The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened - by Frida Kahlo

Like most of her work, there's a lot more going on than what appears on the surface. In a lot of Frida's paintings, the objects become Symbols. The bride is that little doll in the corner peeking from the open watermelon. The fruit is opened up. It's not two halves. The sexual overtones are quite evident. The male genitalia in the bananas and the female genitalia in the open papaya, and it all combines into a circle; a circle of the ying and the yang.

When this particular painting was first made in 1939, it didn't include the little bride there on the left. The papaya wasn't split open. It didn't have these bright colors and the erotic undertones that make this an alluring, sexual still life. So all of that suggests the influence of the European avant-garde on her painting in the 1940s. Even though she wasn't really describing herself as a Surrealist, she was absorbing those influences.