A week after their return, Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser:
Coyoacán, June 14, 1931
Dear Doctor:
You cannot imagine the pain that not seeing you before coming here gave us, but it was impossible. I telephoned your office three times without finding you since no one answered, so I left word with Clifford [Wight] asking him to do me the favor of giving you an explanation. Also, imagine, Diego was painting until twelve the night before the day we left San Francisco and we had no time for anything, so that this letter serves first of all to ask you a thousand pardons and to tell you also that we arrived safely in this country of enchiladas and fried beans—Diego is already working in the Palace. He has had something the matter with his mouth and what’s more he is very tired. I would like, if you write to him, that you tell him that it is necessary for his health for him to rest a little, since if he keeps on working like this he is going to die, don’t tell him that I told you that he is working so much, but tell him that you know about it and that it is absolutely necessary for him to rest a little. I would be most grateful to you.
Diego is not happy here since he misses the friendliness of the people of San Francisco as well as the city itself, now he wants nothing other than to return to the United States to paint. I arrived feeling very well, skinny as always and bored with everything, but I feel much better. I do not know with what to pay you for my treatment and for all the favors that you did for me and Diego. I know that the worst way would be with money, but no matter how great my gratitude it would never compensate for your kindness so that I implore and beg you to be good enough to let me know how much I owe you since you cannot imagine how much pain it caused me to leave without having given you anything equivalent to your kindness. In your answer to my letter tell me how you are, what you are doing, everything, and please say hello to all the friends, especially to Ralph and Ginette [Stackpole].
Mexico is as always, disorganized and gone to the devil, the only thing that it retains is the immense beauty of the land and of the Indians. Each day the United States’ ugliness steals away a piece of it, it is a sad thing but people must eat and it can’t be helped that the big fish eats the little one. Diego sends many greetings. Receive the affection that you know is held for you by
Frieda
The Riveras were not to be in Mexico for long: in July, Frances Flynn Paine, a New York art dealer, art adviser to the Rockefellers, and a member of the board of directors of the Mexican Arts Association, came to Mexico to invite Diego to have a retrospective exhibition at New York’s fledgling Museum of Modern Art.
During the conservative regimes of Calles and his successors, enthusiasm for cultural exchange had gone hand in hand with improved United States–Mexico relations. One of the results was the Mexican Arts Association, hatched at the Manhattan home of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to “promote friendship between the people of Mexico and the United States by encouraging cultural relations and the interchange of fine and applied arts.” Rockefeller contributed the initial funding; his brother-in-law, the New York banker Winthrop W. Aldrich, was the association’s president (it is probably not a coincidence that both the Rockefeller and the Aldrich families had enormous holdings in Latin America). If Rivera was good enough for the Calles administration, the association decided, he was good enough for capitalism: “Diego’s very spinal column is painting, not politics,” argued Mrs. Paine in her essay for the catalogue of Rivera’s show.
Certainly Diego could not resist the honor of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—a show that would be the museum’s second one-man show (the first was Matisse’s) and its fourteenth exhibition. Once again he left his National Palace murals unfinished, and at dawn on a mid-November day, he and Frida, accompanied by Mrs. Paine and by Rivera’s faithful plasterer, Ramón Alva, sailed into New York harbor aboard the Morro Castle. Diego was on deck, full of his usual ebullience. He waved his arms, pointing out the beauty of the lights in Manhattan skyscrapers, the glories of the fog, the rising sun, tugboats, ferries, riveters at work on a dock. A stream of smoke rose from his seven-inch cigar and curled over the broad brim of his tan sombrero. His smile was, as always, genial, his manner courteous. The newcomer announced to the New York Herald Tribune reporter who had come on board to interview him: “There is no reason in the world why any person born on our two continents should go to Europe for inspiration or study. Here it is—the might, the power, the energy, the sadness, the glory, the youthfulness of our lands"; and admiring the Equitable Building (1914) in lower Manhattan, a behemoth that rises forty stories straight up from the building line (it was one of the buildings that caused the city to write the zoning law of 1916, requiring setbacks for skyscrapers), he pronounced: “There we are on our own earth, for whether the architects knew it or not, they were inspired in that design by the same feeling which prompted the ancient people of Yucatan in the building of their temples.” Rivera played to the hilt the role of cultural ambassador from the South. The peoples of North and South America are one young, vital people, he said. A new, harmonious era would bring forth a new American expression in art: “We all are striving toward that perfection—all of us are, in all classes. I feel that we will succeed in this effort at cooperation.”
As the ship neared the dock, Rivera waved his hat wildly to a gathering of friends and welcomers. Waiting on the pier were A. Conger Goodyear, the white-haired and kindly president of the Museum of Modern Art, who would become a close friend of Frida’s, and two men whom Rivera had met in Moscow in 1928—Jere Abbot, the museum’s associate director, and its brilliant young director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who a decade later would visit Frida’s studio in Coyoacán, giving his hostess the immense satisfaction of his approving eye directed at both her art and her person. Clifford Wight and another of Rivera’s San Francisco assistants were there, as well.
After installing their belongings in an apartment at the Hotel Barbizon-Plaza, on Sixth Avenue and Central Park South, Frida and Diego went at once to the Heckscher Building, on Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, which at that time housed the Museum of Modern Art. There they inspected the museum galleries that Rivera’s paintings would soon fill and the studio that had been fitted out for him on a high floor of the building. Here Rivera would work against time; he had little over a month to prepare for his show, which was to comprise 143 paintings, watercolors, and drawings plus seven movable fresco panels, three of which were to be new compositions based on his observations of Manhattan.
Although Rivera worked day and night, stopping only for the occasional glass of milk, he did take time out to play social lion, and he and Frida were honored at a succession of parties and receptions. Through the well-connected Mrs. Paine, they met high-powered New Yorkers from both the world of finance and the world of art. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller (née Abby Aldrich), for example, became a friend and a Rivera patron. She once asked him to paint on her dining room wall a version of his notorious Night of the Rich, a fresco panel at the Ministry of Education Building that showed John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford dining on ticker tape, but Rivera refused: though he agreed that the idea was amusing, he also knew it trivialized his political convictions. Rivera did, however, enjoy his own “nights of the rich.” There is a wonderfully funny photograph of him attending a formal dinner at the posh University Club; he is almost indistinguishable from his hosts—fat, balding, well-dressed, and clearly relishing a lavish meal.
“Diego naturally is already at work and the city has interested him greatly and me likewise,” Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser on November 23, “but I, as always, never do anything except look and get bored during some hours. These days have been full of invitations to the houses of the ’right’ people and I am rather tired but this will be over soon and little by little I will be able to go about doing what I please.”
Lucienne and Suzanne Bloch, daughters of the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch, met the Riveras soon after their arrival in Manhattan at a banquet given by Rivera’s patron Mrs. Char
les Liebman for her sister, Mrs. Sigmund Stern. “I was sitting next to Diego,” Lucienne remembers. “I took him over and talked and talked with him. I was very impressed with Diego’s idea that machines were marvelous; all the artists I knew thought machines were terrible.” Lucienne told Diego that she had been invited to be head of the sculpture department of Frank Lloyd Wright’s school in Taliesin. “Wright is a lackey of the capitalists,” said Diego, “because he believes in spreading people out.” So completely absorbed in Diego Rivera was Lucienne that she didn’t see anyone else, “excepting once in a while I saw this Frida Rivera with her one eyebrow that crossed her forehead and her beautiful jewelry, just giving me these dirty looks. After dinner, Frida came over to me, and she looked at me with a really sharp look and said, ’I hate you!’ I was very impressed. This was my first contact with Frida and I loved her for it. At the dinner she thought that I was flirting with Diego.” The next day Lucienne went to Rivera’s studio and started work as his assistant. Once Frida realized that Lucienne was not trying to seduce her husband but just loved the amplitude and flamboyance of his personality, the two became close friends. (When Lucienne, who married Stephen Dimitroff, another of Rivera’s assistants, a few years later, had a son, the godmother was Frida.)
Frida’s impressions of New York City are recorded in another letter (November 26) to Dr. Eloesser:
High society here turns me off and I feel a bit of rage against all these rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger. . . .
Although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States, I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste.
They live as if in an enormous chicken coop that is dirty and uncomfortable. The houses look like bread ovens and all the comfort that they talk about is a myth. I don’t know if I am mistaken but I’m only telling you what I feel.
Shyness and her dislike of gringo society made Frida stick close by Rivera’s side at his Museum of Modern Art opening on December 22, despite the presence of friends such as Lucienne Bloch and Anita Brenner. The vernissage was a major social event, a gathering of Manhattan’s elite, among them John D. and Abby Rockefeller, art world sophisticates like Frank Crowninshield, and of course, museum officials. The guests merrily drank and chattered against the backdrop of Rivera’s painted pageant of Mexico, their social glitter and sartorial swank in sharp contrast with the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, the group of newly completed fresco panels showing Rivera’s Marxist view of Mexico: Agrarian Leader Zapata, Liberation of the Peon, and Sugar Cane, which depicts workers oppressed by landowners. (The three other panels, depicting his view of the urban proletariat, including Frozen Assets, were not finished in time for the opening, and they were added to the show a few days later.) In equally sharp contrast with the assembled art patrons and patronesses, decked out in black tie and pale, floor-length evening gowns, was Frida Kahlo—olive-skinned, almost swarthy, and strikingly exotic in her bright Tehuana finery—standing quietly next to the protective bulk of her garrulous husband.
Rivera’s show not only received critical acclaim, it also drew the highest attendance of any exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art to that time. By January 27, 1932, when it closed, 56,575 people had paid admission to see it, and the dean of New York art critics, Henry McBride, had described the artist in the New York Sun (December 26, 1931) as “the most talked about man on this side of the Atlantic.”
No doubt the success of Rivera’s show made Frida’s life in New York more amusing. She met many people, and with her new friends, she explored Manhattan, enjoyed leisurely lunches, and went to the movies—preferably horror movies and the comedies of the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. “We had lunch with Frieda at Reuben’s and laughed a lot together,” Lucienne Bloch wrote in her diary. “Then went to see Frankenstein, which Frieda wanted to see again.” Something else that made her days more fun was the fact that Rivera was no longer working against a deadline and could spend more time with her. “Had a delicious meal at the speakeasy with Diego Rivera and wife,” Lucienne wrote, and she went on to note that “Frieda can’t stand the Hotel Barbizon-Plaza because the elevator boys snub her because they can see she is no rich person. The other day she called one of them a son of a bitch and she asked us if it was the correct term.”
By the time the Riveras’ stay in Manhattan was nearing its end, Frida was no longer the shy, reclusive creature she had been when she arrived. Though she still complained about many aspects of Gringolandia, she was now caught up in an active and glamorous life. On March 31, for example, the Riveras, along with a Pullman-car load of culture-hungry New Yorkers, traveled to Philadelphia to attend the premiere of the Mexican ballet H.P., which was conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Frida’s reaction was at once forthright and impudent. A month or so later she set down in a letter to Dr. Eloesser what she did not hesitate to say at the time: “As concerns what you asked me about the Ballet by Carlos Chávez and Diego. It turned out to be a porquería [disgusting mess] with a P of not because of the music or the decorations but because of the choreography, since there was a crowd of insipid blonds pretending they were Indians from Tehuantepec and when they had to dance the Zandunga they looked as if they had lead instead of blood. To sum up, a pure and total cochinada [piggery].”
Chapter 10
Detroit: Henry Ford Hospital
TO DIEGO Rivera, Detroit was the heart of American industry, the home of the American proletariat. Thus when William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and art historian Edgar P. Richardson, also on the staff of the institute, met Rivera in San Francisco and proposed that he come to Detroit to paint murals on the theme of modern industry, Rivera was delighted. The Detroit Arts Commission, then headed by the president of the Ford Motor Company, Edsel Ford, approved, and when Ford agreed to pay ten thousand dollars for the large murals celebrating Detroit industry—in particular the automotive industry, and even more particularly the Ford Motor Company—the deal was made. In April 1932, the most famous painter in the world dispatched his assistants to oversee the preparation of the walls and the lime plaster. At noon on April 21, he and his wife stepped off the train in the city that Diego felt would be the proper place to paint “the great Saga of the machine and of steel.”
They were met at the station by a welcoming party that included Valentiner, the Mexican vice-consul, some twenty members of a Mexican cultural club, Diego’s assistants and their wives, and the press. Frida, according to the Detroit News, wore a black silk brocade dress with corded shirrings at the round neck, a long dark-green embroidered silk shawl, high spindle-heeled slippers, heavy dark uncut amber beads, and a jadeite necklace with carved pendants. In his awkward English, Rivera introduced her: “His name is Carmen,” he said (with the rise of Nazism, he did not like to use her German name). Frida, in response to a photographer’s request that she wave, “ended the little upward flourish of her hand with a lightning-like comic salute,” before dashing down the steps of the train to embrace friends and to thrust a ukulele she was carrying into the hands of Clifford Wight. When asked if she, too, was a painter, she replied in fluent English, “Yes, the greatest in the world.”
Frida and Diego went directly from the station to their new lodgings, a characterless but convenient one-bedroom furnished apartment in the Wardell, a mammoth residential hotel at 15 Kirby East and Woodward Avenue, just across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts. On its letterhead, the Wardell called itself “the best home address in Detroit.” What that meant, the Riveras discovered after a few weeks, was that the hotel did not take in Jews. “But Frida and I have Jewish blood!” Diego shouted. “We are going to have to leave!” Anxious to keep their business, a hotel official
protested, “Oh, no! We don’t mean it that way!” and offered to lower the rent. Rivera retorted, “I won’t stay here no matter how much you lower the price, unless you remove the restriction.” Desperate for customers, the management promised to comply and also reduced the rent from $185 to $100 a month.
Not long after settling in at the Wardell, Frida and Diego met Edsel Ford and the other members of the Detroit Arts Commission, and Rivera began to prepare his mural studies for their approval. Sometimes, with Frida at his side, he toured the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, and other factories around Detroit, tirelessly sketching machinery, assembly lines, and laboratories. He was as excited by the prospect of painting machines as he had been by the prospect of painting agrarian Mexico after his return from Europe in 1921. “I now placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend,” he wrote in his autobiography.
On May 23 the Arts Commission approved his sketches for two large panels on the north and south walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ glass-roofed Garden Court. Though the court’s Italian baroque design—with its walls complicated by arches, grillwork, Doric pilasters, and relief plaques of Etruscan motifs—displeased him (he called the huge stepped fountain "horrorosa" and “a symbol of the way that we have clung to the old culture"), the artist had great ambitions. He would pour “a new wine into the old bottles,” he said, “and paint the story of the new race of the age of steel.” He felt, however, that for this great theme, two walls were not enough, so he asked to decorate all twenty-seven panels around the court. The commission enthusiastically agreed, and Diego prepared more sketches, envisioning “a wonderful symphony,” a vast depiction of Henry Ford’s industrial empire that would contain the composer’s admiration for Henry Ford and his accomplishments and Marxist principles as well. “Marx made theory,” said Rivera. “Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization. . . . And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.”
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