Turkheimer Federico E, Liu Jingyi, Fagerholm Erik D, Dazzan Paola, Loggia Marco L, Bettelheim Eric
Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2022 Sep 2;16:1000656. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.1000656. eCollection 2022.
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican artist who is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. This work aims to use her life story and her artistic production in a longitudinal study to examine with quantitative tools the effects of physical and emotional pain (rage) on artistic expression. Kahlo suffered from polio as a child, was involved in a bus accident as a teenager where she suffered multiple fractures of her spine and had 30 operations throughout her lifetime. She also had a tempestuous relationship with her painter husband, Diego Rivera. Her physical and personal troubles however became the texture of her vivid visual vocabulary-usually expressed through the depiction of Mexican and indigenous culture or the female experience and form. We applied color analysis to a series of Frida's self-portraits and revealed a very strong association of physical pain and emotional rage with low wavelength colors (red and yellow), indicating that the expression of her ailments was, consciously or not, achieved by increasing the perceived luminance of the canvas. Further quantitative analysis that used the fractal dimension identified "The broken column" as the portrait with higher compositional complexity, which matches previous critical acclaim of this portrait as the climax of her art. These results confirm the ability of color analysis to extract emotional and cognitive features from artistic work. We suggest that these tools could be used as markers to support artistic and creative interventions in mental health.
弗里达·卡罗（1907 - 1954）是一位墨西哥艺术家，她以自画像、痛苦与激情以及大胆、鲜艳的色彩而被人们铭记。这项研究旨在通过纵向研究利用她的人生经历和艺术作品，运用定量工具来探究身体和情感痛苦（愤怒）对艺术表达的影响。卡罗儿时患过小儿麻痹症，十几岁时遭遇一场巴士事故，脊椎多处骨折，一生经历了30次手术。她与画家丈夫迭戈·里维拉的关系也动荡不安。然而，她身体上的病痛和个人生活的困扰却成为了她生动视觉语言的素材——通常通过描绘墨西哥和本土文化或女性经历与形象来表达。我们对卡罗的一系列自画像进行了色彩分析，发现身体疼痛和情感愤怒与低波长颜色（红色和黄色）之间存在非常强烈的关联，这表明她对病痛的表达，无论是否有意识，都是通过提高画布的感知亮度来实现的。进一步使用分形维数的定量分析将《折断的圆柱》确定为构图复杂度更高的画像，这与之前该画像作为她艺术巅峰之作的评论一致。这些结果证实了色彩分析从艺术作品中提取情感和认知特征的能力。我们建议这些工具可作为一种标志，来支持针对心理健康的艺术和创造性干预。
