Although My Birth depicts Frida’s own birth, it also refers to the recent death of her unborn child. It is thus a picture of Frida giving birth to herself. “I wanted to make a series of pictures of every year of my life,” Frida said of the painting. “My head is covered because, coincidentally with the painting of the picture, my mother died.” “My head,” she said, indicating that it is her own head that is covered. Years later, she wrote in her diary next to several small drawings of herself: “The one who gave birth to herself. . . who wrote the most wonderful poem of her life.”
As the Detroit winter grew bitter and bleak, Frida bought a fur coat to keep out the gales, but foul weather was within as well as without. Not only did she have to absorb her double loss, progenitor and progeny, she also had to deal with Rivera’s irascibility. His weight loss had played havoc with his health and spirits. Lucienne wrote in her diary: “I feel de trop at the Wardell, and when Diego said he couldn’t sleep at night because of the winter and kept Frieda awake, I at once looked for a room. . . . Frieda gets so moody and cries so often and needs comfort. Diego is nervous and seems to feel even irritated at Frieda’s presence.” Many times in Detroit, Frida would cry on Lucienne’s shoulder, telling her friend about the “hardships of her life with Diego, how irregular and different [he was] from what she was used to.” If she “held her own,” Frida explained, Rivera would say, “You don’t love me,” which put her in an even more helpless position.
Rivera was wearing himself out, working against time. He had to finish the Detroit murals quickly, because he had other projects planned. In October 1932 he had been selected to paint a mural in Rockefeller Center in New York, and in January 1933 he received a commission to do a mural on the theme of “machinery and industry” at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. His schedule was such that it was difficult for Frida even to join him at work. Often he would begin at midnight, after his assistants had prepared a section of wall with fresh plaster, and after it had dried just enough to have the right consistency so that the paint could sink in and become part of the wall. He would start by blocking in the drawing and modeling the highlights in grays and blacks; then, by the first light of dawn, he applied color, often painting until lunchtime. What little free time he had was not necessarily spent with Frida, for he was active in Detroit’s Mexican community, organizing and financing trains to take back to Mexico people who had come to the United States to work in the glory days of the 1920s and were hard hit by the Depression.
In spite of all her problems, Frida gradually detached herself from mourning and reattached herself to life. By February, when she was interviewed and photographed, at the Wardell, for the Detroit News, she was working on a bust-length Self-Portrait painted on a small metal panel (figure 30). It shows her dressed in a white blouse with lace trim around the scoop neckline and a string of pre-Columbian jade beads; the color of jade is echoed in the wool that holds back her braids and in the painting’s pale-green background. She looks fresh and lovely, less girlish than in her 1929 and 1930 self-portraits, more self-assured, ready to amuse and be amused. Her restored spirits are revealed as well in the Detroit News article, which appeared in Florence Davies’s “Girls of Yesterday: Visiting Homes of Interesting People” column under the headline “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.” Even if she was called a “dabbler,” at least attention was being accorded to her art and personality, and compared with the shy girl of the previous year, she had acquired a definite social aplomb. Davies wrote:
Carmen Frieda Kahlo Rivera . . . is a painter in her own right, though very few people know it. “No,” she explains, “I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with anyone. I just started to paint.” Then her eyes begin to twinkle. “Of course,” she explains, “he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.” Then the twinkles in both black eyes fairly explode into a rippling laugh. And that is all that you can coax out of her about the matter. When you grow serious, she mocks you and laughs again. But Señora Rivera’s painting is by no means a joke. . . .
In Detroit she paints only because time hangs heavily upon her hands during the long hours while her husband is at work in the court. So thus far she has finished only a few panels. . . . “But it’s beautifully done,” you exclaim. “Diego had better look out.” “Of course,” she cries, “he’s probably badly frightened right now"; but the laughter in her eyes tells you that she’s only spoofing you—and you begin to suspect that Frede [sic] believes that Diego can really paint.
Chapter 11
Revolutionaries in the Temple of Finance
WHILE RIVERA labored to finish his frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts so that he could move on to Rockefeller Center, a publicity campaign against his murals was building. No sooner had they been finished and officially unveiled on March 13, 1933, than a storm of disapproval burst forth. Churchmen found them sacrilegious, conservatives saw them as Communistic, and prudes thought they were obscene. The murals were called a “heartless hoax on his capitalist employers,” and a “travesty on the spirit of Detroit.” Some civic-minded citizens threatened to wash them from the walls. Others organized committees to defend them. The debate was broadcast in newspapers and on the radio. Thousands of people came to see the murals, and popular support grew. Edsel Ford rose to Rivera’s defense: “I admire Rivera’s spirit,” he said. “I really believe he was trying to express his idea of the spirit of Detroit.” When a large group of industrial workers took it upon themselves to guard the murals, Rivera was euphoric. This, he said, was “the beginning of the realization of my life’s dream.” The Riveras left Detroit a week after the unveiling, confident that the “art form of the industrial society of the future” had had a splendid overture.
It was bitterly cold in the third week of March when Frida and Diego, accompanied by assistants Ernst Halberstadt and Andrés Sánchez Flores arrived in Grand Central Station. In less than two days, the Riveras had installed themselves in a two-bedroom suite on a high floor of the Barbizon-Plaza, and Diego was at work in the RCA Building. The lunches and dinners Frida brought him grew cold on the scaffold beside him as he painted or stood motionless before his fresco, looking and looking, silently appraising what he had accomplished and planning his next day’s stint.
Rivera at work was one of the liveliest shows in town, and tickets were issued to a public willing to pay to watch him. Frida herself went to the RCA Building two or three times a week, often in the evening, when the paying audience had gone. She would spend a few hours beneath the scaffold, sucking hard candies, talking to friends who came by, teaching Mexican ballads to Lucienne Bloch and Stephen Dimitroff in the privacy of the temporary shack that served as a center of operations for the project. She was delighted to be back in cosmopolitan Manhattan, where she had many friends in the art world as well as in “high society” and where she felt more at home. It was, unlike Detroit, a port city; water offered the hope of escape. When she was homesick, she could dream of taking the next boat back to Mexico.
But as she had in Detroit, Frida spent most of her time at home. She did not paint regularly; if in Detroit she had painted “only because time [hung] heavily on her hands,” now that time hung more lightly, she hardly worked at all. During her eight-and-a-half-month stay in Manhattan she produced only one painting, and that one was still not finished when she left. Instead of painting, she read, took care of the apartment, saw friends, went to the movies, and shopped. Another pastime was the game of cadavre exquis, an old parlor game adopted by the Surrealists as a technique to explore the mystique of accident. The first player starts by drawing the top of a body and then folds the paper so that the next player draws the next section without seeing how the figure has been begun. When Frida was a player, the resulting monsters were hilarious. She had a lurid imagination, and her fascination with sexual organs, also seen in the drawings in her journal and in a number of her paintings, burst forth in the “exquisite corpses.” “Frid
a did all the worst ones,” Lucienne Bloch recalls. “Some of them made me blush, and I do not blush easily. She would show an enormous penis dripping with semen. And we found out later when we unfolded the paper that it was a woman all dressed up with big bosoms, and all that, until it got to the penis. Diego laughed and said, ’You know that women are far more pornographic than men.’ ”
Frida’s “pornography” and her new, mischievous self-assurance are also evident in her mode of teasing the New York press. For one interview she received reporters while lying in bed, sucking a long stick of candy. “She stuck it under the bedcovers and she raised it slowly,” says Suzanne Bloch, who witnessed the scene. Keeping a straight face and without a pause in the flow of her talk, Frida secretly delighted in the reporters’ embarrassment. Another time, a journalist asked, “What does Mr. Rivera do in his spare time?” and without hesitating, Frida replied, “Make love.”
She adored department stores, shops in Chinatown, and dime stores. “Frida went through dime stores like a tornado,” Lucienne recalls. “Suddenly she would stop and buy something immediately. She had an extraordinary eye for the genuine and the beautiful. She’d find cheap costume jewelry and she’d make it look fantastic.” Sometimes, swift as an eagle, she would pocket some trinket that entranced her, and once outside the store, give it to a friend. When an acquaintance suggested that she buy herself some stylish clothes, Frida briefly gave up her long native skirts for the amusement of wearing chic Manhattan modes—even hats—and twitching her hips along the Manhattan sidewalks in a parody of the confident strut of a Manhattan socialite. She poked fun at everything that struck her as funny, and that was a lot. American drugstores, for example, were a fantasy world. Once when she was passing a pharmacy in a taxi, the word “Pharmaceuticals” written on the outside struck her as so ponderous that she composed a song called “Pharmaceuticals” and, much to the driver’s mirth, sang it loudly during the remainder of the ride.
Diego asked friends to escort Frida to films and other events. The sculptor David Margolis, then Rivera’s assistant, remembers taking her to see Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, which they liked so much that they saw it again the same day with Diego. Completely lacking in intellectual pretension, Frida openly admitted that she thought the theater dull and preferred to go to Brooklyn to see Tarzan films. To her, gorilla movies were hilarious and surreal. Both Frida and Diego were, Lucienne recalls, “bored to tears” by classical music; during one performance of Lucienne’s father’s Sacred Service, Diego fell asleep. On another occasion, while listening to Tchaikovsky, Lucienne and Frida “acted like the worst mischiefs, making drawings and paper birds and giggling awfully—this in Carnegie Hall!”
Bored or not, it is scarcely surprising that Diego fell asleep during concerts. Working fourteen to fifteen hours per day, he was determined to unveil his new mural by May Day, the workers’ holiday. But as the unveiling approached, trouble began to brew. While Diego had made no secret of his politics when accepting the commission, neither had he made any concessions to the mural’s location, opposite the main entrance to the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. The painting’s left side showed the United States, with Wall Street businessmen on a binge, unemployed workers and protesters bullied by mounted police, and the dehumanization of war. The right half displayed a Marxist utopia, with workers, peasants, soldiers, athletes, teachers, and child-toting mothers united in the effort to build a better world.
Apparently the thought that capitalists might do well not to hire an avowed Communist to decorate one of the world’s truly great urban complexes, a monument to capitalist success, had not occurred to the young Nelson Rockefeller, who, as executive vice-president of Rockefeller Center, had signed the contract. He had himself set the murals’ grandiloquent theme: “Men at the Crossroads looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” His representatives had approved the sketches. He had publicly supported Rivera’s Detroit frescoes, and he had brimmed with enthusiasm whenever he came to see the progress of the murals, ignoring misgivings voiced by Frances Flynn Paine, who had served as Rivera’s agent for the mural commission, and others connected with the RCA Building or with the Rockefellers.
Then on April 24, when the fresco was two-thirds finished, the New York World-Telegram saw enough of it to publish an article under the headline “Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots Bill.” The mural’s “dominant color is red” noted the World-Telegram, “red headdress, red flag, waves of red in a victorious onsweep.” Suddenly the atmosphere at Rockefeller Center grew hostile. Overnight the heavy scaffolding was replaced with a flimsier, movable structure. The number of guards was increased. They picked fights with Rivera’s assistants; one threatened to “brain” an assistant if he tried to take a snapshot of the mural, and when Rivera himself brought someone to photograph it, the guards sent the man away. Frida told Lucienne that “something could happen anytime now,” and Lucienne, familiar with Frida’s imperturbability, thought: “Things are getting very serious if she says it.” The next day, after Rivera had screened the scaffold from public view with large sheets of tracing paper, Lucienne photographed the fresco with a camera she had brought in hidden beneath her skirt.
By the first of May, Diego had transformed a sketch of a “labor leader” into an unmistakable portrait of Lenin. On May 4, Nelson Rockefeller wrote to him asking him to substitute the face of an unknown man for that of Lenin. Lenin’s portrait, he argued, would “seriously offend a great many people.” Rivera declared that to remove the head of Lenin would be to destroy the entire conception of the mural. He offered a compromise: he would balance the head of Lenin with the head of Abraham Lincoln. The answer came on May 9, at a time when most of Diego’s assistants were having lunch in a nearby restaurant. Rockefeller’s rental manager, followed by twelve uniformed security guards, stalked into the RCA Building and ordered the artist to stop working. Slowly Rivera laid down his big brushes and the kitchen plate he used as a palette, and climbed down from the scaffold. He was handed a check for the full amount owed to him (the remaining $14,000 due on a $21,000 contract) and a letter that told him he was fired.
Rivera was stunned. He, who usually moved with a fat man’s liquid grace, walked woodenly to the work shack and changed out of his overalls. More guards appeared and pushed the movable scaffold away from the wall. Within half an hour Radio City personnel had covered the mural with tar paper and a wooden screen.
When they heard the news, Diego’s assistants rushed like avenging angels back to the RCA Building to help him, but there was nothing, beyond protest, to be done. Lucienne Bloch did manage to scrape white paint off two second-story windows to form the words “Workers Unite! Help Protect Rivera M—” Guards stopped her before she could finish the word “Murals.”
Once again, Rivera was at the center of public outcry. As mounted police looked on, ready to move at the first sign of violence, his defenders picketed Rockefeller Center and Nelson Rockefeller’s home, waving banners that read: “Save Rivera’s Painting” and yelling: “We want Rockefeller with a rope around his neck! Freedom in art! Reveal Rivera’s murals!” A group of artists and intellectuals that included Walter Pach, George Biddle, Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Waldo Pierce, H. L. Mencken, and Lewis Mumford petitioned Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider his decision. Wittier comment came in the form of E. B. White’s poem “I Paint What I See,” published in The New Yorker. An imaginary conversation between Rockefeller and Rivera, it ends with a standoff:
“It’s not good taste in a man like me,”
Said John D.’s grandson Nelson,
“To question an artist’s integrity
“Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
“But I know what I like to a large degree,
“Though art I hate to hamper;
“For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
“You painted a radical. I say shucks,
“I never could rent the
offices—
“The capitalistic offices.
“For this, as you know, is a public hall
“And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
“And though your art I dislike to hamper,
“I owe a little to God and Gramper,
“And after all,
“It’s my wall . . .”
"We’ll see if it is, ” said Rivera.
But there was no reconsideration, and it turned out to be Rockefeller’s wall in the end. Nine months later, after the Riveras had left New York, the mural was chipped off and thrown away. (Perhaps Rivera had the last word after all. When he repainted the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1934, he placed John D. Rockefeller, Sr., among the revelers on the capitalist side of the mural, in close proximity to the syphilis spirochetes that swarm on the propeller.)
Rivera’s disappointment at not being allowed to finish his mural was compounded by attacks from the Communist party, which continued to excoriate him for accepting commissions from millionaires: to Joseph Freeman, editor of New Masses, the Rockefeller Center mural was “reactionary” and “counterrevolutionary.” Finally, on May 12, Diego received a telegram from his friend Albert Kahn, architect for the General Motors Building at the Chicago World’s Fair (and the designer of the Detroit Institute of Arts as well), saying that his commission to paint the “Forge and Foundry” mural at the fair, for which sketches had already been drawn, had been canceled. It was a terrible blow to Rivera’s dream of painting murals for modern industrial society.
Frida was, of course, caught up in the fracas. She attended protest meetings—her personal protest was a return to wearing Mexican costumes after her experiment with conventional clothes—and she typed countless letters dictated to her by Diego. Doing whatever she could to shore up the pro-Rivera ranks, she was her husband’s most loyal defender. A few months after Rivera was fired, Nelson Rockefeller came up to her at the opening of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Que Viva Mexico! “How are you, Frida?” he politely inquired. Frida turned on her heels, flipping her long skirts and petticoats, and marched off. (She was a realist, however. A photograph taken in the fall of 1939, when Rockefeller was in Mexico helping with the arrangements for the exhibition entitled “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” put on at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, shows Frida sitting beside him at a buffet lunch.) A newspaper reporter who interviewed Frida shortly after the showdown wrote:
Frida Page 20
