Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Henry Ford Hospital is the first painting Frida did on sheet metal, the first work from her hand that is clearly modeled on Mexican votive paintings in style, subject, and scale. It may have been Rivera’s idea, too, that she record her miscarriage in the same way that a retablo (plate V) records a disaster the victim has survived. In any case, starting in 1932, retablos form the single most important source for Frida’s primitivizing style, and even as her paintings became less primitive and more realistic, retablos continued to be a principal model.

  In most retablos, the holy image—Virgin, Christ, or saint—that saves the sick, wounded, or otherwise endangered person appears in the sky surrounded by an aureole of cloud puffs. A dedicatory inscription tells the story of the trouble, complete with name, date, and place, describes the miraculous intervention, and offers the donor’s thanks. But although Frida’s "retablo" contains none of these elements (as Rivera once wrote: “Frida’s retablos do not look like retablos, or like anyone or anything else . . . [for] she paints at the same time the exterior and interior of herself and of the world") and although it substitutes floating symbolic objects for the usual holy image, the combination of fact and fantasy in this and in many other of Frida Kahlo’s paintings is very like that in retablos. As in retablos, the drawing is naïvely painstaking, the color choices are odd, the perspective is awkward, space is reduced to a rudimentary stage, and action is condensed to highlights. Adherence to appearances is less important than the dramatization of the ghastly event or the miraculous encounter between the victim and the resplendent holy image. Both Frida’s paintings and retablos record the facts of physical distress in detail, without squeamishness. Both evince a kind of deadpan, reportorial directness; since salvation has already been granted, there is no need for the rhetoric of entreaty. The tale is told not to elicit pity but to settle accounts with God. The narration must be accurate, legible, and dramatic, for a retablo is both a visual receipt, or thank-you note, for the delivery of heavenly mercy, and a hedge against future dangers, an assurance of blessings.

  As her pain subsided and other facets of life in Detroit came into focus, Frida’s renewed interest in the world around her appeared, along with her grief, in her art. Showcase in Detroit depicts the display window of a shop where street decorations were manufactured, all decked out with garlands of red, white, and blue and other symbols of Americana in anticipation of Independence Day. Frida probably saw and sketched the window just before her miscarriage, but she painted it after she finished Henry Ford Hospital. The timing of its conception would explain the painting’s lighthearted mood, so different from the more intense and unhappy works that followed the loss of her child. Lucienne Bloch remembers how the painting came to be. She and Frida were shopping for sheet metal. “We were walking together on John R., and we saw one of those old musty-looking stores in a poor neighborhood. It was so extraordinary—all these camp things that had no connection—that Frida stopped in front and said, ’Ah, that’s lovely, that’s beautiful!’ ” To Frida, the window display was like Mexican folk art, thus more genuine than elitist modern art; when she told Rivera about the window, he quickly understood her enthusiasm and suggested, “Why don’t you paint it!”

  On August 31, sweltering in the ninety-nine-degree heat, Frida, Lucienne, Diego, Rivera’s assistant Arthur Niendorff, and Edsel Ford stood on the roof of the Detroit Institute of Arts and watched a solar eclipse through pieces of smoked glass. “Frieda seemed totally disgusted with the eclipse and when it was at its fullest, she said it was not beautiful at all, [no better than] ’a cloudy day when the full business was showing itself.’ ” Lucienne’s diary also notes that Frida started a new painting that day—a full-length self-portrait in which she stands on a gray stone pedestal that is inscribed “Carmen Rivera painted her portrait in the year 1932,” and that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

  Showcase in Detroit is an affectionate spoof of American taste and mores; Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (figure 28) reveals Frida in a more critical mood; her wit, while no less evident, has an edge to it. She is clad, for example, in a long pink dress and old-fashioned lacy gloves, “proper” attire for a Grosse Pointe evening; in her left hand, defying propriety, is a cigarette, in her right a small Mexican flag.

  Perhaps inspired by the solar eclipse, Frida has, for the first time in her paintings, placed the sun and the moon together in the sky. Their juxtaposition became one of the most powerful symbols in her work. It represents the unity of cosmic and terrestrial forces, the Aztec notion of an eternal war between light and dark, the preoccupation in Mexican culture with the idea of duality: life-death, light-dark, past-present, day-night, male-female. Discussing the coexistence of the sun and the moon in Rivera’s art, Bertram Wolfe explained: “In most nature religions, as in ancient Mexican mythology, the lords of the heavens are the Sun and the Moon: the Sun being the masculine principle, the fertilizer and life-giver, and the Moon (or in some Mexican traditions the Earth) the feminine principle, the mother of gods and men.” The juxtaposed sun and moon also refer to the idea that all nature mourns Christ’s death. They can signify as well the darkness that fell upon the earth during the crucifixion, or the solar elipse which astronomers say happened about the time when Jesus was crucified. The sun and moon often flank the cross in medieval crucifixion scenes, and their joint presence in depictions of Christ’s sacrifice is a tradition that continued in the Renaissance, in colonial Mexico, and in Mexican popular art. Frida knew this Christian symbolism and combined it with pagan meanings to heighten the dramatic intensity of her imagery.

  In Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, both the sun and the moon are on the left (Mexican) side of the painting. As for the U.S. portion, an American flag floats in a cloud of industrial smoke, and the scene is dominated by the modern world of skyscrapers, bleak brick factories, and machines, all of which contrast sharply with Frida’s vision of ancient agrarian Mexico. Diego was forever comparing the beauty of American machines and skyscrapers with the splendor of pre-Columbian artifacts. When Frida, on the other hand, painted smokestacks (labeled “Ford"), they belched smoke, and her windowless skyscrapers look like tombstones. In the middle ground she has placed four industrial chimney stacks that resemble automatons; they derive from the automatons that Rivera put in his California School of Fine Arts mural or from the chimney-automatons he designed for H.P., where he showed a ship docked at “Machine City,” and they are meant to be seen in opposition to the pre-Columbian idols on the Mexican side of the border. In the foreground, on the U.S. side, instead of rooted plants we see three round machines, two of which radiate rays of light and energy (as contrasted with the radiant Mexican sun), and all of which have electric cords (as opposed to their counterparts, the Mexican flowers, which have roots). Frida has cleverly depicted a cord, which extends from one of the machines, transforming itself into the roots of one of the Mexican plants. The machine’s other cord is plugged into an outlet on Frida’s pedestal.

  It was a machine that had mowed Frida down in her 1925 accident; it was in “Motor City” that she lost her child, and it was machinery that took Diego away from her for so many hours while she was in Detroit. Agrarian Mexico, on the other hand, meant life, human connectedness, beauty, and she longed to return to it. “To tell you the truth,” she had written to Dr. Eloesser in July, "no me hallo! [I am not happy here!] as the kitchen maids would say, but I have to pluck up my courage and stay because I cannot leave Diego.”

  Her yearning for Mexico, for the comforting embrace of her family and her barrio, was to be heartbreakingly fulfilled: on September 3 she received a telegram informing her that her mother, who had developed breast cancer six months before, was desperately ill, perhaps dying. For three hours Frida tried to reach one of her sisters in Mexico by telephone, but she could not get a line. She asked Lucienne to investigate flights. Discovering there were none, she became hysterical. “Here they talk a
bout all this progress,” she ranted. “Why can’t we go by plane? What’s the matter with all these ’modern conveniences’?” Lucienne went to fetch Diego from the Detroit Institute of Arts; they returned to find Frida in “torrents of tears.”

  The next day Diego put Frida and Lucienne on the train for Mexico. “Frieda cried in the dark compartment,” Lucienne wrote in her diary. “This time it was for leaving Diego and not knowing how her mother is, either. Frieda [was] all shaking like a little child.”

  The train took them through Indiana and Missouri. At Saint Louis, they got off and had lunch on the roof of the Hotel Statler, where they watched airplanes fly by. Frida was hemorrhaging again, and felt too weak to walk, so they went to the movies. In a newspaper, they read that the Rio Grande was flooded—this explained why the telephone lines to Mexico had been out. The following night, in Laredo, Texas, they awoke to find the train moving very slowly through floodwater. Because the bridges were out of commission, they had to wait twelve hours at the border. Finally, they took a bus across the least damaged bridge to Nuevo Laredo, which was brimming with excitement—vendors hawking food, families saying passionate goodbyes, people standing around just enjoying the spectacle. Before boarding the train once more, Frida bought cajeta, scooping the sticky caramel up with her fingers, as she had as a girl.

  The passage through northern Mexico was beautiful, for it was the rainy season, and the desert was full of rivulets and glistening cacti. Frida did not see it. "[She] got more and more hectic,” Lucienne wrote, “and the last hours were agony for her. We arrived in Mexico City at 10 P.M., Thursday, September 8th. There were sisters, cousins and men to meet her, all crying and hysterical. We even forgot the valises.”

  They stayed at Matilde’s house in the Doctores district of Mexico City. The following morning Frida, accompanied by Lucienne, went to see her mother in Coyoacán. Matilde Calderón de Kahlo was in critical condition. “She can’t seem to want to give herself any philosophy, but cries and cries and looks deadly pale,” Lucienne wrote, adding, “Her father is a dear, very fussy, deaf and shabby and Schopenhauerish.”

  On September 10, Frida wrote a letter to Diego telling him all the details of her mother’s illness. Then her thoughts turned, as if for solace, to her love and need for her husband:

  Although you tell me that you see yourself as very ugly, with your short hair when you look in the mirror, I don’t believe it, I know how handsome you are anyway and the only thing that I regret is not to be there to kiss you and take care of you and even if I would sometimes bother you with my grumbling. I adore you my Diego. I feel as though I left my child with no one and that you need me. . . . I cannot live without my chiquito Undo [handsome little one]. . . . The house without you is nothing. Everything without you seems horrible to me. I am in love with you more than ever and at each moment more and more.

  I send you all my love

  Your niña chicuititita

  Niñita Chiquitita preciosa [little tiny pretty girl], Diego wrote in reply,

  I include this [letter] only to accompany the papers with many kisses and love [for] my beautiful Friduchita. I am very sad here without you, like you I can’t even sleep and I hardly take my head away from work. I don’t even know what to do without being able to see you, I was sure that I had not loved any woman as I love the chiquita but not until now that she has left me did I know how much I really love her, she already knows that she is more than my life, now I know, because really without you this life does not matter to me more than approximately two peanuts at most.

  I already finished six more panels since you left, working always with the fixed idea that you should see the things when you return. I’m not telling you anything because I want to see what a face the chicua will make when she sees them. Tomorrow I am going at last to the factory of chemical products. They didn’t want to let me in because of such secrets and dangers. How stupid and shocking, it was necessary for Edsel to write in order for them to give me permission.

  On September 15, one week after Frida’s arrival, and two days after having 160 gallstones removed, Matilde Calderón de Kahlo died. Lucienne wrote in her diary: “Her sisters all came wrapped in dark [shawls] and red in eyes. Frieda sobbed and sobbed. It was terribly sad for her. They didn’t tell their father until the next morning. He was almost crazy about the idea sometimes, and would lose his memory and ask why his wife wasn’t there.” A photographic portrait of Frida taken at this time by her father shows her dressed in black and wearing an expression that is new in her photographs: she looks as if grief had sucked all the concavities of her face inward. There is a darkness in her eyes, the unmistakable darkness of sorrow.

  During the remaining five weeks of her stay in Mexico, Frida devoted most of her time to her family. She and Lucienne took Guillermo Kahlo for walks in a nearby park. Stopping to gaze at what Lucienne thought were “very pompier" scenes, he exclaimed over their beauty. “He is still a romantic.” He was still an eccentric too. “Sometimes,” she noted, “he gets into fits of bad character and yells with a knife.”

  They also spent hours chatting with Frida’s sisters, Adriana and Cristina, who lived in Coyoacán, and with Matilde, whose bourgeois home with its flowery wallpaper, fake Louis XVI rugs, and lace curtains surprised Lucienne, who was used to Frida and Diego’s Mexicanista taste. Frida took perverse delight in objets such as white porcelain ashtrays shaped like shells, decked with gold and violets, each displaying a nude woman painted to look as though she were lying on the shell’s side. “It’s so horrible it’s beautiful!” she would cry.

  On one occasion Frida and Lucienne went to San Angel to check the progress of the linked modern houses, designed by the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman. Frida liked the idea of having two separate houses. “I can work,” she told Lucienne, “and he can work.”

  In mid-October, the painter and cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias and his wife, the American-born dancer and painter Rosa Rolando, produced a delicious Mexican farewell dinner. Frida was both gay and sad. The next day, a crowd of at least twenty people came to the train station to say goodbye—Lupe Marín with one of her sisters, Frida’s father, her sisters, and many others. When the train left the station, Frida cried for a while, then went silently to bed.

  It was a cold, forbidding dawn on October 21 when they arrived back in Detroit. Diego, wearing a suit belonging to Clifford Wight because, after his diet, his own clothes were too big for him, was on the platform to meet them. “Frida returned to Detroit,” he wrote in his autobiography. “She had been watching her mother die, and was spent with grief. Added to this, she was horrified by my appearance. At first she could not recognize me. In her absence, I had dieted and worked so hard that I had lost a great deal of weight. . . .The moment I saw her, I called out, ’It’s me.’ Finally acknowledging my identity, she embraced me and began to cry.”

  The painting entitled My Birth (plate VI) was probably conceived and even begun before Frida’s trip to Mexico, but she finished it after her return to Detroit. The first of the series suggested by Diego that records the years of her life, it shows, as Frida put it, “how I imagined I was born.” It is one of the most awesome images of childbirth ever made.

  We see the infant’s large head emerging between the mother’s spread legs from the doctor’s vantage point. Heavy, joined eyebrows identify the child as Frida. Blood covers the inert, drooping head and skinny neck. The baby looks dead.

  A sheet covering the woman’s head and chest, as if she had died in childbirth, emphasizes the total exposure of delivery. As a substitute for the mother’s head, on the wall directly above her is a painting of another grieving mother, the Virgin of Sorrows pierced by swords, bleeding and weeping. Frida said that she included the Virgin of Sorrows in My Birth as “part of a memory image, not for symbolic reasons.” It is a detail of furnishings remembered from childhood—just the kind of object her devoutly Catholic mother would have cherished. The bed, said Frida, was her mother’s bed; both she
and her sister Cristina were born in it. Possibly the pink lace border on the pillowcase and the sweet pastel walls that contrast so markedly with the ghastliness of the scene are childhood memories too. Less fanciful than Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth is like a retablo in both style and content; indeed, there is a scroll set aside for an inscription along the painting’s lower edge. But the requisite information was never filled in. Perhaps Frida felt it would be superfluous to tell the story again in words. Or perhaps she wanted to say that here no miraculous salvation had occurred. My Birth depicts a calamity, not a close call, not a disaster averted by divine intercession for which thanks should be given: the icon of the Virgin gazes ineffectually upon a scene of double death.

  The stripped-down image of pain in My Birth also recalls a famous Aztec stone sculpture of parturition (c. 1500) that depicts a squatting woman giving birth to a full-grown man’s head, her face set in a forbidding grimace of pain (plate VII). The woman in childbirth is, in Aztec religion, the equivalent of a warrior capturing a sacrificial victim; she represents the birth of an era. Frida surely knew the sculpture, and it is likely that she also knew its meanings; for her, as for the Aztecs, the idea of birth was full of portent. Rivera wrote of Frida’s My Birth: “The mother’s face is that of the mater dolorosa, with her seven daggers of pain which make possible the opening from which the child Frida emerges, the only human force since the marvelous Aztec master . . . who has given plasticity to the actual phenomenon of birth.”