Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Señora Diego Rivera, the comely young wife of the artist whose fresco has been ordered covered—perhaps permanently—because of its Communistic viewpoint, is grieved, but not perturbed. . . .

  A girlish Spanish type, olive skinned, doe-eyed, lithe and slender, she sat down on the edge of her bed in a room filled with friends and sympathizers, and associates of her husband, closed her ears to their excited conversations and told us just how she feels about it. . . .

  She believes that the Rockefellers have acted so “because they were afraid of public opinion,” and she feels very certain that “Mrs. Rockefeller probably feels badly about it.” They saw the preliminary sketches with Lenin’s portrait, more prominent there than in the painting, she said, and they approved.

  “The Rockefellers knew quite well the murals were to depict the revolutionary point of view—that they were going to be revolutionary paintings,” she said quietly. “They seemed very nice and understanding about it and always very interested, especially Mrs. Rockefeller.

  “We were their guests at dinner two or three times, and we discussed the revolutionary movement at great length.

  “Mrs. Rockefeller was very nice to us always. She was lovely. She seemed very interested in radical ideas—asked us many questions. You know she helped Mr. Rivera at the Museum of Modern Art and really battled for him.”

  When Rivera was ordered off the scaffold at Rockefeller Center, he announced that he would use what was left of Rockefeller’s fee “to paint in any suitable building that is offered, an exact reproduction of the buried mural—I will paint free of charge except for the actual cost of materials.” No suitable site was offered him, and he finally chose to paint instead the history of the United States, as seen from a revolutionary perspective, on twenty-one movable panels in a dilapidated, soon-to-be-razed building at 51 West Fourteenth Street that housed a Lovestonite organization called the New Workers’ School.*

  On June 3, one month after the beginning of the Rockefeller Center battle, Frida and Diego moved downtown to a two-room flat at 8 West Thirteenth Street so that Rivera could be nearer to his work. Diego let it be known that the new apartment was more expensive than the Barbizon-Plaza suite; in his pride, he did not want to admit that Rockefeller had hurt him financially. In September they moved again, to an apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Hotel Brevoort, on Fifth Avenue at Eighth Street.

  Between May 9, when he was thrown out of Rockefeller Center, and July 15, when he started work at the New Workers’ School, Rivera was too demoralized, bitter, and angry to paint. Friends noted that Frida’s eyes were often red from weeping. But though he did not paint, Rivera was not idle. He and Bertram Wolfe did research on American history in preparation for the New Workers’ School fresco cycle. He gave numerous lectures about art and politics, and he made public appearances not only to defend his position on the RCA Building mural but also to support other causes, such as the Scottsboro Defense Fund. On May 15 he addressed fifteen hundred Columbia University students who were protesting the dismissal of Donald Henderson, an economics instructor and an avowed Communist. Frida, who tended to be rather distant at these manifestations—she saw them as theater rather than as history—was at his side, sitting in her usual bolt-upright position, looking like an Aztec princess. During the five-hour demonstration there were fist and water fights, the university president was burned in effigy, and the statue of Alma Mater was blindfolded and a black-draped coffin labeled “Here lies academic freedom” placed at her feet. The New York Times reported: “Diego Rivera, Mexican artist dismissed recently from Rockefeller Center, and his wife, Carmen, addressed the students in front of the sundial, where he urged the students to ’wrest control of the university from Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler.’ ”

  When Rivera began to paint again, he became his old expansive self. Louise Nevelson, who had taken an apartment with Marjorie Eaton on the ground floor of the Thirteenth Street building, recalled that the Riveras’ “house was always open in the evening, and anyone who wanted to would come. They were very serious about people; they didn’t make distinctions. I was never in a home like Diego’s. Princesses and queens . . . one lady richer than God. And workmen, laborers. He made no distinction, and all were treated like one body of people. It was very simple. Diego and Frieda liked it so much because at the other place uptown they had had a doorman, and of course Frieda and he did not believe in that. They were delighted to find a place where they could come in and not be bothered. So every night people came, and then he’d take the gang to a little Italian restaurant on 14th Street.”

  Both Nevelson and Eaton were aspiring young artists, and they were happy to be in the company of the great Rivera, even though, in order to enjoy that company, they had to put up with a certain amount of “bohemian” unreliability. Having been asked to come to the Riveras’ apartment at six, they would find Diego resting and Frida not dressed. Frida would try on various skirts and blouses, asking for Rivera’s opinion. Then she would disappear for half an hour, returning in a new costume. When she was finally dressed, it was Rivera’s turn to disappear. After a long bath he would suddenly announce, “We will go to dinner,” and he would escort the three young women to some Chinatown or Greenwich Village restaurant, where they would be joined at a long table by other friends.

  At one such dinner, there were among the diners Frida and Diego, Nevelson, Eaton, the modern dancer Ellen Kearns and the sculptor John Flanagan, who worshiped Rivera and liked to sit and watch him paint for hours. “We used to carry on,” Nevelson recalled. “There’d be a white tablecloth and we’d put, say, powdered sugar on it. One person would start the composition, then another would add to it, spilling wine, shaking pepper, moving things around until the table-cloth was a whole landscape. Diego was great for having fun.”

  Indeed he was. Louise Nevelson was a beautiful, vivacious, strong-willed divorcée in her early thirties, a passionate devotee of art and of men. Before long she had joined the ranks of Rivera’s assistants and had painted an expressionistic portrait of the maestro looking ugly, as he told her he thought he was, but unmistakably a genius. He showed his gratitude by taking her to an Indian shop, asking her what she liked, and buying the necklace she admired.

  Soon all the assistants were aware that Rivera was spending a lot of time with Louise. A July entry in Lucienne’s diary reports that Diego did not appear at work at all that day, and that Sánchez Flores told the other assistants that Rivera very much liked “the girl that sticks around Diego.” Lucienne was indignant; “Frieda is too perfect a person,” she wrote, “for anyone to have the strength to take her place.” When Rivera did not turn up at the New Workers’ School a second time, Sánchez Flores told the others that Rivera was in Louise’s company again. “I felt so bad for Frieda,” wrote Lucienne on that day.

  Frida no longer went every day to the scaffold. She was not well—her right foot felt paralyzed, and she had to keep it raised as much as possible—and she was lonely. Lupe Marín, who came to stay for a week on her way back to Mexico from Europe, recalled that “Frida did not go out. She spent the whole day in the bathtub. It was too hot to go out in the streets.”

  Often Diego did not come home until dawn. Frida would call Suzanne Bloch and say, “Oh, I hate to be alone!” or “I’m feeling blue. Please come and see me.” Once when Suzanne spent the night with Frida, Frida whiled away the evening cooking a battalion of little puddings for Diego to eat when he returned.

  Rivera did show some concern for Frida, asking Lucienne and Stephen Dimitroff to persuade her to paint, though it was, Lucienne thought, merely because “he wanted to be independent of her.” Noting that Frida admired a small fresco panel that Lucienne had just finished, Rivera encouraged his wife to try the medium herself. After a display of recalcitrance, Frida did, but the bust-length Self-Portrait she produced was horrible, she thought. When the figure was finished, she wrote all around the head (mostly in English): “Absolutely rotten, No sirve [It doesn’t work]. Oh! boy v
ery ugly, Frieda.” In disgust, she dropped the panel—it cracked but did not break—and threw it away. Lucienne and Stephen, who thought it was beautiful, retrieved it from the garbage can and took it home. Later, during a move, the edges broke off, but the main section remains intact, and it is not “rotten” but full of charm. The face that stares out of the plaster has the intense physical presence of a Faiyum mummy portrait. Even in this experimental work, Frida’s self-presentation is startlingly alive.

  The strain between Frida and Diego was exacerbated by another conflict. Frida was desperate to go back to Mexico, at least for a visit. After four years of living almost continuously in the United States, she still felt alienated by Gringolandia and its way of life. In a letter to Dr. Eloesser written some years later, when she was happily back in her native country, she expressed her feelings about the relative merits of the U.S. and Mexico, admitting that in Mexico, “one always has to go around with ones thorns sharp . . . to defend oneself from all the cabrones [bastards] . . . who get into hot arguments wanting always to get ahead and to screw the next person.” In the U.S., on the other hand, one could relax because “there people are dumber and more malleable.”

  What’s more [she continued] in relation to Diego’s work the people here [in Mexico] always respond with obscenities and dirty tricks, and that is what makes him most desperate since he has only to arrive and they start attacking him in the newspapers, they have such envy for him that they would like to make him disappear as if by enchantment. On the other hand in Gringolandia it was different, even in the case of the Rockefellers, one could fight against them without being stabbed in the back. In California everyone treated him very well, also they respect the work of anyone, here he does no more than finish a fresco and the next week it is already scratched or spat upon with phlegm. This as you must understand would disillusion anyone above all when one works like Diego, using all the effort and energy of which he is capable, without taking into consideration that art is “sacred” and all that series of pendejadas [stupidities], but on the contrary, toiling like any bricklayer. On the other hand, and this in my personal opinion, in spite of the fact that I understand the advantages that the United States have for any work or activity, I don’t like the gringos with all their qualities and their defects which are very great, their manner of being, their disgusting puritanism, their Protestant sermons their endless pretension, the way that for everything one must be “very decent” and “very proper” seems to me rather stupid. I know that the people here are thieves, hijos de la chingada, cabrones, etc. etc. but I don’t know why, they do even the most horrible things with a little sense of humor, while the gringos are "sangrones" [dullards] by birth, although they are very respectful and decent(?). Also their system of living seems to be the most repugnant, those damned parties, in which everything from the sale of a painting to a declaration of war is resolved after swallowing many little cocktails (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a spicy way) they always take into account that the seller of the painting or the declarer of war is an “important” personage, otherwise they don’t give one even a nickel’s worth of attention. In the U.S. they only suck up to the “important people” it doesn’t matter to them that they are unos hijos de su mother [Frida wrote “mother” in English] and like this I can give you a few other little opinions of those gringo types. You might tell me that you can also live there without little cocktails and without “parties,” but without them one never amounts to anything, and it is irritating that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition, to succeed in becoming “somebody,” and frankly I no longer have even the least ambition to be anybody, I despise the conceit and being the gran caca does not interest me in any way.

  Unlike Frida, Rivera liked the United States and its citizens; he liked the adulation the Manhattan art world gave him, and he was determined to stay in New York until the New Workers’ School panels were completed. Moreover, to him, going back to Mexico was going backward in time. He was convinced that the world revolution would happen in an industrialized country, and he wanted to be there, at least on the ideological barricades, fighting with images as ammunition. He said that he and Frida should sacrifice their comforts and their love of home for the great Communist cause. Frida did not agree. She thought all this was a lot of “bunk.”

  On November 16, 1933, Frida wrote to her friend Isabel Campos that she spent her time in Gringolandia “dreaming about my return to Mexico.”

  New York is very pretty [she went on] and I feel better here than in Detroit, but in spite of this I am longing for Mexico. . . . Yesterday we had snow for the first time, and soon it will be so cold that . . . the aunt of the little girls [death] will come and take them away. Then there will be nothing to do but dress in woolen underwear and put up with snow. I do not feel the cold so much because of my famous long skirts but sometimes I feel a cold draft that could not even be prevented by twenty skirts. I still run around like crazy and I am getting used to these old clothes. Meanwhile some of the gringa-women are imitating me and trying to dress a la Mexicana, but the poor souls only look like cabbages and to tell you the naked truth they look absolutely impossible. That doesn’t mean that I look good in them either, but still I get by (don’t laugh). . . .

  Tell me what you want me to bring you from here, because there are so many really adorable things that I don’t know what would be good to bring you, but if you have a special taste for something, just tell me and I’ll bring it.

  As soon as I arrive you must make me a banquet of pulque and quesadillas [fritters] made of squash blossoms, because just thinking about it makes my mouth water. Don’t think I’m forcing this on you and that already from here I am begging you to give me a banquet. It’s just that I am reminding you, so that you don’t look wide-eyed when I arrive.

  What do you know about the Rubés and all the people who used to be our friends? Tell me some gossip, because here no one chats with me about anything and from time to time gossip is very pleasant to the ear . . . here come a thousand tons of kisses for you to share and keep most of them for yourself. . . .

  Frida ends her letter with a drawing of herself in front of Manhattan skyscrapers. She weeps, and a comic strip balloon says, “Don’t forget me.” Above her is a sad-faced sun. In the middle of the drawing is a boat moving through the ocean in the direction of Mexico. There, the sun smiles.

  Frida’s longing to absent herself from New York, to return home, is visible in her painting called My Dress Hangs There (figure 34), which is signed on the back in chalk and inscribed: “I painted this in New York when Diego was painting the mural in Rockefeller Center.” Since it was finished after she returned to Mexico, and because it shows the influence of Rivera’s Radio City mural, she no doubt continued working on it until her departure.

  Directly in the middle of a composite image that shows Manhattan as the capital of capitalism as well as a center of poverty and protest in the Depression years hangs Frida’s Tehuana costume. Flanked by cold, anonymous skyscrapers with endless blank windows in regular rows, and hanging on a powder-blue hanger hooked over a powder-blue ribbon, the embroidered maroon blouse and pea-green skirt with pink ribbons and white ruffles looks exotic, intimate, and feminine. By absenting herself from her dress, Frida is saying that her dress may hang in Manhattan, but she is elsewhere; she does not want any part of “Gringolandia.” Though empty clothing in this painting is not yet the anguished symbol it was to become in later works, the clothes exert a powerful presence nonetheless; Frida already knew the emotional reverberations of empty dresses.

  The message is delivered with a light touch, a leftist view of Manhattan in the guise of a charming folkloric parody. Frida mocks the North American obsession with efficient plumbing and the national preoccupation with competitive sports by setting upon pedestals a monumental toilet and a golden golf trophy. Business, religion, and the drastic eclecticism of U.S. taste are targets too. Snaking around the cross in the sta
ined-glass window of Trinity Church is a large red S that turns the crucifix into a dollar sign; a red ribbon links the church’s gothic tower with a Wall Street Doric temple, Federal Hall; and instead of Federal Hall’s marble steps, Frida has pasted on her canvas a graph showing “Weekly Sales in Millions”: in July 1933, big business appeared to be doing fine, but the masses—tiny, swarming figures at the bottom of the painting—were not the beneficiaries. An outsize telephone perched on top of an apartment building is the city’s heart; its black wire loops in and out of windows like an immense circulatory system, connecting everything.

  Thus Frida laughs at America. But she has something serious to say as well about human waste and wasted human beings in a capitalist society: a garbage pail overflows with a hot-water bottle, daisies, a stuffed toy rabbit, a liquor bottle—and a frilly cloth smeared with blood, a bone, globs of entrails, an object that looks like a human heart, and most horrific of all, a bloody human hand.

  One curious thing about the cast of characters in Frida’s view of Manhattan is that none of the leading actors is alive. The artist’s empty dress takes center stage. Automatons are her opposite. On the steps of Federal Hall stands the statue of George Washington, a reminder of the revolutionary idealism of the past. The billboard showing Mae West plays a different kind of role. At the time that Frida was at work on this painting, Rivera, in a conversation about his view of the American ideal of beauty (“the George Washington Bridge, a trimotor, a good automobile, or any efficient machine"), said that as for human beauties, Mae West “is the most wonderful machine for living I have ever known—unfortunately on the screen only.” Frida did not see it that way. She has placed Mae West next to the church with its dollar-sign window, because the film star, too, represents false values—in her case, vanity, luxury, the worship of glamour. Her sumptuousness is ephemeral: the edges of the billboard on which she appears are peeling away from the frame, and the buildings below it are burning.