The curious combination of being at once self-fascinated and outgoing that characterized Frida as an adult may have begun in the sick child’s exacerbated awareness of the discrepancy between the inner world of daydreams and the outer world of social interchange. The dream of having an imaginary friend, a consoling confidante, never left her; explaining in her diary the origin of the double self-portrait called The Two Fridas (plate XIV), she wrote:
I must have been 6 years old when I experienced intensely an imaginary friendship with a little girl more or less the same age as me. On the glass window of what at that time was my room, and which gave onto Allende Street, I breathed vapor onto one of the first panes. I let out a breath and with a finger I drew a “door.” . . . [Here Frida drew the window of her room.]
Full of great joy and urgency, I went out in my imagination, through this “door.” I crossed the whole plain that I saw in front of me until I arrived at the dairy called “Pinzón.” . . . I entered by the “O” of Pinzón and I went down in great haste into the interior of the earth, where “my imaginary friend” was always waiting for me. I do not remember her image or her color. But I do know that she was gay—she laughed a lot. Without sounds. She was agile and she danced as if she weighed nothing at all. I followed her in all her movements and while she danced I told her my secret problems. Which ones? I do not remember. But from my voice she knew everything about me.. . . When I returned to the window I entered through the same door drawn on the glass pane. When? For how long had I been with her? I do not know. It could have been a second or thousands of years . . . . I was happy. I blurred the “door” with my hand and it “disappeared.” I ran with my secret and my joy as far as the furthermost corner of the patio of my house, and always in the same place under a cedar tree, I cried out and laughed, surprised at being alone with my great happiness and with the so vivid memory of the little girl. Thirty-four years have passed since I experienced this magic friendship and every time that I remember it, it revives and becomes larger and larger inside of my world.
When Frida was up and about again, a doctor recommended a program of physical exercise to strengthen her withered right limb, and Guillermo Kahlo, who had been unusually tender and concerned during his daughter’s illness, made sure that she took up all kinds of sports, which were considered highly unusual for respectable young girls in Mexico at that time. She played soccer, boxed, wrestled, and became a champion swimmer. “My toys,” she recalled, “were those of a boy: skates, bicycles.” She liked to climb trees, row on the lakes of Chapultepec Park, and play ball.
Nevertheless, she said, “The leg remained very thin. When I was seven I wore little boots. In the beginning I supposed that the jokes [about my leg] did not injure me, but afterwards they did, and as time went on more intensely.” Frida’s childhood friend, the painter Aurora Reyes, says: “We were quite cruel about her leg. When she was riding her bicycle we would yell at her: ’Frida, pata de palo!’ [Frida, peg leg], and she would respond furiously with lots of curses.” To hide the leg, she wore three or four socks on the thinner calf, and shoes with a built-up right heel. Other friends admired the fact that she never let her slight deformity keep her from physical activity.
They remember her, black bloomers showing, pedaling her bicycle like a demon around Centenario Park. “She was extremely well coordinated and graceful. When she walked, she made little jumps so that she seemed to float like a bird in flight.”
But she was a wounded bird. And being wounded, she was different from the other children, and often lonely. Just at the age when she might have expanded her world beyond her family circle and made “best friends,” she was forced to stay at home. When she recovered and returned to school, she was teased and left out. Her reaction was alternately to withdraw (she said she became an “introverted creature") and to overcompensate by becoming first a tomboy and later a “character.”
As in the photograph in which she stood apart from the family gathering, so in the paintings in which she portrayed herself as a child, Frida is alone (even in her depiction of her family tree, she stands apart). Although this solitude has much to do with feelings she had at the time she produced the paintings, it is also certain that her painted memories contain much truth about the past: a lonely adult recalls earlier moments of loneliness.
In a 1938 painting inscribed with the words “They ask for airplanes and are given straw wings” (figure 4), Frida combined her recollection of a minor childhood disappointment with her memory of her freedom of movement being curtailed by polio and with her current frustration at being immobilized by surgery on her foot. Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram D. Wolfe, said the painting recalls “the time when her parents dressed her in a white robe and wings to represent an angel (wings that caused a great unhappiness because they would not fly).” In it, Frida, who looks about seven, holds what she asked for and did not receive, a model airplane. The straw wings that she did receive are suspended by ribbons descending from the sky; clearly they cannot fly. To drive that point home, Frida has wound a ribbon around her skirt and nailed the bows at either end to the ground.
Another painting in which Frida shows herself as a solitary child is Four Inhabitants of Mexico (figure 5), from 1938. More ambiguous in its meaning than the self-portrait with straw wings, it at first looks like a harmless piece of Mexican folklore. It is, in fact, a forbidding image of a child confronting the emblems of her cultural heritage.
Unprotected by the walls of her family home, Frida sits on the dirt ground, sucking her middle finger, clutching the folds of her skirt, and impassively absorbing the comings and goings of the adult world. Flanking her are four odd characters: a pre-Columbian Nayarit idol, a Judas figure, a clay skeleton, and a straw horseman. Each of the four inhabitants was modeled after a Mexican artifact that the Riveras actually owned. The scene must be Coyoacán; La Rosita, a pulque bar near Frida’s house, is visible in the background. The village square is “empty, with few people,” Frida said, “because too much revolution has left Mexico empty.” For all her love of her native land, Frida has painted a highly ambivalent view, identifying Mexico’s sufferings with her own.
The young Frida stares at one of the four inhabitants, the pre-Columbian clay sculpture of a naked pregnant woman who is a symbol both of Mexico’s Indian heritage and of the little girl’s own future as a sexually mature woman. Like the adult Frida, the idol is broken; the fronts of its feet are missing and its head has been broken off and repaired. Frida told a friend that the idol is pregnant because, being dead, she has something alive inside, “which is the whole thing about Indians.” And she is naked “because they have no shame about sex or stupid things like that.”
The Judas figure, a large, mustachioed unshaven man wearing blue worker’s overalls, gesticulates as if he were delivering a pronunciamiento, and holds one of the fuses in his network of explosives in a position that suggests an erect penis. He is the male counterpart of the passive pregnant idol, the leader-destroyer who is full of fury and sound and blows himself up. The long shadow that he casts on the earth goes right between the female idol’s legs and lies next to her shadow, thus linking them as a couple. His shadow touches the little girl as well, so that she becomes, along with the Judas and the figurine, part of a family. Frida said she found more humor than menace in the Judas figure, explaining that the Judas was a pretext for joy, gaiety, and irresponsibility, and that it had nothing to do with religion. “It is burnt up,” she said, ". . . it makes noise, it is beautiful, and because it goes to pieces it has color and form.”
The grimacing skeleton, a large version of the small ones Mexican children like to dandle and bounce during the Day of the Dead, signifies “death: very gay, a joke,” Frida said. Like the pregnant idol, the skeleton is in the child’s line of vision; it, too, represents her future.
Behind the skeleton, in the middle distance, is the straw man, perhaps a revolutionary bandit like Pancho Villa, wearing a hat and a cartridge belt and riding a stra
w burro. He suggests a fragility and pathos in Mexican life, a poignant mixture of poverty, pride, and dreams. Frida said that she put him in her painting “because he is weak, and at the same time has such elegance and is so easy to destroy.”
It is an odd vision of Mexico, for it suggests that the nation’s inhabitants—made of papier-mâché, straw, and clay—are the ephemeral survivors of a terrible history. Yet these objects had a personal significance for the mature Frida; like the monkeys and other pets with which she surrounded herself, they were to her a kind of family; they offered familiar comfort in a world that often felt void. The four inhabitants, three of which reappear in The Wounded Table, 1940 (figure 55), were Frida’s companions in a picturesque and sorrowful drama; in effect, as Frida created her Mexican persona, she herself became the fifth inhabitant of Mexico.
It took years for Frida to turn herself into that “fifth inhabitant.” Polio was the beginning of the transformation. All her life she hated the withered leg that resulted from this illness, and she hid it with long Mexican skirts and compensated for it (and for her other wounds) by becoming the most Mexican of Mexicans.
Of his six children, Frida was the one to whom Guillermo Kahlo felt most attached. Rarely demonstrative, he would nonetheless murmur, “Frida, lieber Frida," in a low voice when he came home to Coyoacán from his work in Mexico City. He recognized in her something of his own high-strung sensibility, his own introspection and restlessness. “Frida is the most intelligent of my daughters,” Kahlo used to remark. “She is the most like me.”
A man of fixed habits, he did not have much time for his children. He left home early in the morning for his studio at the corner of Madero and Motolina, above La Perla, the jewelry shop where he had once worked, in the center of Mexico City. Because of the distance from Coyoacán, he did not follow the Mexican custom of going home in the middle of the day to eat a large comida. Instead, Señora Kahlo prepared his lunch in a Mexican basket and sent it to him with a houseboy.
The studio, consisting of a small study and a darkroom, was his own private world, complete with the props necessary to portrait photography (Oriental rug, French chairs, backdrops with illusionistic landscapes), his big German cameras, his lenses and glass plates—and a scale-model locomotive with intricate parts that he painstakingly maintained. As befitted a cultured European of that period in Mexico, he also had a small but carefully selected library—mainly German books, including works by Schiller and Goethe, as well as numerous volumes of philosophy; he once sententiously informed his daughters that “philosophy makes men prudent and helps them to fulfill their responsibilities.” Above his desk and dominating the room was a large portrait of a personal hero, Arthur Schopenhauer.
Every evening Guillermo Kahlo returned home at the same hour. Solemn, courteous, a little severe, he greeted his family, then went directly into the room that housed his German piano and shut himself in for an hour. His passions were Beethoven first, then Johann Strauss; the strains of the “Blue Danube” would be just audible through the thick walls. When he emerged, he ate alone, with his wife waiting on him in silence. After supper he played the piano again, and before retiring he always read.
Although Kahlo was not intimate with his children, he was attentive to his favorite. He stimulated Frida’s intellectual adventurousness, lending her books from his library and encouraging her to share his curiosity about, and passion for, all manifestations of nature—stones, flowers, animals, birds, insects, shells. On occasion, Frida and her father would go to nearby parks, and while Kahlo (who was an amateur painter) painted watercolors, she spent hours collecting pebbles, insects, and rare plants along the river’s edge. These she would take home to look up in books, to dissect, and to peer at under a microscope.
When she was old enough, her father shared with her his interest in Mexican archaeology and art and taught her to use a camera and to develop, retouch, and color photographs. Although the young Frida did not have much patience for the exacting work, something of her father’s fastidiousness, his concern for minute surface detail, would later appear in her own paintings. Certainly the tiny brush strokes and the small scale that retouching photographs entails became second nature to Frida, and the stiff formality of her father’s portraits affected her approach to portraiture. Acknowledging the link between his art and her own, Frida once said that her paintings were like the photographs that her father did for calendar illustrations, only instead of painting outer reality, she painted the calendars that were inside her head. And if Guillermo Kahlo’s meticulously realistic paintings, mostly still lifes and sentimental farm scenes, did not influence Frida, the fact that he was a painter as well as a photographer did: Frida is yet another instance of a woman artist—other examples are Marietta Robusti (Tintoretto’s daughter), Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kaufman—with an artist father who encouraged her career.
After Frida’s bout with polio, the two were drawn even closer to each other, bound by a shared experience of illness and loneliness. Frida recalled that her father’s attacks frequently occurred at night, just before she went to bed. When she was a small child, she was hustled out of the way. Nothing was explained to her, and she would lie in bed in fright and wonder; in the morning she was equally perplexed to find her father acting perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened. He became, she said, a “kind of fearful mystery, for whom I also had pity.” Later, she often accompanied him on photography outings, to be there when he needed her. “Many times when he went walking with his camera on his shoulder and me by the hand, he would suddenly fall. I learned to help him during his attacks in the middle of the street. On the one hand, I would make sure that he immediately breathed alcohol or ether, and on the other, I watched so that his camera would not be stolen.”
Years later, Frida wrote in her diary: “My childhood was marvelous, because, although my father was a sick man (he had vertigos every month and a half), he was an immense example to me of tenderness, of work (photographer and also painter) and above all of understanding for all my problems.”
Another testimony to her daughterly love is Portrait of Don Guillermo Kahlo (figure 7). It is based on a photograph that he probably took of himself, and was painted in 1952, eleven years after he had died of a heart attack, and only two years before her own death. Sober browns, grays, and black convey the seriousness of Herr Kahlo; the furrowed brow and the wild, haunted look in his overlarge eyes—eyes that are as round and shiny as his camera lens—hint at emotional imbalance. It is surprising that Frida once used the word “tranquil” to describe her father, for his surface calm came from control and taciturnity, not from any real feelings of peace. Similarly, Frida would choose to paint her own face always as an impassive mask to hide the disquiet within. Surrounding the man and his camera, and echoing the circular forms of eyes and lens, Frida has painted magnified cells containing dark nuclei afloat in a swarm of small dark marks that suggest sperm. Did she merely want to refer to the fact that he was her biological progenitor? Or does the background suggest that Frida saw a connection between her father and primal energy? Whatever their meaning, the effect of the staccato marks is to heighten the sense of Guillermo Kahlo’s unrest.
The inscribed scroll below her father’s bust reads: “I painted my father, Wilhelm Kahlo of Hungarian-German origin, artist-photographer by profession, in character generous, intelligent and fine, valiant because he suffered for sixty years with epilepsy, but he never stopped working and he fought against Hitler, with adoration. His daughter Frida Kahlo.”
Chapter 3
The National Preparatory School
IN 1922, FRIDA KAHLO entered what was undoubtedly the best educational institution in Mexico, the National Preparatory School. Out from under the thumbs of mother, sisters, aunts, away from the gentle, slow village life of Coyoacán, she was thrust into the heart of Mexico City, where modern Mexico was being invented and where students actually participated in that invention. Among her fellows were the cream of Mexico’s y
outh, sons and daughters of professional people from the capital and from the provinces who wanted their children to prepare for the various graduate and professional schools of the National University. By the time their student days were over, not only had they helped to change both their school and their university; they were on their way to becoming leaders in the national community as well. It is no wonder that when Frida changed her birth date she chose to have been born the year of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. If the decision came in a flash of insight, the story behind it unfurled in her tumultuous years at the Preparatory School.
From its inception, the Preparatoria was impressive. It was founded in 1868, after the execution of Emperor Maximilian, when the Jesuit College of San Ildefonso was transformed into part of the restored republic’s system of free secular education set up by President Benito Juarez, and it was more like a college than a secondary school. Its first director, Gabino Barreda, described the curriculum as a ladder of knowledge, one step leading to the next, beginning with mathematics and culminating with logic. In between, students would take numerous courses in the physical and biological sciences; languages would be coordinated with the sequence of scientific study—first French, followed by English, in some cases German, and in the final two years, Latin. “The following,” Barreda said, “will be our motto: liberty, order, progress; liberty as a means, order as a basis and progress as an end.” His words were an interpretation of those carved in stone on the Preparatoria’s escutcheon: “Love, Order and Progress.”
In 1910, as the opening guns of the revolution were sounding in the provinces, Porfirio Díaz’s last minister of instruction, Justa Sierra, created the National University of Mexico and made the Preparatoria an integral part of it; by the 1920s, attending the school meant being taught by the ablest minds of Mexico—biologist Isaac Ochoterena, for example; historian Daniel Cossio Villegas; philosophers Antonio Caso and Samuel Ramos; scholars of literature Erasmo Castellanos Quinto, Jaime Torres Bodet, and Narciso Bassols (then director of the National Law School), the last two of whom later served as education ministers. It also meant being caught up in a center of cultural and political ferment.
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