Frida
Page 10
Frida, however, saw the change that the accident brought about in her not as a rebirth but as an accelerated process of aging. A year had passed since the accident when she wrote to Alejandro:
Why do you study so much? What secret are you looking for? Life will reveal it to you soon. I already know it all, without reading or writing. A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds. My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants and everything today is bland and lucid. I know that nothing lies behind, if there were something I would see it. . . .
What Frida described is the bleak, forbidding dream landscape that would reappear in many of her self-portraits: an outer expression of inner desolation. But she did not share her “painful planet” with many friends and she was forced to hide the intensity of her suffering from her family: “No one in my house believes that I am really sick, since I cannot even say so because my mother, who is the only one who grieves a little, gets sick, and they say that it was because of me, that I am very imprudent, so that I and no one but I am the one that suffers.” The public Frida was gay and strong. Wanting to surround herself with people, she accentuated qualities she already possessed—vivaciousness, generosity, wit. Gradually, she became a famous personality. Aurora Reyes remembers that after her accident and during her relapse “she always acted happy; she gave her heart. She had an incredible richness, and though one went to see her to console her, one came away consoled.”
“When we went to visit her when she was sick,” Adelina Zendejas recalls, “she played, she laughed, she commented, she made caustic criticisms, witticisms, and wise opinions. If she cried, no one knew it.” No one except Alejandro. After the accident, most of the caricatures she drew in her letters to him were weeping self-portraits.
Eventually the role of the heroic sufferer became an integral part of Frida: the mask became the face. And as the dramatization of pain became ever more central to her self-image, she exaggerated the painful facts of her past, claiming, for example, that she had spent not one but three months in the Red Cross Hospital. She created a self that would be strong enough to withstand the blows life dealt her; one who could survive—indeed transform—that bleak planet.
Both the strength and the emphasis on suffering pervade Frida’s paintings. When she shows herself wounded and weeping, it is the equivalent to her letters’ litany of moral and physical wounds, a cry for attention. Yet even the most painful of the self-portraits are never maudlin or self-pitying, and her dignity and determination to “put up with things” is evident in her queenly carriage, her stoic features. It is this blend of directness and artifice, of integrity and self-invention, that gives her self-portraits their peculiar urgency, their immediately recognizable steely strength.
Of all Frida’s paintings, the one that most powerfully illustrates these qualities is The Broken Column (plate XXVIII), painted in 1944 soon after she had undergone surgery and when she was confined, as she had been in 1927, in an “apparatus.” Here Frida’s determined impassivity creates an almost unbearable tension, a feeling of paralysis. Anguish is made vivid by nails driven into her naked body. A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her torso, the two sides of which are held together by the steel orthopedic corset that is a symbol of the invalid’s imprisonment. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida’s feeling that without the steel corset she would literally fall apart. Inside her torso we see a cracked ionic column in the place of her own deteriorating spinal column; life is thus replaced by a crumbling ruin. The tapered column thrusts cruelly into the red crevasse of Frida’s body, penetrating from her loins to her head, where a two-scrolled capital supports her chin. To some observers, the column is analogous to a phallus; the painting alludes to the link in Frida’s mind between sex and pain, and it recalls the steel rod that pierced her vagina during the accident. A disjointed entry in her diary reads: “To hope with anguish retained, the broken column, and the immense look, without walking, in the vast path . . . moving my life created of steel.”
The corset’s white straps with metal buckles accentuate the delicate vulnerability of Frida’s naked breasts, breasts whose perfect beauty makes the rough cut from neck to loins all the more ghastly. With her hips wrapped in a cloth suggestive of Christ’s winding sheet, Frida displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; a Mexican Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of her spiritual suffering.
Frida is no saint, however. She appraises her situation with truculent secularism, and instead of beseeching the heavens for solace, she stares straight ahead as if to challenge both herself (in the mirror) and her audience to face her predicament without flinching. Tears dot her cheeks, as they do the cheeks of so many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico, but her features refuse to cry. They are as mask-like as those of an Indian idol.
To convey the loneliness of physical and emotional suffering, Frida has painted herself isolated against an immense and barren plain. Ravines cut into the landscape are a metaphor for her injured body, like the desert deprived of the capacity to create life. In the far distance there is a strip of blue sea beneath a cloudless sky. When she painted her family tree Frida used the ocean to represent the fact that her paternal grandparents lived in Europe. In her first Self-Portrait it was, she said, the “synthesis of life.” The sea in The Broken Column seems to represent the hope of other possibilities, but it is so far away, and Frida is so broken, that it is utterly beyond reach.
* * *
* Frida refers to factions campaigning for presidential elections to take place early in 1928. With President Calles’s support, former president Alvaro Obregón had had set aside the constitution’s proviso forbidding any president to serve a second term, so that he could run for the office. A revolt against Obregón was violently suppressed.
Chapter 6
Diego: The Frog Prince
WITHIN A FEW MONTHS of Alejandro’s return from Europe, late in 1927, Frida had recuperated sufficiently to lead an almost normal, active life. Although she did not resume her studies—her leg still hurt and besides, she wanted to paint—she did rejoin her old school companions from the Preparatoria. Most of them were by this time students in the professional schools of the university, and firecrackers and water bombs had given way to national student congresses and protest demonstrations.
The principal causes for which they fought were two: José Vasconcelos’s 1928–1929 campaign for the presidency against Calles’s candidate, Pascual Ortíz Rubio, and the drive for university autonomy. The first was a lost cause; the second was won in 1929.
Former President Alvaro Obregón, having survived both an assassination attempt and a rebellion, won the presidency in January 1928. Six months later he was murdered. Emilio Portes Gil was appointed provisional president, and new elections were scheduled for the fall of 1929. Vasconcelos, who had concluded that the Calles regime was more corrupt and tyrannical than the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, decided to run against Ortíz Rubio as the candidate of the National Anti-Reelectionist party. He knew he had no hope of winning the election, but he and his supporters believed that the battle against caudillaje (rule by military chieftain) and for the rebirth of the democratic, Mexicanist spirit of the early twenties was a moral imperative.
The fight for university autonomy was not unrelated, for in part it too was a revolt against government oppression. It had begun essentially in 1912, when Justo Sierra declared that the university he had founded two years before should be free from government intervention. The institution’s first rector, Joaquín Eguia Liz, went further: he said the university should be autonomous. Finally,
on May 17, 1929, a nationwide student strike was triggered when the president of Mexico closed the law school after students rejected a proposed new system of examinations. The students massed, marched, held protest meetings, and painted propaganda signs. The government retaliated with mounted police, fire hoses, and guns. Alejandro Gómez Arias, elected president of the National Student Confederation in January 1929, was the battle’s undisputed leader. “Samurai of my country,” he called his fellow students in fiery speeches. “We will not be convinced by violence.” In July, the law that established the National Autonomous University of Mexico was signed, approved by Congress, and handed ceremoniously to Alejandro.
Another student leader, one who channeled his passionate anti-militarism and anti-imperialism into numerous campaign speeches against the Callistas and for Vasconcelos, was Germán de Campo. During the long, lonely months of 1927, when Alejandro was away and Frida was trapped in one orthopedic corset after another, her friendship with “Germancito el Campirano,” as she called him, had deepened. She adored the handsome young man’s fun-loving spirit, his alegría, and his vehemence. An irrepressible dandy, he delivered the most fervent speeches wearing a boutonniere and an elegant felt hat and carrying a cane made of Indian bamboo. He was to die soon after the battle for university autonomy was won, silenced by a Callista bullet while giving a pro-Vasconcelos speech during a demonstration in San Fernando Park.
It was Germán de Campo who, sometime in the early months of 1928, introduced Frida into the circle of friends surrounding the exiled Cuban Communist revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, who was, like Alejandro and de Campo, a student at the law school. Mella was editor of a student newspaper called Tren Blindado (The Blind Train) and of El Liberador, the Anti-Imperialist League’s official organ, and he contributed to the Communist publication El Machete. Most important for Frida, however, he was also the lover of the Italian-born American photographer Tina Modotti, with whom he was walking on January 10, 1929, when he was assassinated by a gunman in the hire of the Cuban government.
Modotti had come to Mexico from California in 1923 as the great photographer Edward Weston’s apprentice and companion, and she had stayed on after he left, becoming increasingly involved in communist politics, largely through her successive love affairs with the painter Xavier Guerrero and Mella. She was talented, beautiful, tempestuous, and sensitive, and exuded a vibrant strength, somehow managing to be earthy and otherworldly at the same time. Not surprisingly, she was adored by the Mexican art world of the 1920s, a circle that included the painters Jean Charlot, Roberto Montenegro, Best-Maugard, Nahui Olín, and Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias; the writer Anita Brenner; and the editor of Mexican Folkways, Frances Toor; and, of course, the major muralists, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera. Frida and Modotti soon became fast friends, the younger woman—and neophyte painter—drawn naturally to the bohemian world of artists and communists that surrounded the photographer.
This was not Alejandro’s world, though many of its members campaigned with him under the anti-Callista banner. By June 1928 his affair with Frida was over, ending finally when he fell in love with her friend Esperanza Ordóñez.
Frida did not let go easily. “Now as never before I feel that you do not love me anymore,” she wrote to him. “But, I confess to you, I don’t believe it, I have faith—it cannot be—Deep down, you understand me, you know I adore you! That you are not only a thing that is mine, but you are me myself!—Irreplaceable!” Nevertheless, two or three months later, through her friendship with Tina Modotti, Frida had joined the Communist party and had met Diego Rivera, replacing her old love with a new one.
Diego Rivera was forty-one years old when Frida came to know him, and he was Mexico’s most famous—and infamous—artist. Certainly he had covered more walls than any other muralist.
He painted with such fluency and speed that it sometimes seemed he was driven by a telluric force. “I am not merely an ’artist,’ ” he said, “but a man performing his biological function of producing paintings, just as a tree produces flowers and fruit.” Indeed, work was to him a kind of narcotic, and any impediment to it irritated him, whether it was the demands of politics, illness, or the petty details of daily life. Sometimes he labored without stopping for days at a time, taking his meals on the scaffold and, if necessary, sleeping there.
While he painted, he was surrounded by friends and onlookers whom he regaled with fictitious tales—of fighting in the Russian Revolution, for example, or experimenting with a diet of human flesh, especially young female flesh wrapped in a tortilla. “It’s like the tenderest young pig,” he said.
Despite his antics, and though the speed with which he painted made it appear that he was improvising, he was well trained, deliberate, a complete professional. He had been producing paintings since he was three, when his father, after watching him draw all over the walls, gave him a blackboard-lined room where he could draw to his heart’s content.
Born in Guanajuato in 1887 to a schoolteacher (a Mason and freethinker) and his wife, a pious young woman who owned a candy store, Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was considered a prodigy from the beginning. At ten he demanded to be sent to art school, and while continuing his elementary education by day, he took night classes at the most prestigious art school in Mexico, the San Carlos Academy. He won prizes and scholarships, but by 1902 academic teaching seemed to him too limited, and he left school to work on his own.
In those days there was only one place for an aspiring art student, and Rivera, armed with a pension granted by the governor of Veracruz, sailed for Europe in 1907. After a year in Spain, he settled in Paris, where, except for various trips, he stayed until he returned to Mexico in 1921, leaving behind an adoring Russian common-law wife, Angelina Beloff, an illegitimate daughter by another Russian woman, and a host of friends from various, mostly bohemian coteries—Picasso and Gertrude Stein, for example, Guillaume Apollinaire and Elie Faure, Ilya Ehrenburg and Diaghilev.
His first job in Mexico City was to paint the mural entitled Creation in the amphitheater of the National Preparatory School. It is an odd work for a painter already fired with enthusiasm at the prospect of creating a revolutionary and specifically Mexican art. While its intellectual inspiration is clearly Vasconcelos’s lay mysticism—it deploys idealized, monumental figures of theological virtues, and personifications of, for example, wisdom, strength, erotic poetry, tragedy, and science—it is virtually devoid of Mexicanidad in both style and content. Perhaps Rivera was still too enamored of European painting to find the forms and themes that would embody his ideals. Nevertheless, in Creation, he did discover his medium and his scale: the monumental mural. And if his subject matter here was universal and allegorical rather than native and real, it would not be long before the mythic muse with a classical body became Rivera’s classic Mexican Indian mother.
Rivera’s Mexicanidad first emerged in the Ministry of Public Education murals (1923–1928), which he began as soon as he finished the Preparatory School auditorium. In the ministry’s three stories of open hallways surrounding a huge courtyard, he painted the Indians toiling in the fields and mines; being educated by saintly-looking Indian teachers in a rural, open-air school; holding a workers’ meeting and dividing the lands restored to them by the revolution. He invented his own vocabulary for describing them: solid, brown, rounded bodies, round heads and an infinitude of hats—anonymous figures that came to be called (by his enemies) “Rivera’s monkeys.” His subject and his style eventually were so utterly merged that although influences (Giotto, Michelangelo) are obvious, his work does not look derivative: to some, Mexico itself, its folklore and folk, its cactuses and mountains, seems a “motif invented by Diego Rivera. And whatever his specific subject, he portrayed the Indian valiantly struggling under continued oppression to gain new rights and liberties and a better life.
It was a grand and democratic theme, and Rivera and the other muralists embraced
it with reformist zeal not only in their art but in their politics. In September 1923, taking their cue from the mushrooming of labor and peasant organizations in the postrevolutionary years, they gathered in Rivera’s home to found the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors; along with Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Fernando Leal, and Xavier Guerrero (then Tina Modotti’s lover) formed the executive committee. In a manifesto, they declared their sympathy for the oppressed masses and their conviction that Mexican art “is great because it surges from the people; it is collective, and our own aesthetic aim is to socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois individualism. We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic. We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property. We proclaim that this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the makers of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme objective in art, which is today an expression for individual pleasure, is to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.”
With the reaction against positivism and the belief in the genius of intuition that were among the fruits of the revolution came a reevaluation of the art of the child, the peasant, and the Indian. Painters dared proclaim that “the art of the Mexican people is the greatest and the most healthy spiritual expression in the world.” Pre-Columbian art, which had been spurned as alien and barbaric, now was seen as a reflection of something essentially, mysteriously—even nobly—Mexican. Rich Mexicans who in prerevolutionary days might have acquired works by the fashionable Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga now collected Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec idols. Popular artifacts were judged to be works of art, true expressions of “the people” rather than mere curios or junk. There was a revival of handicrafts, and urban Mexicans began to decorate their homes with bright objects from the market and cheap furniture made for campesinos. The regional costumes of Mexico were extolled, categorized, and even worn by cosmopolitan Mexican women. Mexican food replaced French cuisine at sophisticated tables. Corridos (ballads) were meticulously gleaned in all parts of the country, published, and sung in schools and concert halls. Modern Mexican composers Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas wove native rhythms and harmonies into their music, and Rivera’s friend the U.S. composer Aaron Copland would write that “the principal imprint of the Indian personality—its deepest reflection in the music of our hemisphere—is to be found in the present-day school of Mexican composers.”