Your loved and multifarious chicua,
Friduchín
“As you can observe, I have painted,” she wrote, and indeed, she had. From 1937, in addition to Fulang-Chang and I, the Self-Portrait she made for Trotsky, and Memory, come My Nurse and I, The Deceased Dimas, and the still life called I Belong to My Owner. The list for 1938 includes not only Remembrance of an Open Wound and Esquincle Dog with Me, but such works as Four Inhabitants of Mexico, They Asked for Planes and Only Got Straw Wings, Girl with a Death Mask, Me and My Doll, What the Water Gave Me, and three more still lifes, Tunas, Pitahayas, and Fruits of the Earth. Beyond that, Frida was not only more productive; she was also becoming more adept at making her art correspond to her evolving persona. In sophisticated ways her paintings now portrayed not merely “incidents” in her life but glimpses of her inner being and the way she perceived its relation to the world. As we have seen, Fulang-Chang and I, the Self-Portrait dedicated to Trotsky, and Remembrance of an Open Wound clearly show her new confidence in her female attractiveness. Others, such as Memory, My Nurse and I, and especially What the Water Gave Me, are equally clear indications of her development toward greater psychological complexity and technical sophistication.
Several works from this period suggest that Frida continued to feel the sorrow of childlessness; very likely she had another miscarriage or abortion in 1937. My Nurse and I, The Deceased Dimas, Four Inhabitants of Mexico, They Asked for Planes and Only Got Straw Wings, and Girl with Death Mask all show children in unhappy situations; in all but The Deceased Dimas (and possibly Girl with Death Mask), the child is Frida. This nostalgia for her own childhood reflects, I think, current maternal longings—Frida is identifying herself as the child she could not have. Me and My Doll is an even more emphatic statement of her frustrated desire for motherhood.
Two of these paintings—My Nurse and I and Four Inhabitants of Mexico—evince as well Frida’s preoccupation with her roots in Mexico’s past, a passion for her heritage that may have been heightened by the renewed realization that she would leave no progeny to link her with future generations. More and more in these years, the ethic of Mexicanidad pervaded Frida’s existence on many levels: it was a style, a political stance, and a psychological support. It expressed itself in her behavior and her appearance, in the decoration of her home, and in her art.
Frida rightly judged My Nurse and I, in which she has painted herself as an infant with an adult’s head, suckling in her dark Indian nurse’s arms, to be one of her best paintings (plate X). It is a declaration of her faith in the continuity of Mexican culture, in the idea that Mexico’s ancient heritage is reborn in each new generation, and that Frida, as an adult artist, continues to be nourished by her Indian ancestry. In it she has literally placed her being within the bosom of her Indian past, melding her feeling about her own life with pre-Columbian culture’s stress on magic and ritual, its cyclical view of time, its idea of cosmic and biological forces working together, and the importance it gave to fertility. The painting recalls the ritualistic dignity of a well-known Olmec stone sculpture called Señor de las Limas, in which a child with an adult’s face is held in the arms of an adult male. It also brings to mind ceramic sculptures like those from Jalisco (c. 100 B.C.–A.D. 250) that depict a mother holding her suckling child, and in which, as in My Nurse and I, the ducts and glands of the lactating breasts are revealed in a plant-like pattern on the breasts’ surface. Massive and brown, Frida’s nurse is a concretization of Mexico’s Indian heritage and of the Mexican earth, plants, and sky. As if in sympathy with the nursing mother, milk-white veins in a huge leaf in the background are engorged. The raindrops in the sky are “milk from the Virgin"; thus had Frida’s own Indian nurse explained to her the phenomenon of rain. The engorged leaf and the “Virgin’s milk,” the praying mantis and the metamorphosing caterpillar/butterfly that are camouflaged against the stems and leaves of plants, all express Frida’s faith in the interconnectedness of every aspect of the natural world and in her own participation in that world.
“I appear with the face of an adult woman and the body of a baby girl, in the arms of my nana,” Frida said of My Nurse and I. “From her nipples falls milk as from the sky. . . . I came out looking like such a little girl and she so strong and so saturated with providence, that it made me long to sleep.” She also said that she painted the nurse’s face as a mask because she could not remember how her nana looked. But the matter is more complicated than that. For although Frida might have intended the nurse to be a sanguine, reassuring image, one that could lull her to sleep, there is little that is comforting in the nurse’s aspect. The fearsome Teotihuacán stone mask with its blank staring eyes could hardly be more chilling as a mother image; a funerary mask, it evokes the ritual savagery of the Mexican past, and suggests that that past encompasses the present and threatens Frida’s life. Frida appears to be simultaneously protected by the nurse and offered as a sacrificial victim.
Nor does Frida look like a sleepy, satisfied, cuddled infant. The piercing look she gives the viewer seems to say that along with the milk, which she described as “saturated with providence,” she also imbibes a terrible knowledge of her own fate. That tragic sense of destiny might have Christian overtones as well: the painting makes an obvious analogy with the motif of the “Madonna Caritas” in which the Virgin suckles the infant Christ, and it can also be compared to a Pietà.
It may be that there is yet another dimension to My Nurse and I. The frightening nurse has loose black hair and eyebrows that meet, a sign that she is the baby’s ancestor or perhaps another side of Frida. Indeed, My Nurse and I may be, like My Birth, a double self-portrait; in it one aspect of Frida nurtures the other, becoming the life-sustaining half in the central duality of Frida’s adult self.
As the child in Four Inhabitants of Mexico sees her destiny in the skeleton in the square, so does Girl with Death Mask combine Frida’s and Mexico’s preoccupation with death. The child—who may well be Frida, for she looks like the little girl in My Grandparents, My Parents and I—stands in a barren landscape holding a zempazúchil, the yellow flower that in Mexico since Aztec times has been associated with death and is used to decorate graves on the Day of the Dead. Her fate, her mortality, is clapped upon her face in the form of a white skull mask. The tiny painting, no bigger than a hand, was a gift to Dolores del Rio, who says that it represents the child Frida never had, and that it was prompted by a conversation between herself and Frida about Frida’s unhappiness at not being able to bear Diego a child.
The Deceased Dimas (plate XI) is identified on an inscribed ribbon that reads: “The difuntito Dimas Rosas at three years of age, 1937.” (In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is a fiesta that lasts several days, and one day is devoted to dead children, or difuntitos.) Dimas Rosas was an Indian child, probably one of several siblings belonging to a family in Ixtapalapa whom Rivera used as models and to whom the artist was a compadre. (A compadre is a person related to another person as a result of a religious ceremony; Rivera and Dimas’s father became compadres when Dimas was baptized and Rivera was chosen as godfather.) Despite Diego’s scientific arguments, the father of this family persisted in consulting witch doctors rather than medical doctors, with the result that his children kept dying. In this situation, as in her painting, Frida would have responded with a kind of fatalistic sorrow rather than shock or sentimental compassion. Like so many who witness poverty and death frequently, she would have known how helpless she was to change the outcome.
The painting follows a Mexican tradition of postmortem portraiture that stretches back to colonial times, and that in turn derives from a European tradition beginning in the Middle Ages. At first, in Nueva España, such portraits served the moralistic function of honoring a person considered to be exemplary. Later, they served as mementos for the family of the deceased. One such memorial hangs above the head of Frida’s bed in the Frida Kahlo Museum. It shows a dead child crowned with flowers, his body and the bed on which he lies strewn wi
th blossoms. Like Dimas, this child holds flowers in his lifeless hands, and his head rests on a sausage-shaped pillow, but there is an obvious difference. Dimas’s parents could not have afforded to commission such a souvenir. His portrait records a traditional child’s lying in state: garbed like a saint or a holy personage, Dimas wears a cardboard crown and the silk mantle of the Magi who came to adore the infant Christ. But Dimas’s tiny brown feet are bare, and he lies on a humble straw petate, the mat that serves as the standard bed of Mexico’s poor. Like corn, the straw mat is so fundamental to Mexican peasant life that there are many idiomatic expressions based on the word. One of these turns the noun into a verb: se petateó means “he has taken himself and his petate for eternal sleep.” De petate a petate means “from birth to death.”
Just as in Henry Ford Hospital and My Birth Frida transformed her source in retablos, and in My Nurse and I began with another well-known type, the Madonna Caritas, so in Dimas she has altered a traditional mode in subtle ways so that the convention amplifies her originality. Dimas is not seen in the side view typical of postmortem oortraits. Instead, the soles of his feet face us, at once bringing to mind Andrea Mantegna’s dramatic “feet first” Dead Christ. Like the Italian Renaissance master, Frida has raised the dead person’s head on a pillow so that the spectator stares straight into death’s pallor. The intention is to extract the maximum dramatic intensity from the scene. By having Christ’s feet seem to stick out at the viewer, Mantegna forces one to become almost physically engaged with Christ’s wounds and to dwell upon the significance of his death. In Frida’s Dimas, the “feet first” perspective thrusts the viewer headlong into the position of a mourner leaning over the body of the dead child, and then forces him to recognize death in its most factual and physical—not to say pedestrian—aspects. Frida is unsparing. She does not cosmeticize death. Drops of blood dribble from the corner of Dimas’s mouth, and his slightly open, unfocused eyes are both haunting and horrible. There is a note of pathos in the little postcard image of Christ’s flagellation that has been placed on Dimas’s pillow, evidence of the simple faith of the child’s family. But what Frida has painted is an atheist’s view of death—literal and nontranscendent. Dimas will be rolled in his petate and put into the ground, one more victim of Mexico’s high rate of child mortality. The sardonic quality of Frida’s conception is revealed in the title she gave this painting when she showed it in New York in 1938: Dressed Up for Paradise.
It was not provincialism that made Frida borrow folk art modes. She was knowledgeable about art and she knew artists, critics, and art historians. When asked whom she admired, she mentioned Grünewald and Piero della Francesca, Bosch and Clouet, Blake and Klee. She loved the primitivism and fantasy of Gauguin and Rousseau, yet hers was distinct from theirs because it stemmed from Mexican popular tradition.
The adoption of primitivism as an approach to style and imagery had several advantages for Frida. Besides reaffirming her commitment to Mexico’s indigenous culture, it was, in a sense, a leftist political statement, for it expressed her feeling of solidarity with the masses. Adapting a popular art style also coincided with Frida’s finely wrought self-image. Like her costumes, Mexican popular art is full of festive color and alegría, and like her life, it is often theatrical and bloody. Being a painter of such charming, if off putting, folkloric pictures added to Frida’s self-creation as a fabulous, exotic creature. It offered another advantage as well. Primitivism reveals and conceals. Were it not for their small scale and retablo-like style, paintings like A Few Small Nips or My Birth would be unbearable to look at. With fantasy, bright color, and charmingly naïve drawing, Frida distanced both the viewer and the artist from her painting’s painful content. The popular art manner undercuts, and simultaneously underscores, the impact of horrific images—images that the example of popular art emboldened her to present. Works such as Dimas and Henry Ford Hospital are thus ingeniously ingenuous, and Frida’s primitivism is an ironic stance. It allowed her both to display, and to mask and mock, the intimate torments of the self.
Frida’s still lifes are curious assortments of fruits and flowers into which she projected all kinds of personal feelings—her fascination with fecundity and death, for example, and her Mexicanidad. I Belong to My Owner, known only from a photograph, depicts a bunch of peculiarly animate desert flowers whose toothy pods and snake-like blossoms allude both to sexual organs and to Frida’s love of her native land; an earthenware vase is inscribed with the painting’s title and with “VIVA MEXICO.” What did Frida mean by the contrast between the vase full of dry, prickly-looking Mexican wild flowers (which she adored and used to decorate her table) and the single cut rose lying on a table with no water, so that it certainly will die? Perhaps the painting refers to the period when her love was divided between Diego and Trotsky, and the title is a pun on an emotional truth: that Frida, for all her “flings,” would always belong to Diego.
The three other still lifes from this period are similarly Mexicanista. Frida deliberately chose exotic Mexican fruits that have none of the neutrality of apples and oranges, and that often look decidedly bizarre. Tunas, for example, shows the fruit of a prickly pear cactus, which Frida associated with Mexico; in letters she speaks of her native country as “Mexicalpán de las Tunas.” On a tablecloth whose undulations she has transformed into a landscape and a cloudy sky are three tunas shown in different states of ripeness—a life cycle that ends with a maroon-red fruit split open to form a vaginal shape, but even more emphatically suggesting an extracted heart; no doubt, the splotches of red on the plate and the tablecloth are allusions to blood.
Like Tunas, Pitahayas (now lost) and Fruits of the Earth (figure 66) allude to the cycle of life—to sex and death. In the latter, corn cobs, two sheathed, the third stripped of its husk and with half its kernels gone, suggest time’s passage, and the stem of an upside-down mushroom thrusts upward like a phallus or a bone. In Pitahayas a toy skeleton sits on a lava rock holding its scythe over a pile of the pomegranate-type fruits of the night-blooming cereus; most of the fruits are split open to reveal the juicy pulp within. André Breton, who was as quick as Frida to descry the sexual nature of this fruit, said: “I never imagined that world of fruits which encompasses such a marvel as the pitahaya, whose coiled pulp is like the colour of rose petals, whose skin is grey, and which tastes like a kiss blended of love and desire.”
Frida’s imperfect fruits look as if they have struggled to survive in the parched Mexican earth. As survivors, they reminded Frida of herself, and her still lifes are thus a kind of self-portrait: far from being meaningless volumes of a certain color and shape, they are symbols of a larger drama; they are placed not on a conventional tabletop, but in a mountain landscape and beneath the tumultuous Mexican sky.
When Frida was in one of her bouts of work, she would retire to her studio and paint with complete concentration. But like a surf rider losing a wave, she easily lost her momentum. Diego did what he could to encourage her. “She’s working now,” he would say to friends—meaning she could not be interrupted. “Diego always wants me to paint and do nothing else but that,” Frida wrote in a letter to art dealer Julien Levy. “But I am lazy and I paint very little.” She was not really lazy; rather she was so modest about her work that she professed a lackadaisical attitude toward it, and was reluctant to show it to anyone.
Thus it was at Diego’s urging that she participated in a group show at the small University Gallery in Mexico City early in 1938. “Since I came back from New York [in 1935] I have painted about twelve paintings, all small and unimportant, with the same personal subjects that only appeal to myself and nobody else,” she wrote (in English) in her February 14 letter to Lucienne Bloch. “I send four of them to a gallery, which is a small and rotten place, but the only one which admits any kind of stuff, so I send them there without any enthusiasm, four or five people told me they were swell, the rest think they are too crazy.”
Among the “four or five people” who thoug
ht Frida’s work was “swell” was Julien Levy, who owned a small, elegant surrealist-oriented gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. “To my surprise,” she went on in her letter to Lucienne, “Julian [sic] Levy wrote me a letter, saying that somebody talked to him about my paintings, and that he was very much interested in having an exhibition in his gallery, I answered sending few photographs of my last things, and he send another letter very enthusiastic about the photos, and asking me for an exhibition of thirty things on October of this year.”
Although she told Lucienne, “I don’t know what they see in my work. Why do they want me to have a show?” she accepted Levy’s invitation.
Frida’s attitude toward her work was both a pose and more than a pose: it was part of her character. No matter how much admiration and encouragement she received, and even when, later on, she needed money, she did not think in careerist terms—she never pushed for exhibitions, patrons, or reviews. If someone bought a picture she would say she felt sorry for the purchaser: “For that price they could buy something better,” or “It must be because he’s in love with me.” Having a recognized genius for a husband provided her with a protective buffer; she could pretend that she played at art, making tiny private paintings while Diego made huge public ones, even when she was painting seriously and even though art was a mainstay in her life. The folkloric character of her work, and her decision to present it in popular art frames made of tin, shells, mirrors, velvet, or sometimes plaster painted with Talavera tile patterns, were part of the stance of being an amateur—as if, deliberately, she chose to relegate her art to the realm of the “charming” and “exotic,” safe from serious criticism and competition. She preferred to be seen as a beguiling personality rather than to be judged as a painter. Her paintings expressed, in the most vivid and direct way possible, her reality; making them was only part of, and no more important than, making and being Frida Kahlo.
Frida Page 27
