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Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Page created on March 2, 2018 / Page updated on October 6, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000

Introduction

Frida Kahlo lies across a fractured volcanic plain, her face turned toward the viewer while green stems and leaves spread from an opening in her red-clad torso. Fine red lines travel through the vegetation and into the stony ground; a pale pillow under her head brings a trace of the bedroom into the exposed landscape. [1] [2] This small 1943 painting makes body, plant and place difficult to separate without making any one interpretation of their connection compulsory.

Its title, Roots or Raíces, suggests attachment, yet the plant has no clearly visible point of origin. Hayden Herrera reads it as a vine born from Kahlo that nourishes the land; Rita Eder asks whether the roots might instead pass through her from elsewhere. [3] [4] The disagreement starts in the picture itself and opens a larger question: does Kahlo portray a body giving life, receiving it, changing form, or all three?

At a Glance

  • Artist and date: Frida Kahlo, 1943. Sotheby's records the work as signed and dated lower right; an independently inspected 1967 Mexican exhibition entry also gives 1943. [1] [5]
  • Title: Raíces / Roots. El Pedregal is a reported 1953 exhibition-title variant, not an established original title. [3] [6]
  • Medium and published size: Oil on metal; Sotheby’s gives 30 × 50.3 cm, while 1967 and 2016 catalogues publish slightly different sizes. [1] [5] [7]
  • Collection and display: Private collection; the buyer at the 2006 sale was anonymous. No current owner or on-view location has been independently verified. [1] [8]

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. A Body Open to the Landscape
  3. Why the Pedregal Matters
  4. Who Nourishes Whom?
  5. Fertility, Mortality and Changing Roots
  6. Mexican and Christian Comparisons
  7. Titles, Exhibitions and Sale History
  8. What the Record Still Cannot Tell Us
  9. Related Reading

A Body Open to the Landscape

The picture is wide but only about thirty centimetres high. Kahlo's head rests at viewer-left, with long dark hair against a pale pillow; the orange skirt stretches toward viewer-right and ends in a white pleated flounce. [1] [2] A deep red upper garment holds the figure together visually until a roughly rectangular opening interrupts the torso. Through that opening, grey-pale terrain remains visible, while thick green stems cross its edges.

Her gaze turns outward instead of following the body across the ground. The face's recognisable features identify a self-representation in conjunction with the catalogue and scholarly sources, but its expression does not reveal a diagnosis or single state of mind. [2] [4] Eder finds a seeming serenity in the pose, Herrera a steadfast impassivity. Those descriptions register a tension between composed face and opened body; neither proves that Kahlo felt calm or detached while making the work. [3] [4]

The pale support under the head reads as a pillow, an ordinary household object carried into a field of broken rock. Herrera finds it reassuring after the picture's more unsettling implications. [3] The object is visible, but reassurance is his response to its juxtaposition with the barren terrain. At the other end, the skirt and leaves partly conceal the legs, while dark fissures make the body's contact with the ground difficult to determine.

Green branches move over the red top, orange skirt and foreground. Their broad pointed leaves have light midribs and finer veins, and several stems end bare rather than in foliage. [2] Red threadlike extensions cross the painted ground and appear to continue the veins inside the leaves. They invite comparison with roots or blood vessels without proving that liquid is depicted, that the plant belongs to a particular species, or that every line penetrates the rock rather than lying pictorially over it.

The torso opening is the central spatial surprise. It reveals the same sort of ground that surrounds Kahlo, so the viewer seems to look through the body rather than into a painted organ cavity. [2] [4] Some stems overlap the aperture; others align with its interior. No single root ball or initial stem is unambiguously shown. The observed fact is a shared passage between person, vegetation and terrain, not a diagram of where growth starts.

Low irregular stones fill almost all the background beneath a narrow pale sky. Greys, violets, browns and greenish patches are separated by dark cracks; a pale hollowed formation sits near the skirt at viewer-right. [2] Herrera compares a fissure with a grave and that pale formation with a skull. [3] These are suggestive analogies, not securely identifiable hidden objects, and the painting's image does not permit conclusions about its pigments, metal alloy, paint layers or condition.

Watch: Frida Kahlo

Five perspectives to view here alongside the article.

Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas: Great Art Explained

Great Art Explained

A focused visual introduction to the painting and its context.

Why the Pedregal Matters

Herrera, Joëlle Guyot, Luis Roberto Vera and Eder identify the landscape with the Pedregal, the lava terrain associated with Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli project. [3] [4] [9] [10] The reported El Pedregal title strengthens this place-specific link, although the surviving object image alone cannot geolocate its rocks. Museo Anahuacalli describes a cracked lava field near Coyoacán and says Rivera and Juan O'Gorman began building toward 1941. [11]

Sotheby's Herrera essay instead dates the couple's start to 1942 and says the land was bought with Kahlo's money. [3] The museum confirms the project and its terrain, not that precise financing claim or reconciled construction year. It is safest to locate the painting in the context of their early-1940s engagement with the site without turning it into a topographic record of a particular spot.

The Pedregal's apparently inhospitable stone makes the plant conspicuous. Anahuacalli's own history describes lava once treated as barren or hostile and subsequently valued as a setting for art and architecture. [11] Against that context, the red and green lines may be read as an imaginative renewal of the ground, but no soil analysis or ecological programme follows from the image. The work stages a relation between an individual body and a specific Mexican landscape while declining to tell us whether the figure supplies, receives or shares vitality.

Herrera connects the museum project with Kahlo and Rivera's efforts to bind their lives to the Mexican earth. He quotes a later description of Anahuacalli as a living plant embracing the terrain, though the original source and date of that passage have not been independently acquired here. [3] The resonance is useful as a mediated artist-word trail, not a caption Kahlo wrote for Roots. A second botanical-landscape passage printed without diary folio or translator on the Sotheby's page is likewise withheld from direct quotation or attribution to this painting's making. [1]

Roots (Raíces) in Kahlo’s career

Timeline source: Museo Frida Kahlo chronology [20].

Who Nourishes Whom?

Herrera and Guyot compare Roots with Kahlo's 1937 My Nurse and I. In the earlier work an infant receives milk from a wet nurse; they see the adult Kahlo in Roots reversing the flow by offering blood or life to the earth. [3] [9] The comparison is powerful because both images join body and sustenance, but its direction of nourishment is a critical reading. The red lines are visible; their identification as blood and their function as fertiliser are not documented by a Roots (Raíces) artist statement.

Guyot's French-language discussion reads the painting within a larger vision of cosmic interdependence. She links the Pedregal, plant, body and nourishing reversal, while citing Kahlo's diary language about the unity of beings. [9] The diary's exact original pages and context have not been checked for this article. Her interpretation should not be reduced to an assertion that Kahlo made a botanical illustration or offered a literal account of the site's fertility.

Laura E. Pérez approaches the same arrangement through self-portraiture. She argues that Kahlo increasingly represents herself through and as nature, and calls Roots an especially explicit instance because the cut-out torso and red-veined leaves make the figure continuous with the surrounding world. [12] This reading does not dissolve Kahlo into an anonymous landscape: the outward-looking face remains sharply individual even as the middle of the body opens to ground and growth. The picture can suggest a self in transformation rather than an identity fixed by portrait likeness alone.

Itsuka Komatsu's Japanese study offers a related but distinct framework of human-plant mimicry, life cycles and the constructed figure of “Frida.” [13] Its repository abstract and selected assigned pages have been read, but the complete article has not been translated at sentence level. This account therefore uses only that broad, attributed line of thought, not invented details of its argument. Together with Pérez, it widens the question from pregnancy or bodily damage to the ways a self can be imagined as participating in vegetal life.

Eder contests the assumption that the plant must originate inside Kahlo. The 2025 UNAM essay observes that its stems also seem to traverse her from elsewhere and asks whether the opened body might be freed from customary anatomical and social limits. [4] Her alternative does not prove an outside root any more than Herrera proves an internal one. It makes the uncertain direction of passage productive: the painted body is permeable, and the plant can be seen as a relation rather than an offspring.

Fertility, Mortality and Changing Roots

Herrera gives the birth reading its strongest formulation. She imagines the childless figure giving birth to a vine through which her blood enters the parched earth, and links bare stems with losses in Kahlo's life. [3] Such a reading is part of the work's critical history, but the painting contains no fetus, infant, visible uterus or counted biographical events. The thirteen-stem count and its proposed symbolism come from the essay, not a secure artist explanation or independent technical record.

Amparo Serrano de Haro's Spanish essay shows why “roots” should not be turned into a fixed fertility code. In The Dream, she finds root growth associated with death and forgetting; in Raíces, green and red branching brings a more generative relation; in subsequent pictures, the motif joins love, artistic continuity and history. [14] Her comparison acknowledges reproductive hope without claiming that every root in Kahlo's work has the same meaning. It also helps keep the 1943 painting distinct from other bodies and terrains that Kahlo painted.

Herrera sets Roots beside two other 1943 self-portraits. In Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, Diego Rivera's face appears on Kahlo's forehead amid branching strands; in Thinking About Death, a skull occupies that position while spiny leaves close around her. [3] Her comparison traces different ways an image might join thought, body and vegetation, but these are separate paintings, not panels of a documented series. Roots moves the plant to a passage through the torso and replaces the enclosing foliage with an expansive rocky field.

That difference complicates a strictly marital interpretation. Herrera connects the Anahuacalli project and a diary line addressed to Rivera with Kahlo's desire for bonds, but the diary's original folio and context have not been checked. [3] The husband's portrait is conspicuously present in the Tehuana painting and absent as an identifiable person in Roots. The latter's branching can be discussed as connection without saying that every stem is a coded reference to Rivera or that its purpose is to repair their relationship.

Herrera finds mortality in the cracked plain as well as renewal in the leaves. She describes a dark ravine before the figure, a skull-like rock toward the right and the possibility of growth after death. [3] The visual basis is a network of fissures and a pale hollowed form, not an unambiguous grave or skull. [2] The image can sustain a tension between barrenness and growth, bodily opening and composed gaze, but it does not certify Kahlo's personal acceptance of death in 1943.

Eder observes much the same opposition of fertile and sterile, mobile and static, calm and ominous. She then applies the later philosophical idea of a “body without organs” to propose freedom from conventions that define bodies by gender, beauty, health or reproductive function. [4] The phrase appeared in Antonin Artaud's 1947 writing, four years after Roots, and was later developed in philosophy. It is Eder's retrospective lens, not a documented influence on Kahlo or a claim that a physical organ is absent.

That distinction matters because the open torso is readily medicalised. Kahlo's health and reproductive history is relevant to how some writers have interpreted it, but later hospital records cannot establish the intention or physical cause of a 1943 image. [3] [4] In the painting, the torso is visibly discontinuous and the landscape visible through it. Whether this represents desire, sacrifice, survival, release, a dream of unity or a critique of bodily norms remains an argument to make, not a fact to read off a painted aperture.

Mexican and Christian Comparisons

Vera calls the reclining Kahlo an earth mother and an Indigenous or autochthonous Mater Dolorosa. He compares her red branching forms with serpentine blood associated with Coatlicue and with Mexican tequitqui and retablo imagery; he also places the small work beside Rivera's monumental La tierra fecunda. [10] These comparisons reveal how the painting has been placed within Mesoamerican, Catholic and post-revolutionary visual traditions. None is a documented Roots (Raíces) source named by Kahlo, and the different traditions should not be fused into a single “Aztec meaning.”

María A. Castro-Sethness proposes a more specific Christian analogy. In a nineteenth-century Eucharistic Man of Sorrows image, a vine grows from Christ's side and blood nourishes lambs; she reads Kahlo's opened torso and branching red lines as a sacrificial nourishment of the earth. [15] The formal resemblance deserves consideration, especially beside Kahlo's small metal supports and interest in popular religious images. Yet the painting contains no donor inscription, saintly intercessor, thanksgiving or identified source retablo, so calling it a devotional ex-voto would overstate the evidence.

Vera also invokes reclining Christ figures, while Guyot reads the scene through a broader pre-Columbian cosmogonic frame. [9] [10] Their arguments can coexist as different scholarly questions without becoming a single account of what Kahlo believed. The Pedregal provides a more firmly sourced place than a generalised cultural label, and the painting's own visible forms continue to limit every comparison: pillow, face, opening, plant and volcanic fractures remain present even when larger mythic language is applied.

Sotheby's attributes to Gannit Ankori an identification of the painted plant as Calotropis procera, also said to appear in Thinking About Death. [3] Ankori's exact page and botanical evidence remain unread; the painting shows leaves and stems but no securely identifiable flowers or fruit. [2] [16] Kew's distribution record would not make the species impossible in Mexico, but it cannot identify a stylised painted plant from a digital image. “Plant,” “branches” and “vine-like growth” remain more honest descriptions than a Latin binomial presented as fact.

Titles, Exhibitions and Sale History

The Spanish title Raíces appears in a directly inspected 1967 Homenaje a Frida Kahlo entry at the Museo de Arte Moderno. Justino Fernández lists it as Sala Juárez item 11, dated 1943, in oil on sheet metal. [5] That independent record supports the object's identity while giving a rounded measurement rather than Sotheby's later 30 × 50.3 cm. A third published size, 30.5 × 49.9 cm, is a catalogue variant; no current measurement has resolved why they differ. [1] [7]

Herrera reports that Kahlo called the work El Pedregal a decade after making it. His account associates the name with the 1953 British Arts Council Mexican-art exhibition at London's Tate Gallery, whose dates and catalogue are independently documented. [3] [6] The exact entry has not been found, so it remains uncertain whether El Pedregal appeared there or was Kahlo's own title. Raíces and Roots remain the controlled bilingual pair for this single 1943 painting.

The first exhibition checklist entry directly read here is the 1967 Mexico City one. Sotheby's published exhibition list then traces the work through a 1978–79 United States retrospective, the 1982–83 Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti tour, other European, American and Japanese exhibitions, and Tate Modern's 2005 Kahlo show. [1] These are selected documented appearances, not a complete lifetime-to-present itinerary. A request for the 2007–08 centenary tour recorded in 2006 is not evidence that the later loan occurred.

Tate's 2026 Frida: The Making of an Icon guide mentions Roots when discussing Ana Mendieta's Silueta photographs and human-plant imagery. [17] That is evidence of current critical reception, not a Roots (Raíces) object label or verified loan. The guide alone does not establish that the original Roots is on view in London; no public display after the 2005 Tate show has been confirmed from the item-level sources read for this page.

Sotheby's published provenance runs from Eduardo Morillo Safa to Dolores Olmedo, then to an unnamed owner who acquired the painting in 1982. [1] Contemporary reports identify Houston collector Marilyn Oshman as the 2006 seller and say that the buyer bid by telephone anonymously. [8] The auction catalogue's “present owner” means its then-consignor, not the owner today. Published celebrity-collection claims lack an owner, auction or museum confirmation and are not accepted.

The painting sold in New York on 24 May 2006 for $5,616,000 including premium. That price set records for Kahlo and Latin American art at auction at the time, but later sales exceeded them; Sotheby's reports a $54,660,000 result for a different Kahlo painting in November 2025. [18] The 2006 sale is relevant to the object's public history and the last documented change of custody, not a present valuation or a measure of the picture's meaning.

What the Record Still Cannot Tell Us

The 1953 Arts Council catalogue entry could clarify the reported El Pedregal title, while the 1988 catalogue raisonné and later book accounts may add object history and interpretation. [6] [16] [19] Their exact relevant pages have not been consulted. The original diary or letter sources behind the Sotheby's epigraph and other mediated Kahlo passages are likewise unavailable, so those words cannot yet be treated as Kahlo's own commentary on this painting.

A current registrar or owner record could establish the present credit, precise measurements, metal support, reverse inscriptions, frame, condition, treatment and exhibition loans. [1] [19] Until then, the anonymous 2006 purchase does not disclose a current owner, and photographs cannot resolve questions about the metal support, reverse, condition or treatment.

The supported account is nevertheless substantial. Kahlo set her individuated face and everyday pillow against a body opened to rock and proliferating vegetation, on a modest metal panel linked by scholarship to the Pedregal. [1] [2] [3] Critics have seen nourishment, fertility, death, sacred analogy and freedom in those crossings; Eder's later question about the direction of the roots keeps the familiar birth story from closing the picture. [3] [4] [9] [10] [12] [15] Roots remains most exacting when its visible permeability and its competing interpretations are held together.

What the Water Gave Me also brings a body into a shifting natural world, but in a different pictorial setting. Flower of Life and Sun and Life develop plant and bodily forms without sharing Roots' provenance or its uncertain El Pedregal title.

Frequently Asked Questions

The sources read here treat Raíces / Roots and Herrera's reported El Pedregal as titles for one 1943 painting, not different objects. [1] [3] [5] The original 1953 exhibition entry that could clarify the variant's exact printed form is still unread. [6]

Several scholars describe it that way, and the stems cross a torso opening. [3] [9] [12] [15] Eder notes that the image does not settle where the roots began and proposes that they may pass through the body from elsewhere. [4] The secure visible relation is connection, not a proven one-way origin.

No according to the strongest object records: Sotheby's calls it oil on metal and the 1967 checklist says oil on sheet metal. [1] [5] A 2025 essay's canvas caption conflicts with both and is not adopted, although its interpretation remains useful. [4]

The 2006 buyer was anonymous, and no current owner or item-level display notice has been verified. [8] Tate's 2026 guide mentions the work in comparison with Ana Mendieta but does not establish that the original painting is on view. [17]

Discussion

Use the cited evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. The prompts below are starting points, not fixed interpretations.

Reader Insights

Close Looking

Does the body feed the roots, receive their nourishment, or both?

Context

What does the volcanic Pedregal setting contribute to the image?

Open Question

How should the reported *El Pedregal* title be distinguished from the catalogue title?

Join the Conversation

Which reading best fits the evidence, and where does uncertainty remain?

References

  1. Sotheby's, Roots, Latin American Art N08208, lot 6, New York, 24 May 2006; complete description, provenance, exhibited and literature blocks, and catalogue note inspected. “Present owner” is time-bounded to the 2006 catalogue. View source text.
  2. Editorial close-looking note based on Sotheby's official lot image (reference 1), checked against the image accompanying Rita Eder's UNAM essay (reference 4). It supports visible relationships, not physical examination or image-publication rights.
  3. Hayden Herrera, signed 2006 catalogue note within Sotheby's lot 6, paragraphs after the literature list; birth, nourishment, Anahuacalli, title, death, grave, skull, levitation, stem count and pillow are her arguments or reports, not unaided observation. View source text.
  4. Rita Eder, “El cuerpo sin órganos: metáfora de la libertad frente a lo normativo”, Gaceta UNAM, 8 September 2025, pp.24–25; complete essay read. Its canvas caption conflicts with refs. 1 and 5. View source text.
  5. Justino Fernández, Catálogo de las exposiciones de arte en 1967, UNAM IIE supplement, DOI 10.22201/iie.18703062e.1968.sup1, printed p.115, Homenaje a Frida Kahlo, Sala Juárez item 11. View source text.
  6. Arts Council/Tate Gallery, Exhibition of Mexican Art from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present Day (1953), 4 March–26 April; Tate archive poster record TG 106/39 confirms host and dates, and Tate Archive records TG 92/506/2 and TG 106/43 corroborate the exhibition. The 103-page 1953 catalogue and any entry for this painting have not been read, so the reported El Pedregal title remains unconfirmed there. View source text.
  7. Ivanna Margarucci, Frida Kahlo: una vida a través del arte (Museo Roca, 2016), printed p.81, item 137, Raíces; used for its published 30.5 × 49.9 cm variant, not its unverified celebrity ownership credit. View source text.
  8. Artnet Magazine, “Art Market Watch,” 26 May 2006, and Patricia C. Johnson, Houston Chronicle, 25 May 2006, contemporary sale reports naming Marilyn Oshman as seller and an anonymous telephone bidder. Neither identifies a later owner. View source text.
  9. Joëlle Guyot, “Mythes identitaires et histoire dans l'œuvre de Frida Kahlo”, América 3 (1988), pp.81–99, discussion of Raíces at p.94; full French article read. View source text.
  10. Luis Roberto Vera, “Raíz mesoamericana: Octavio Paz, Efraín Huerta y Frida Kahlo”, Impossibilia 4 (2012), pp.202–32, discussion of Raíces at pp.220–24. The celebrity collection caption and original-source claims are not adopted. View source text.
  11. Museo Anahuacalli official history and the museum's account of its ecological space; both describe the early-1940s project and lava terrain associated with Juan O'Gorman. The museum does not confirm Sotheby's exact finance/year account. View source text.
  12. Laura E. Pérez, “Decolonizing Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez”, Monograma 11 (2022), pp.71–85, discussion of Raíces at pp.81–82. View source text.
  13. Itsuka Komatsu, “Frida Kahlo's Circle of Life: Mimicry through Plants and the Human Body,” Rikkyo Review of New Humanities 3 (2015), pp.28–51, DOI 10.14992/00010872; repository abstract and selected assigned pages only, not a complete translation. View source text.
  14. Amparo Serrano de Haro, “Frida Kahlo: Bodegón con cuerpo de mujer”, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma VII.10 (1997), pp.355–66, discussion of Raíces at pp.364–65. View source text.
  15. María A. Castro-Sethness, “Frida Kahlo's Spiritual World: The Influence of Mexican Retablo and Ex-voto Paintings on Her Art”, Woman's Art Journal 25.2 (2004–05), pp.21–24, discussion of Raíces at p.23. A proposed analogy is not a documented model. View source text.
  16. Sotheby's Herrera catalogue note attributes a Calotropis procera identification to Gannit Ankori, Imaging Her Selves (2002), without an exact page. Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Plants of the World Online, records the species' distribution; neither source identifies the painted plant from specimen evidence. View source text.
  17. Tate Modern, Frida: The Making of an Icon large-print guide (2026), printed p.135; comparative mention of Roots beside Ana Mendieta's Silueta photographs, not an object label or proof that the painting is on view there. View source text.
  18. Sotheby's, 2006 Roots result retrospective, and 2025 top-lots summary. Used only for dated market facts, not current value. View source text 1; View source text 2.
  19. The 1953 Arts Council/Tate catalogue entry, 1988 catalogue raisonné no. 88, the Roots entry in TASCHEN's 2021 Frida Kahlo: The Complete Paintings, Herrera's and Ankori's relevant book pages, original artist-text witnesses, and current registrar or owner records have not been consulted. None supplies object-specific claims in this article.
  20. Museo Frida Kahlo, Frida interactive chronology, selected work dates used for the comparison timeline. The current work's date follows its cited object record. View source text.