In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo’s image is everywhere. Every bus, every handbag, every poster
and billboard, there she is, looking out at you, just like Mona Lisa.
I wondered ‘Who would have thought of it back then in her day?’
She is almost saint-like.
It struck me that some women, Joan of Arc, Mother Theresa, some women
seem to rise up and resonate for centuries. Their paths take a heaven-bound route, the way
of a flight of wild geese, leaving the earth far behind.
What is it about Frida Kahlo that has resonated so?
I went to her house in Mexico City like a pilgrim, sort of to find out. This visit, like a visit to Mecca, was
one of my life dreams.
Her house was painted an electric blue.
It was the colour popular of indigenous culture – representing purity,
love and electricity. While lizards
running by, she’d learnt to paint on its patio.
Going into the house, I found myself in Frida’s private world. Here are the paintings she said could
never leave it. They are so deeply
personal, and were, in her life time, considered too intimist and therefore not
up to Diego’s standards.
She was born in the blue house in 1907. She was the 3rd of 4 daughters.
Her father was a photographer.
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| Guillermo Kahlor |
Frida shared her father’s passion and intensity and he recognised her talent.
“He was an immense example of tenderness” she said of him.
Pattern behind is like cells under a
microscope given by her father who encouraged her medicine.
She believed that social equality is the key to a better life. Nobody fights for himself – everything
is all and me.
“Marxism will give health
to the sick”
In this painting the eagle in this painting is the symbol of
capitalism. The working man is in
danger of being its prey. The important way to fight capitalism was to say was ‘we’
and NOT ‘I’
When she married Diego they would live in the house between 1929 and
1954. Rivera was a national hero when they met. They were both deeply committed to same ideals. He was twenty-one years older, 200 pounds
heavier, and, at more than six feet, nearly 12 inches taller than she,
gargantuan in both scale and appetites. As irresistible as he was ugly, Rivera
was described by Frida as “a boy frog standing on his hind legs”
It was obvious, despite the battles of ego the two suffered, that her and
Diego attained a rare love and respect.
Diego told her she was a good painter and told her all the time.
One of the pieces in the house speak of their love. ‘Two clocks’ (left
is time of divorce and right is when reunited again) It is called “Time works again”
Both had many lovers but no-one could separate our fountains
of love.
However, Kahlo’s paintings also speak of issues society chooses to hide:
her unspoken miscarriage and infidelity.
We learn from them of her sorrow, in which she expresses the grief she
felt when, just before her toes were amputated Diego was having affaire with
her sister. This was in 1935 and
she didn’t paint for a year.
"Still-life in wooden frame" alludes to the womb. This was a commission
rejected because of its reference to the female sexual organ.
Other paintings spoke of her strong
will to live, despite the pain of operations on her back.
“Long live life” shows her passion to create.
She said that:
“I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint”
“Who needs feet when I’ve got wings to fly”
She tried to disguise the short leg, with its long heal by wearing long
dresses. Working as a teacher at National Painting and Sculpture School, the
students would instead notice the sound of bells ringing on her indigenous
clothes and the students also noticed her unibrow.
Some of her paintings were similar to Ex Votums – Votas. Ex-Votos are images offered to a saint or the Madonna
as a thank you for an answered prayer. In most cases, the Ex-Vota is
signed by the supplicant and dated, and explains why the giver is giving
thanks. In many cases, they tell a very touching personal story. “I thank our lady for saving me”
Frida collected the ones of people who had accidents and was interested
in lives of real people.
She also collected
other things, photos (6000), skeletons and skulls, popular art (a common theme
in her work) papier-maché Judas figures which were loaded with fire-works and
exploded to mock Judas and mermaids (popular art) because their bodies were
broken and Frida identified with them.
She was active in the Mexican Communist Party. Trotsky lived in her house for two years – sharing political
passions with the couple.
Frida
and Trotsky had an affaire and they passed love notes to each other hidden in
books. Diego and Frida built
higher garden walls and thickened ceiling for Trotsky, but Stalin was
unrelenting in his harassment and pursuit of Trotsky and later Trotsky was
brutally murdered in a house around the corner in the same neighbourhood.
Frida had numerous other lovers too, among them Nickolas Murray, the photographer
“her adorable Nick” an enduring love, Georgia O’Keefe and Jacquelina Camba
Noquchi. She was discrete with her love affaires.
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| Portrait of Frida by Nicolas Murray |
But she did not forget her inner child. Her house still has the dolls that she kept all her life and
the puppets and theatres she played with. Diego brought her puppets to
hospital.
There was something dream-like about her work, where she expressed
herself without the reason or
He wrote for her catalogue.
“The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb”
In 1934 Breton also protested against the threat
to expel Trotsky from France where Trotsky had been recently exiled. He referred to Trotsky several times in
his ‘The Political Position of Surrealism’ citing his revolutionary aim to “win
every man’s right not only to bread but to poetry” He recognised Frida Kahlo as
being “delicately situated at that point of intersection between the political
(philosophical) line and the artistic line” He used her art to reinforce Surrealism’s call for a ‘single
revolutionary consciousness’
Frida could also connected to the spirituality of pre-hispanic cultures.
The Aztecs and
their “magical beings or spirits”.
These ancient Mexicans had myths and legends of their own, such as the ritual of the ingestion of the peyote. This
mission was spiritual in commune with the gods.
Antonin Artaud tried
desperately to participate in such cultural, social, and political life of Mexico,
determined to find its primitive spirit.
He said
“The one that cannot see what is, because
nothing exists in reality, but which, by the brush or pen, reproduces what it
supposes, and what it supposes is always in the measure of its limitless
imagination”
In ‘Souvenir du Mexique’ Breton described Mexico
as “Red land, Virgin land, all soaked with the most generous blood, land where
man’s life is priceless yet ready as the agave (always its best expression) to
consume itself in a flowering of desire and danger!”
He claimed Aztec culture was the foundation of
modern Mexican cultural revolution, while “the power of conciliating life and
death” was the main attraction that ‘lures us to Mexico’
Zopotec’s love of independence inspired Breton’s
adventurer’s turn of phrase and conflation of the revolutionary spirit of
France and that of Latin America as well as his fascination with Kahlo’s
Tehuana dress (the typical dress of the Isthmus Zapotec women)
In Diego’s bedroom we see his hat and his dungarees
and his bed. Devoted companions, Frida and Diego no longer slept together as Diego
snored. But in this ground floor
room, he could come and go as he pleased, to do his true love, his ‘obrero’
Frida said of him: “Diego is neither defeatist nor downcast. He is, first and foremost, a
researcher, a builder and above all, an architect… No matter whether his
composition is a painting or a house or an argument”
She said to him: “Never in life I will forget your presence. You found me turned apart and you took
me back full and complete”
Rivera’s admiration was mutual. He said that Kahlo’s art “had no
precedent in the history of art – paintings which exalted the feminine
qualities of endurance to truth, reality, cruelty and suffering”
“Every moment he is my child” Frida said of
him.
In her effort to please Diego’s stomach, Frida learned to
master Diego’s favourite dishes from Lupé Marine, Diego’s previous wife. The
kitchen is a traditional Mexican kitchen with no fridge. The oven is
authentic (just logs under a tiled box) and they collects pots on travels, with
dishes large enough for a whole village and big ceramic dishes.
They would have
grand dinner parties. Even
Eisenstein dined with them. It was
said that people “Came for Diego but stayed on because of Frida” all recognising
her and enchanted by her personality.
Then, up some steps is Frida’s studio. She had to be carried up the steps. In there, there is still
the empty wheel chair, the mirror, the powder paints, her easel (a gift from
Rockafellor) and a poster showing ‘Intra-Uterine life’, showing the process of
growth from conception to birth.
All her books are annotated, suggesting her intellectual curiosity and
reveal her deep interest in pre-Hispanic cultures. Her file boxes are decorated (each picture refers to what’s
inside – the devil with horns is Rivero’s box)
Then we come to her bedroom.
We see the bed where she first began to paint after her accident in a
tram crash. This is the same bed
in which she would die.
Frida’s ashes are on the dressing table in pre-hispanic urn with design
of toad representing Diego ‘the toad-frog’ Diego has written on it: “May she
rest in ashes alive in my heart”
It’s as if she’s resting symbolically inside her beloved Diego.
We see the wardrobes for her clothing, which was important to her art.
Her mother was a seamstress and so knew dressing skills. Frida had 300 items of clothes from
different regions of Mexico and wore the folkloric work in her work.
Her
Tehuana dress was her signature dress, a hybrid representing her own mixed
European and Mexican bloods. The
dress symbolised a matriarchal society which was administered and dominated by
women. The dress represents female
power and independence and Diego was fond of powerful Zapote women. Frida was able to perceive the semiotic
quality of the clothing.
In an outbuilding of the house, there are the corsets and the diary,
telling of her pain and her despair.
We recall the pain that Frida suffered, with her polio, her back
problems and the dominoing effects of gangrene. Like Christ on the cruxifix, there is something of this same
agony expressed by her and she often drank a bottle of cognac, lived off
painkillers and had 32 corsets during her life.
And yet Frida Kahlo managed to transform her pain and oppression.
From a Christian viewpoint, she transformed her pain into love. St Augustine argued that Christ
suffering on the cross was in fact a joyous occasion.
St. Augustine speaks of going to the cross as a bridegroom to his bride.
Joseph Campbell speaks of self‐preservation as only the second law of life. The
first law is that you and the other are one. That the Kingdom of God is
within us. And Easter and Passover remind us that we have to let go in order to
enter it.
Perhaps this is what Frida Kahlo achieved and it is this what has made
her such an inspiration: it is her political engagement, her spiritual
sensitivity, her historical rootedness, her love of life and art that are all
aspects of her character which helped her to rise up now letting her colourful feathers fall, serving
as ornaments in the sacred dance
The life of a man who has perfected himself is a bright light for the
people of earth, who look up to him as an example and this is why Frida Kahlo has become a
symbol in Mexico of saint-like realms, showing us how we can transform
adversities into creativity.
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