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Diego and Frieda
“There is nothing to do but put up with it,” Frida wrote. “I have a cat’s luck.” Her indomitable will had begun to triumph over despair and apathy.
Henry Ford Hospital (plate IV) is dated simply July 1932. It is the first of the series of bloody and terrifying self-portraits that were to make Frida Kahlo one of the most original painters of her time; in quality and expressive power it far surpasses anything she had done before. Rivera noted the change: speaking of her painting after the miscarriage, he said, “Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art—paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.”
In Henry Ford Hospital, Frida lies naked in her hospital bed, hemorrhaging onto a single sheet. A large tear runs down her cheek, her stomach is still swollen from pregnancy. The unflattering depiction of her body is typical of Frida: this is clearly a nude perceived by a woman, rather than one idealized by a man.
Against her swollen stomach, she holds six vein-like red ribbons from the ends of which float a series of objects symbolic of her emotions at the time of the miscarriage. One is a fetus, and the ribbon that links it with Frida is continuous with, and obviously meant to represent, the child’s umbilical cord. She has placed it directly above the pool of blood from her miscarriage and given it the male genitals of the “little Diego” she had hoped it would be.
All the floating symbols of maternal failure, including the fetus, are in the same large scale in relation to Frida regardless of their actual size. The salmon-pink torso on a pedestal is “my idea of explaining the insides of a woman,” Frida said; several sperm-like organisms, presumably an X-ray view of the drama of conception, appear on the torso’s surface, and two spinal columns, also drawn there, refer to her injured backbone or possibly to the congenital scoliosis of the spine diagnosed by Dr. Eloesser in 1930. Wanting to get things right, Frida copied medical illustrations of pelvic bones to paint what she said was the principal cause of her miscarriage.
The snail, Frida once explained, refers to the slowness of the miscarriage, which, like a snail, was “soft, covered and at the same time, open.” The meaning of the strange piece of machinery below the bed is ambiguous. According to Lucienne Bloch, it represents Frida’s hips, which seems likely, since all the other symbols are intimately connected with the female body. Bertram Wolfe thought the machine was an “iron vise suggesting the wracking grip of pain,” and given Frida’s statement that after her experience in Detroit, “anything mechanical” always meant bad luck and pain, this interpretation seems plausible as well. Frida herself told one friend that the machine was meant to remind her of Diego, and to another she said that she had “invented [it] to explain the mechanical part of the whole business.”
The lurid lavender orchid, with its projecting stem, looks like an extracted uterus. “Diego gave it to me in the hospital,” Frida said. “When I painted it, I had the idea of a sexual thing mixed with the sentimental.”
Frida’s hospital bed floats beneath a blue sky in an immense, barren plain; she said that she painted the ground beneath the bed earth color because she was trying to express solitude and loneliness. But, she added in a seeming contradiction, “Earth to me is Mexico, people around, and everything, so it was a help to me, when I had nothing, to put the earth around me.” Clearly visible on the horizon is the Rouge River complex, with its coke ovens, conveyors, smokestacks, and water towers. It suggests Frida’s distance from Diego, who, when she was hospitalized, seemed to be so far from her, caught up as he was with sketching the Rouge. The faraway buildings also evoke the patient’s perception of the outer world’s indifference to her plight, her feeling of separation from everyday life. The world outside the hospital functions cleanly and efficiently; Frida, on the other hand, is a wreck. Her desolation is underscored by the disjunctive scale—she looks tiny in relation to the bed—and by the way the bed is tipped up and drawn in an intentionally incorrect perspective. The absence of a top sheet and the placement of the bed out of doors make vivid the feeling of helpless exposure that many hospital patients experience. Frida is floating, disconnected, empty, unprotected.
To help her combat depression, Lucienne and Diego conspired to keep Frida occupied, and as soon as she was strong enough, to get her away from the apartment. To this end, soon after her return from the hospital, Rivera secured permission for her and Lucienne to use a lithography workshop in a local arts-and-crafts guild. With the help of technical advice from a workshop assistant, and after consulting a book on lithography, the two women began drawing on the lithographer’s stones.
Despite her poor health and the torrid summer weather, Frida went with Lucienne to the workshop every day from eight o’clock till three. Frida was “like the wildest animal when anyone came into the studio to see us ’fool around,’ ” Lucienne wrote in her diary. “They didn’t realize how serious we were in the work. Frieda would be so cross, she would swear each time a fly came settling on her arm.”
When they printed Frida’s stone, however, they were “horribly disappointed,” Lucienne wrote. “The worst streaks appeared on the stone and wouldn’t come out. All Frieda’s work gone kaput. Diego came to see in the evening which was sweet of him because he had been working all day in the museum. . . . Frieda decided to try the same sketch all over again, so we worked again the next day. No one dares come and watch, we are so ferociously at work. . . . Seeing Diego start over and over again the thing he hasn’t done well gives us courage.”
Finally, they produced a few prints that seemed technically satisfactory, and Rivera suggested they send some of them to George Muller, a New York lithography expert, in order to get his advice. He sent Frida back her print with his comments: “These proofs are not good and not bad considering your experience. Work hard and you will get better results.” It was a message as bland as an aphorism in a fortune cookie. Frida, who in any case preferred the directness, immediacy, and privacy of oil painting, returned to her easel. But the lithograph—called Frida and the Abortion—remains, a powerful and heartrending image (figure 26). In it, Frida stands naked and as passive as a paper doll, submitting to the various stages of her pregnancy. A male fetus is attached to her by a long winding vein, and a much less developed embryo is curled within her womb. Cells in two different moments of division show an earlier stage in the development of her lost child. Two tears fall on her cheeks, and the hemorrhage that ended her pregnancy is depicted in droplets of blood that run down the inside of her leg and into an earth that is both a grave and a garden. In contrast to Frida, the earth is fertile: its plants, nourished by Frida’s blood, have grown into shapes that echo the eyes, hands, and genitals of her male fetus.
Frida’s body is divided into light and dark halves, as if to reveal the light and dark halves of her psyche, the presence within her of life and death. On her dark side is a weeping moon, and a third arm which holds a palette shaped rather like the fetus, implying, perhaps, that painting is an antidote to maternal failure, that for Frida, making art must take the place of making children.
Three more times (according to Rivera’s count) Frida was to try to have a child. Even though she knew her husband did not want another offspring, she was convinced that having his baby would strengthen her hold on him. Rivera recalled that it was because of the danger to Frida that he “forbade her to conceive again,” but her close friend Ella Wolfe, Bertram Wolfe’s wife, believes that Frida could have had a baby if she had stayed in bed for five or six months, and that the problem lay with his refusal to sire another child. “Diego was very cruel to Frida about having a child. She was dying to have
a baby by him. That’s the way Diego was.”
Mute testimony to Frida’s longing is found in the blue house at Coyoacán: in her collection of books on parturition; in the human fetus in a jar of formaldehyde that was a gift from Dr. Eloesser in 1941 and that she, typically, kept in her bedroom; and most poignantly, in her large collection of dolls and dollhouse furnishings. Frida had all kinds of dolls: old-fashioned ones, foreign dolls, cheap Mexican dolls made of rags or of papier-mâché. Chinese dolls are propped on a shelf near her pillow. Beside her bed is an empty doll bed where she once kept a favored doll, and three little dolls are enclosed with Rivera’s baptism dress in a vitrine in her bedroom. One that she treasured, a boy doll, had been given to her by a Cachucha (probably Alejandro) shortly after her accident, when she was hospitalized. Among Frida’s notes to Alejandro from 1926 is this doll’s baptismal certificate, written in careful Art Deco capitals to make it look official and adorned with a charming drawing of a winged turtle. The certificate reads:
LEONARDO
He was born in the Red Cross in the year of grace, 1925 in the month of September and he was baptized in the town of Coyoacán in August of the following year—
His mother was
Frieda Kahlo
His Godparents
Isabel Campos
and Alejandro Gómez Arias
Frida was a good “mother.” Displayed in Rivera’s bedroom is a list of tasks to be accomplished: certain dolls were to be taken to the doll hospital; some needed new bodies, one needed a wig. “But don’t lose them,” she warned. When friends took leave of her, she would often say, “Bring me a doll.” They often did.
Frida transferred her yearnings for a baby to other people’s children—especially (after she returned to Mexico) to Diego and Lupe Marín’s daughters Lupe and Ruth and Cristina’s two, Isolda and Antonio, who were in and out of their aunt’s house as if it were their own and whom she delighted in spoiling. She lavished a different but equally warm attention on her numerous pets—a pack of escuincle dogs, various monkeys, cats, parrots, doves, an eagle, and a deer. When the monkeys and parrots accompany Frida in self-portraits, they often seem a substitute for children. And she tended the plants in her garden as if they were as needy as infants. Flowers and fruit she painted so that they look alive, projecting upon them the full force of her obsession with fertility.
Many of her paintings express this fascination with procreation, and some directly reflect her despair at not having children. One of the most moving of the latter is Me and My Doll, painted in 1937, a year in which, from the evidence of the number of paintings on this theme, she must have had another miscarriage (figure 48). In it Frida and a large naked baby doll sit side by side on a child’s bed, as if posing for a formal photograph; the doll is lifeless and wears a dumb, fixed smile that forms a bitter contrast with Frida’s sober demeanor. Instead of a conventional image of a mother cooing over her infant, we see a woman sitting bolt upright, facing not toward the “child” but straight ahead. She is smoking, and she is very much alone.
A disjointed passage from Frida’s journal of 1944 reveals that her sadness over not having a child lasted even after she had found other things to fill her life. “I sell everything for nothing. . . . I do not believe in illusion . . . the great vacillator. Nothing has a name. I do not look at forms . . . drowned spiders. Lives in alcohol. Children are the days and here is where I end.” Painting was the best antidote to Frida’s pervasive sense of barrenness—that barrenness that is seen in the desert backgrounds of so many of her self-portraits. The year she died, she told a friend: “My painting carries within it the message of pain. . . . Painting completed by life. I lost three children. . . . Paintings substituted for all of this. I believe that work is the best thing.”
The shock of the miscarriage and the slower realization that she would never bear children made Frida say she wanted to die. Yet her grasp on life was too strong, her rootedness too resilient, for her to succumb to grief. When she was strong enough, she would go every day to the art institute at lunchtime, carrying Diego’s lunch in her big Mexican basket. Since Diego was on a rigorous diet, she conscientiously made the basket’s contents less bountiful than was her wont, or Diego’s desire. Still, she only picked at the food, and there was always some left over. José de Jesús Alfaro, an unemployed Mexican dancer who, like a number of other men out of work, spent much of his time watching Rivera paint, remembers: “Frida came in every day at about eleven-thirty. Diego looked down and then descended from the scaffold. There were Coca-Cola boxes on the floor and he and Frida would sit on them and he’d say, ’Sit down, muchachos, sit down.’ The Mexican-style food was always delicious. I went to the institute to get something to eat.”
After lunch Frida would draw, knit, read, or simply watch Rivera paint. During their breaks from work she loved to get Rivera’s assistants to expand on their life stories; all of them remember her great capacity for human feeling, compared with Rivera’s more abstract, less personal interest in his fellowman. If Rivera was gruff, she would intercede for them: when, for example, Stephen Dimitroff tried to charm his way into Rivera’s employ by speaking Bulgarian, he was dismissed with a shout from the maestro: “No more assistants!” “Help the pobrecito, " Frida cried. “He just wants to watch you work.” And Rivera did.
Occasionally she left the courtyard to wander slowly through the institute’s galleries with Dr. Valentiner. The museum director was astonished at her critical discernment. She would stop suddenly and say, “That’s a fake!” or “That’s beautiful!” What appealed to her had nothing to do with the pieties of connoisseurship. She loved Rembrandt and Italian primitives, and had an extraordinary eye for lesser-known treasures.
At home, with Lucienne, she made a schedule to study biology, anatomy, and history, and she gave Lucienne Spanish lessons. The two women bought a blackboard, and Lucienne borrowed books from the library, encouraging Frida to read them by reading them herself. But “Frieda has great difficulty doing things regularly,” Lucienne wrote in her diary. “She wants schedules and to do things like in school. By the time she must get into action, something always happens and she feels her day broken up.” Although Frida inherited her father’s fastidiousness and need for order, she did not inherit his rigorously disciplined work habits. If friends dropped in, she let them interrupt her, and even if the visitor was Jean Wight, who she knew would bore her by chatting about fashion, she did not feel capable of telling her guest that she was busy.
When Frida was painting, however, she put in long hours, starting early in the morning and working until it was time to take Diego’s lunch to the institute. A good day’s work made her exuberant. She painted four of the five paintings from the Detroit period in one burst of energy that began with the lithograph and Henry Ford Hospital. Shortly thereafter, she produced Showcase in Detroit, and then on August 30 she began Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States.
It was here, in Detroit, that she adopted a certain posture as a painter, a pose that was at once serious and mocking. She pretended not to consider her work important, and as if to emphasize her “amateur” status, she did not don the masculine workers’ attire of so many women artists. Instead, she wore frilly Mexican costumes under a ruffled apron more appropriate to a fiesta than to painting with oils. Yet when she finally settled down to work, she worked with concentration. “My paintings are well painted,” she once said, “not with speed, but with patience. . . . I think that at least [they] will interest a few people.” And she cared enough about her particular painting methods to invent a painting stand that facilitated them. It consisted of an aluminum pipe that went from floor to ceiling, with a support attached to it that could slide up and down according to which part of the painting was in progress—or whether the artist could stand or had to sit. She and Lucienne were convinced that the pipe could also be used for the display of paintings. Why, they asked, should paintings always be displayed on walls?
&n
bsp; At Rivera’s suggestion Frida began to paint on metal, to make her works seem more like Mexican ex-votos, or retablos. After preparing the small panels of sheet aluminum with an undercoating to form a binder between metal and pigment, she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil or ink, and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along. Compared to the method of a painter who works on a canvas a little bit all over, loosely brushing in color areas and gradually refining the image, her method was primitive—almost a coloring-book approach—but it was effective. (In later years, she would block in broad areas of color before bringing the image, section by section, to a high degree of verisimilitude.)
Frida Page 18
