnel as a cornucopia that brings nature's bounty without bringing health; at 28 by 36 centimetres the picture compresses a medical episode into one of her most concentrated images of a body ruled by appetite rather than will.