Text: Gerry Souter

Translator: Jorge Gonzalez Casanova (for Frida Kahlo’s Writings)

 

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ISBN: 978-1-78310-743-8

Gerry Souter

 

 

 

Frida Kahlo

Beneath the Mirror

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The Dream or The Bed, 1940. Oil on canvas,

74 x 98.5 cm. Collection Isidore Ducasse, France.

Contents

 

 

Introduction

The Wild Thing

Death of Innocence

Señora Diego Rivera

Affair of the Art

“I urgently need the dough!”

“Long live joy, life, Diego...”

Conclusion

Index

Notes

2. Self-Portrait, 1930. Oil on canvas,

65 x 55 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

 

Introduction

 

 

Her serene face encircled in a wreath of flaming hair, the broken, pinned, stitched, cleft and withered husk that once contained Frida Kahlo surrendered to the crematory’s flames. The blaze heating the iron slab that had become her final bed replaced dead flesh with the purity of powdered ash and put a period – full stop – to the Judas body that had contained her spirit. Her incandescent image in death was no less real than her portraits in life. As the ashes smoldered and cooled, a darkness descended over her name, her paintings and her brief flirtation with fame. She became a footnote, a “promising talent” forever languishing in the shadow of her husband, the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, or as art critic stated with a yawn over one of her works: “…painted by one of Rivera’s ex-wives”.

Frida Kahlo should have died 30 years earlier in a horrendous bus accident, but her pierced, wrecked body held together long enough to create a legend and a collection of work that resurfaced 30 years after her death. Her paintings struck sparks in a new world prepared to recognise and embrace her gifts. Her paintings formed a visual diary, an outward manifestation of her inward dialog that was, all too often, a scream of pain. Her paintings gave shape to memories, to landscapes of the imagination, to scenes glimpsed and faces studied. Her paintings, with their symbolic palettes, kept madness (yellow) and the claustrophobic prison of plaster and steel corsets at arm’s length. Her personal vocabulary of iconic imagery reveals clues as to how she devoured life, loved, hated, and perceived beauty. Her paintings, seasoned with words and diary pages and recollections of her contemporaries, reward us with a life lived at a fractured gallop, ended – possibly – at her own will, and left behind a courageous collective self-portrait, a sum of all its parts.

The painter and the person are one and inseparable and yet she wore many masks. With intimates, Frida dominated any room with her witty, brash commentary, her singular identification with the peasants of Mexico and yet her distance from them, her taunting of the Europeans and their posturing beneath banners: Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Expressionists, Surrealists, Social Realists, etc. in search of money and rich patrons, or a seat in the academies. And yet, as her work matured, she desired recognition for herself and those paintings once given away as keepsakes. What had begun as a pastime quickly usurped her life. Frida’s conversations were peppered with street slang and vulgarisms that belied her petit stature, Catholic upbringing and conservative love of traditional Mexican customs. While strolling a New York street wearing her red-trimmed Tehuantepec dress, jewelry studded with thousand-year-old jade and with a scarlet reboso shawl across her shoulders, a small boy approached and asked, “Is the circus in town?” She was a one-person show in any company, a Dadaist collection of contradictions.

Her internal life caromed between exuberance and despair as she battled almost constant pain from injuries to her spine, back, right foot, right leg, fungal diseases, many abortions, viruses and the continuing experimental ministrations of her doctors. The singular consistent joy in her life was Diego Rivera, her husband, her frog prince, a fat Communist with bulging eyes, wild hair and a reputation as a lady killer. She endured his infidelities and countered with affairs of her own on three continents consorting with both strong men and desirable women. But in the end, Diego and Frida always came back to each other like two wounded animals, ripped apart with their art and politics and volcanic temperaments and held together with the tenuous red ribbon of their love.

Her paintings on metal, board and canvas with their flat muralist perspectives, hard edges and unrepentant sweeps of local colour reflected his influence. But where Diego painted what he saw on the surface, she eviscerated herself and became her subjects. As Frida’s facility with the medium and mature grasp of her expression sharpened in the 1940s, that Judas body betrayed her and took away her ability to realise all the images pouring from her exhausted psyche. Soon there was nothing left but narcotics and a quart of brandy a day.

Diego stood by her at the end as did a Mexico slow to realise the value of its treasure. Denied singular recognition by her native land until the last years of her life, Frida Kahlo’s only one-person show in Mexico opened where her life began and acted out its brief 47-year arc. When she was gone, the eyes of that life remained behind, observing us from the frame with a direct and challenging gaze.

3. Diego Rivera, Self-Portrait, 1906.

Oil on canvas, 55 x 54 cm. Collection of the

Government of the State of Sinaloa, Mexico.

4. Pancho Villa and Adelita, c. 1927.

Oil on canvas, 65 x 45 cm.

Museo del Instituto Tlaxcala de Cultura, Tlaxcala.

 

 

The Wild Thing

 

 

As a young girl, wherever she went she seemed to run as if there was so little time left to her and so much to be done. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico. By that time running, hiding, and learning to quickly identify which army was approaching the village were everyday survival skills for Mexican civilians. Frida eventually dropped the German spelling of her name, inherited from her father, Wilhelm (changed to Guillermo), a Hungarian raised in Nuremberg. However, she used the German “Frieda” spelling in some of her intimate letters. Her mother, the former Matilde Calderón, a devout Catholic and a mestiza of mixed Indian and European lineage, held deeply conservative and religious views of a woman’s place in the world. On the other hand, Frida’s father was an artist, a photographer of some note who pushed her to think for herself. Guillermo was surrounded by daughters in La Casa Azul (the Blue House) at the corner of Londres and Allende Streets in Coyoacán. Amidst all the traditional domesticity, he fastened onto Frida as a surrogate son who would follow his steps into the creative arts. He became her very first mentor that set her aside from traditional roles accepted by the majority of Mexican women. She became his photographic assistant and began to learn the trade, though with little enthusiasm for the photographic medium. She traveled with him to be there if he suffered one of his epileptic seizures.

Guillermo Kahlo was a proud, fastidious man of regular habits and many intellectual pursuits from the enjoyment of fine classical music – he played almost daily on a small German piano – to his own painting and appreciation of art. His work in oil and watercolour was undistinguished, but it fascinated Frida to watch him use the small brush strokes of a photo retoucher to create scenes on a bare canvas instead of just removing double chins from vain portrait customers.

He rigidly maintained his own duality: outwardly active, but trapped with his epilepsy as he regained consciousness lying in the street, felled by a grand mal seizure with Frida kneeling at his side holding the ether bottle near his nose, making sure his camera was not stolen. He played his music and read from his large library, but inside was constantly in turmoil about money to support his family. He wore what Frida described as a “tranquil” mask. She adopted that self-control, or at least the appearance of it, in the darkest moments of her life, never willing to display any public face that revealed what lay behind the stoic image.

Frida Kahlo was spoiled, indulged and impressionable. Her father’s success landed him a job with the government of Porfirio Díaz, photographing Mexican architecture as a sort of advertisement to lure foreign investment. Since 1876 Díaz had enjoyed some 30 years as president of Mexico and adopted a Darwinian philosophy toward governing the Mexican people. This “survival of the fittest” concept meant virtually all government money and programs went to building up the rich and successful while ignoring less productive peasants. Mexico became the economic darling of international trade as countries took advantage of its mineral wealth and cheap labour. European customs and culture ruled while native Mexican and Indian traditions languished. Díaz personally selected Guillermo Kahlo to show the best side of Mexico to foreign investors, vaulting the photographer from an itinerant portraitist into the coveted middle class.

5. Diego Rivera, Nude of Frida Kahlo, 1930.

Lithography, 44 x 30 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

6. Diego Rivera, Nude of Frida Kahlo, 1930. Lithography,

44 x 30 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

Poem published by El Universal Ilustrado

 

November 30, 1922

 

MEMORY

 

I had smiled. Nothing else. But suddenly I knew

In the depth of my silence

He was following me. Like my shadow, blameless and light.

In the night, a song sobbed...

The Indians lengthened, winding, through the alleys of the town.

A harp and a jarana were the music, and the smiling dark skinned girls

were the happiness

In the background, behind the “Z?calo” (sic), the river shined

and darkened, like

the moments of my life.

He followed me.

I ended up crying, isolated in the porch of the

parish church,

protected by my bolita shawl, drenched with my tears.

Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

 

April 25, 1927

 

Yesterday I was very sick and very sad; you can’t imagine the level of desperation one can reach being this sick. I feel a dreadful discomfort that I can’t describe and sometimes I have a pain that nothing can take away. They were going to put the plaster cast on me today, but it’ll probably be Tuesday or Wednesday because my dad hasn’t had the money – and it costs sixty pesos. And it’s not the money so much, because they could easily get it. [The problem is that] nobody at home believes that I’m really sick, because I can’t even say it, since my mother, who is the only one who worries a little bit [about me], is ill. And they say it’s my fault, that I’m very imprudent. So nobody suffers, despairs, and all that, but me. I can’t write much because I can barely bend down; I can’t walk because my leg hurts terribly. I’m already tired of reading – I don’t have anything nice to read – I can’t do anything but cry, and sometimes I can’t even do that. Nothing amuses me; I don’t have a single distraction – only sorrows – and all the people that pay me a visit annoy me very much. [...] You can’t imagine how these four walls exasperate me. Everything! There’s no way I can describe to you my desperation.

7. Portrait of Alicia Galant (detail), 1927.

Oil on canvas, 107 x 93.5 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

 

 

Kahlo wasted no time in buying a lot in the nearby suburb of Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City and building La Casa Azul, a traditional Mexican wrap-around home – painted a deep blue with red trim – with its rooms opening onto a central courtyard. In 1922, to assure her a better than average education, he also entered Frida into the free National Preparatory School in San Ildefonso. She became one of 35 girls admitted to the school’s enrollment of 2,000 students and rose to become a class character alongside other male pupils who became some of Mexico’s leading intellectuals and government leaders. She devoured her new freedom from mind-numbing domestic chores and hung out with a number of cliques within the school’s social structure. She found a real sense of belonging with the Cachuchas gang of intellectual bohemians – named after the type of hat they wore. Leading this motley elitist mob was Alejandro Gómez Arias, who reiterated in countless speeches that a new enlightenment for Mexico required “optimism, sacrifice, love, joy” and bold leadership. His good looks, confident manner and impressive intellect drew Frida to him.

All her life, Frida attracted men of this stripe and, once conquered, each became enmeshed in her passionate, possessive web. But each conquest also puzzled the country girl as she pondered what these strong decisive men saw in her.

She was short, dark, slender and a cripple. At age 13, Frida had been felled by a bout of polio that withered her right leg leaving it shorter than her left. Neighbourhood children taunted her with shouts of, “pata de palo” or “peg leg”. To conceal her affliction, she wore layers of stockings on her thin leg and had a half-inch added to the heel of her shoe. Considering the state of medicine in Mexico of the 1920s – hot walnut oil baths and calcium doses – she was lucky to be alive. To further compensate for her limp, she plunged into sports: running, boxing, swimming and wrestling, every strenuous activity available to girls. But her greatest sport was intellectual debate, and with Arias she found a true soul-mate.

By 1923 they were lovers and sharing hours at the Ibero American Library, absorbing Gogol, Tolstoy, Spengler, Hegel, Kant and other great European minds. From these sessions and her own reading, she gradually developed a deep-seated affinity for socialism and the uplifting of the masses. To her in that circle of social climbing students, these two concepts were abstractions for lip service, but she remained a committed and vocal Communist for the rest of her life. She even substituted the 1910 date of the start of the Mexican Revolution for her actual birth year, 1907, as an affirmation of her commitment to revolutionary ideals.

8. Portrait of My Sister Cristina, 1928.

Oil on wood, 99 x 81.5 cm.

Otto Atencio Troconis Collection, Caracas.

9. Portrait of a Lady in White, c. 1929.

Oil on canvas, 119 x 81 cm.

Private collection, Germany.

10. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Señora Doña
Evangelina Rivas de Lachica, 1949. Oil on canvas,

198.1 x 139.7 cm. Private collection.

 

 

The atmosphere in Mexico City was alive with political debate and danger as volatile speakers stepped forward to challenge whatever regime claimed power only to be gunned down in the street, or absorbed into the corruption. Díaz fell to Madero who lasted 13 months until he stopped a lethal load of bullets from his general Victoriano Huerta. Populist heroes Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata split the country’s peasant population between them, hunting down anyone who disagreed with their land reform manifestos, but neither managed to build a majority and neither was equipped by temperament or education to govern.

Venustiano Carranza assumed power as Huerta fled Mexico, and was no better than the lot who had preceded him. All of these politicians were products of Díaz’ Eurocentric economic policies that nurtured the rich and ignored the poor. Into this vacuum were thrust the proletariat ideals of the Communist revolution that had swept Russia following the assassination of the Tzar and his family in 1917. The socialist theories of Marx and Engels looked promising after the slaughter of the seemingly endless Mexican revolution.

And yet, for all this progressive political dialectic and debate, Frida retained some of her mother’s Catholic teachings and – after a satiric flirtation with European dress and attitudes including cross-dressing as a man in a tailored suit – developed a passionate love of all things traditionally Mexican. During this time, her father gave her a set of watercolours and brushes. He often took his paints along with his camera on expeditions and assignments. She began this habit as she accompanied him.

Ten years of revolution had wiped out Mexico’s economy and cost Guillermo Kahlo his job with the government. Matilde sent her servants packing and the quality of life in the Blue House dropped a peg or two as the daughters took over all household chores and Guillermo shouldered his Graflex camera in search of portrait commissions.

With the general population breathing easier under the government of a pair of generals, Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Calles, some local intellectuals and artists drifted into favour among the government ministries. “Revolutionary” land reforms were pledged. But the same old story prevailed, keeping a fire lit beneath the political debates and burgeoning movements that left the Mexican capitol in constant ferment.

Frida became a casual student at the Preparatory School, enjoying the stimulation of her intellectual friends rather than the formal studies. At age 15, her intellect was sharp and she tested political and philosophical doctrines with her pals in innocent debate where telling points were not measured in death and destruction. During this period, she learned the minister of education had commissioned a large mural to be painted in the Preparatory School courtyard. It was titled Creation and covered 150 square metres of wall. The muralist was the Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, who had been working in Europe for the past 14 years. Assisted by his wife, Guadalupe (Lupe) Marín, and a team of artisans, he assembled scaffolding and the coloured wax that required blow torch heat to fuse to a resin base spread on the charcoal sketched wall grid. This slow encaustic process was eventually abandoned for plaster fresco, but to Frida the creation of the growing scene spreading its way across the blank wall was fascinating. She and some friends often sneaked into the auditorium to watch Rivera work.

His image was far from that of a starving artist. The scaffolding creaked under his weight as he paced back and forth across the wall. Everything about him was oversized from his unruly mop of black hair to the wide belt that held up his pants which sagged in the seat and bagged at the knees. The students nicknamed him Panzón (fat belly).

Eventually these intrusions ended when another group of students, representing the views of their elite ultra-conservative parents, began damaging other murals in progress by the artists David Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, claiming the murals promoted atheism and socialist ideology. Rivera’s assistants armed themselves and acted as guards when they were not mixing colours or transferring sketches to the wall. Rivera himself cultivated the image of a revolver-packing defender of creative freedom and often turned up at parties with a big Colt pistol stuffed in his belt or in his jacket pocket.

From a very early age, Frida had been taught by her father to appreciate the art of painting. As part of her education he encouraged her to copy popular prints and drawings of other artists. To ease the financial situation at home, she apprenticed with the engraver, Fernando Fernandez, a friend of her father’s. Fernandez praised her work and gave her time to copy prints and drawings with pen and ink. But she painted with the same enthusiasm as she collected hand-made toys, dolls, and colourfully embroidered costumes – as a hobby, a means of personal expression, not as “art” because she had no thought of becoming a professional artist. She considered the skills of artists such as Diego Rivera far beyond her capabilities. Her earliest works were studies in colours and shapes of buildings such as Have Another One, painted in 1925. It is an aerial view of a town square and has a child’s naïve approach to its flat perspective and the donkey cart making its way across a foreground avenue. Another work, Paisaje Urbano (Urban Landscape), is a composition of architectural planes and linear smokestacks that indicates a more sophisticated structure and an appreciation of the work accomplished by subtle use of shadow and control of values. This application hints at the knowledge gained from her line art copies under Fernandez’ tutelage. It also reflects an eye for composition not unlike the photographs of Edward Weston, who had spent a year in Mexico and was in the process of creating a new way of seeing shapes, textures and their interrelationships. Though she did not consider her painting to be anything but a pleasant pastime, that didn’t stop her from conniving her way into a seat in the auditorium where she watched Rivera work – even under the jealous eye and insults of Lupe Marín. His wife regularly brought Diego his lunch in a basket. It was one way she managed to keep an eye on him, especially when he was painting from a particularly beautiful model. Lupe was his second wife and knew him very well.

11. Portrait of Miguel N. Lira, 1927.

Oil on canvas, 99.2 x 67.5 cm.

Museo del Instituto Tlaxcala de Cultura, Tlaxcala.

12. Portrait of Diego Rivera, 1937.

Oil on canvas, 46 x 32 cm. Jacques and

Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City.

 

 

And then everything changed forever. In Kahlo’s words to author, Raquel Tibol:

The buses in those days were absolutely flimsy; they had started to run and were very successful, but the streetcars were empty. I boarded the bus with Alejandro Gómez Arias and was sitting next to him on the end next to the handrail. Moments later the bus crashed into a streetcar of the Xochimilco Line and the streetcar crushed the bus against the street corner. It was a strange crash, not violent, but dull and slow, and it injured everyone, me much more seriously… I was eighteen then but looked much younger, even younger than (my sister) Cristi who was 11 months younger than I… I was an intelligent young girl but not very practical, in spite of the freedom I’d won. Maybe for that reason I didn’t size up the situation, nor did I have any inkling of the injuries I had… The collision had thrown us forward and the handrail went through me like a sword through a bull. A man saw I was having a tremendous hemorrhage and carried me to a nearby pool hall table until the Red Cross picked me up…

As soon as I saw my mother I said to her: “I’m still alive and besides I have something to live for and that something is painting”. Because I had to be lying down with a plaster corset that went from the clavicle to the pelvis, my mother made a very funny contrivance that supported the easel I used to hold the sheets of paper. She was the one who thought of making a top to my bed in the Renaissance style, a canopy with a mirror I could look in to use my image as a model.[1]

The scene of the accident was gruesome. Somehow, the collision tore off Frida’s clothes, dumping her nude onto the shattered floor of the bus. Seated near Frida had been a painter or artisan carrying a paper packet of gold gilt powder. It burst, showering her naked body. The iron handrail had stabbed through her hip and emerged through her vagina. A gout of blood haemorrhaged from her wound, mixing with the gold gilt. In the chaos, bystanders, seeing her bizarre pierced, gilded and blood splashed body began screaming, “La Balarina! La Balarina!” One bystander insisted the hand rail be removed from her. He reached down and tore it from the wound. She screamed so loud the approaching ambulance siren could not be heard.

In 1946, a German physician, Henriette Begun, composed a clinical history of Frida Kahlo. Its entry for September 17, 1925 reads:

Accident causes fractures of third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, three fractures of pelvis, eleven fractures of the right foot, dislocation of the left elbow, penetrating abdominal wound caused by an iron hand rail entering the left hip, exiting through the vagina and tearing left lip. Acute peritonitis. Cystitis with catheterisation for many days. Three months bed rest in hospital. Spinal fracture not recognised by doctors until Dr. Ortiz Tirado ordered immobilisation with plaster corset for nine months… From then on has had sensation of constant fatigue and at times pain in her backbone and right leg, which now never leaves her.[2]

 

 

 

 

 

Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

 

October 20, 1925

 

According to Dr. Díaz Infante, who treated me at the Red Cross, I’m out of danger now and I’m going to get more or less well. [...] The right side of my pelvis is fractured and deviated, I had a foot dislocation, and a dislocation and small fracture of my left elbow and the wounds that I talked to you about in the other letter: the longest one went through my body from the hip to the crotch, so there were two of them. One has already healed and the other is about two centimetres long by one-and-a-half centimetres deep, but I think it’ll heal soon. My right foot is covered with very deep scratches and another thing is that [...] Dr. Díaz Infante (who is very nice) didn’t want to keep treating me because he says that Coyoacán is very faraway and that he couldn’t leave a wounded person and come when they called him, so he was replaced by Pedro Calderón of Coyoacán. Do you remember him?

Well, since every physician says something different about the same illness, Pedro, of course, said that he thought everything was extremely well except for the arm, and that he doubted very much that I could extend it, because the joint is fine, but the tendon is contracted and keeps me from extending my arm, and if I was able to do it, it would be very slowly and after lots of massages and hot water baths. You can’t imagine how it hurts; every time they pull me I cry a litre of tears, even though they say that you shouldn’t believe in a dog’s lameness or a woman’s tears. My leg hurts so very much, one must think that it is crushed. Besides, the whole leg throbs horribly and I feel very uncomfortable, as you might imagine, but with rest they say that the bone will soon heal and that I’ll be able to walk little by little.

 

 

 

 

 

Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

 

January 10, 1927

 

I am, as always, sick. You see how boring this is. I don’t know what else to do, as I’ve been like this for more than a year and I’m fed up. I have so many complaints, like an old woman! I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I’m thirty years old. You’ll have to wrap me up in a cotton cloth and carry me around all day; I don’t think, as I told you one day, that you could carry me in a bag, because I just won’t fit in it. [...] I need you to tell me something new because truly I was born to be a flower pot and I never leave the dining room. I’m buten buten