Even What the Water Gave Me is, in fact, more real than surreal. For while the accumulation of small and fantastic details makes this painting appear to be less coherent and less grounded in earthy reality than other works, all its images are closely tied to events or feelings in Frida’s life, and the scene taken as a whole is perfectly plausible as a “real” depiction of the dreamer and her dream.
Julien Levy said that Frida rarely talked about her work, but did talk to him about What the Water Gave Me. “It’s quite explicit,” Levy explained. “It is an image of passing time. She indicated, for one thing, that it was about time and childhood games and the sadness of what had happened to her in the course of her life. Dreams, as Frida grew older, were all of them sad. The child’s dreams were happy. As a child she played with toys in the bathtub. She had dreams about them. The painting’s images relate to her bathtub games. And now she looks at herself in the bathtub, and, as with backward dreaming, all her dreams have turned to a sad ending. She also used to talk a lot about masturbating in the bathtub. And then, she talked about the perspective of herself that is shown in this painting. Philosophically her idea was about the image of yourself that you have because you do not see your own head. The head is something that is looking, but not seen. It is what one carries around to look at life with.”
What water offered Frida was a soothing suspension of the objective world so that she could immerse her fantasy in a constellation of fleeting images of the type that cross the inner eye when consciousness is ebbing away. Yet even in this, the most fantastic of her paintings, Frida is down to earth. She has, in fact, depicted “real” images in the most literal, straightforward way. We may not know what each detail means, but she did. Frida’s poetry is not one of subtle nuances. Nothing is amorphous or blurry. She draws her lines and is utterly concrete.
Perceiving this, and knowing that realism and Marxism go hand in hand, Diego argued that Frida was a “realist.” In a 1943 article called “Frida Kahlo and Mexican Art,” he wrote:
In the panorama of Mexican painting of the last twenty years, the work of Frida Kahlo shines like a diamond in the midst of many inferior jewels; clear and hard, with precisely defined facets. . . .
Recurring self-portraits which are never alike and which increasingly resemble Frida, are everchanging and permanent like a universal dialectic. Monumental realism is brilliantly apparent in Frida’s work. Occult materialism is present in the severed heart, the blood flowing on tables, the bathtubs, the plants, the flowers, and the arteries closed by the hemostatic forceps of the painter.
Monumental realism is expressed to the smallest dimensions; tiny heads are sculpted as if they were colossal. So they appear when the magic of a projector magnifies them to the size of a wall. When the photomicroscope enlarges the background of Frida’s paintings, reality becomes apparent. The web of veins and the network of cells are distinct, although they lack some elements, giving a new dimension to the art of painting. . . .
Frida’s art is individual-collective. Her realism is so monumental that everything has “n” dimensions. Consequently, she paints at the same time the exterior and interior of herself and the world. . . .
In a sky composed of oxygen plus hydrogen plus carbon, and the prime mover electricity, the spirits of space, Huarakan, Kukulkan and Gukamatz are alone with parents and grandparents, and she is in the earth and in matter, thunder, lightning and the light rays, which in their conversion finally created man. But for Frida, that which is tangible is the mother, the center of all, the mother-sea, tempest, nebula, woman.
If what is described here hardly sounds like the kind of realism that is accessible to the masses and moves them to think of social reform, it is nevertheless realism in the context of Rivera’s thought. Frida’s paintings, like Rivera’s murals, and indeed, much of Mexican art from retablos to Posada’s engravings, interweave fact and fantasy as if the two were inseparable and equally real.
Frida’s humor, too, differs from the sophisticated and disenchanted urge to paradox of European Surrealism. “Surrealism,” said Frida, “is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were ’sure’ of finding shirts.” Her idea of Surrealism was playful: “I use Surrealism as a means of poking fun at others without their realizing it, and of making friends with those who do realize it.” Frida’s Surrealism was the fun of surprising people by putting a skeleton Judas on top of her bed’s canopy, or decorating her plaster casts with iodine and thumbtacks, or making cadavres exquis. For her own amusement and to give away as presents, Frida liked to assemble fanciful objects out of an assortment of curios. Probably she got the idea from Breton, Miró, and Dali’s Surrealist “assemblages,” or from Marcel Duchamp or Joseph Cornell, each of whom paid tribute to Frida by making her a box containing irrationally juxtaposed objects. In Mexico, she could have been inspired by her intimate friend Machila Armida, who made bizarre concoctions of objects like the one in which she incorporated a butterfly, an alligator, a snake, a mask, and barbed wire in order to menace what must be the bride doll that Frida found in Paris in 1939 (and included in her 1943 still life The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened).
In the Frida Kahlo Museum beneath a protective glass ball is an assemblage of small objects—an equestrian cowboy on top of a skull, tin soldiers, dice, toy angels, all on pedestals—that might be one of Frida’s works. A piece that was surely hers, a gift for Alejandro Gómez Arias, was a world globe that Frida covered with butterflies and flowers. In a later year, when she was sick and unhappy, she asked for it back and covered the butterflies and flowers with red paint to symbolize both her politics and her pain.
Frida made these collage objects in the same spirit in which she arranged her furnishings or her clothes. Unlike the Surrealists, she did not think that her incongruous juxtapositions held a profound significance. For her, ambiguity was a game. Less complex and ironic, more fatalistic and earthily sardonic than Surrealist humor, Frida’s humor was a jest at pain and death. By contrast, Surrealist humor is deadly serious. “The trouble with El Señor Breton,” Frida said once, “is that he takes himself so seriously.”
A few discerning critics (besides Rivera) recognized the differences between Frida’s art and orthodox Surrealism. In his article “Rise of Another Rivera,” published in Vogue on the occasion of Frida’s Julien Levy exhibition, Bertram Wolfe said: “Though André Breton, who will sponsor her show in Paris, told her she was a surrealiste, she did not attain her style by following the methods of that school. . . . Quite free, also, from the Freudian symbols and philosophy that obsess the official Surrealist painters, hers is a sort of ’naive’ Surrealism, which she invented for herself. . . . While official Surrealism concerns itself mostly with the stuff of dreams, nightmares, and neurotic symbols, in Madame Rivera’s brand of it, wit and humor predominate.”
After visiting Frida in Mexico in 1939 to take notes for a projected article, the art historian Parker Lesley wrote her that the main point of his article would be to define her painting as an example of “conscious, purposeful, and useful symbolic painting in opposition to the unconscious, totally obscure cabalistic productions of ingenious frauds such as Dali. You know clearly what you have painted, he admits that he has not the vaguest idea of the meaning of his work. Consequently, the differences, aesthetic and psychological, between honesty and charlatanism should be made available to a reading public.”
And in a series of articles on Frida written over the years, Antonio Rodríguez stated his view that Frida was not a Surrealist but rather a “painter deeply rooted in reality . . . an extraordinarily realistic painter.” Although it seems connected with that of the Surrealists, he said, “Frida’s work, instead of wanderings in the world of oneirocritical sensations, is a bleeding memory of what she has experienced, a kind of autobiography.”
In later years, Frida vehemently denied that she was a Surrealist. Surrealism’s loss of vogue in the 1940s may have had something to do with this. As Julien Levy said,
“the cock was crowing. Practically everyone, when the cock crowed, denied that he was a Surrealist, because it wasn’t chic.” Many artists who had once been infatuated with Surrealism came to see it as decadent and European. After the war, Paris was no longer the cultural capital of the world; Americans felt that New York was the place where vital new art was being invented, and Mexicans continued to take pride in their native culture. But there were other reasons for Frida’s defection as well. Breton’s ardent Trotskyism must have exasperated Frida after she and Diego broke with Trotsky; certainly her and Diego’s decision in the 1940s to attempt to rejoin the Communist party would have made them both denounce the art movement. Around 1952, Frida put some of her thoughts on the subject in a letter to Antonio Rodríguez:
Some critics have tried to classify me as a Surrealist; but I do not consider myself to be a Surrealist. . . . Really I do not know whether my paintings are Surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself. . . . I detest Surrealism. To me it seems to be a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art. A deviation from the true art that the people hope for from the artist. . . . I wish to be worthy, with my painting, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas that strengthen me . . . . I want my work to be a contribution to the struggle of the people for peace and liberty.
It is interesting that perhaps Frida’s most Surrealist work is the diary that she kept from around 1944 to the time of her death. The red leather volume with the initials “J.K.” imprinted in gold on the cover (it was said to have belonged to John Keats) was purchased in a rare-book store in New York City by a friend and given to Frida with the hope that filling it might offer her some solace at a time when she was sick and lonely. Into its pages (now there are only 161, because at the end of her life friends tore out sections of it) Frida poured a moving and poetic soliloquy made up of images and words. Since the journal is private and thus did not need to be accessible in its meaning, the grounding in realism to which Frida was committed in her paintings is absent here. The drawings were produced in a playful, improvisatory way, like the assemblage objects or the decorations on her plaster casts. The fact that what she drew or wrote in her journal was intended only for her—or Diego’s—eyes freed her to be truly surrealistic if she wished.
Images and words flow with a freedom that must have come from her knowledge of Surrealist “automatism.” There are pages of seemingly unconnected words or phrases, and there are lists of words that start with the same letter, occasionally arranged as if they were poems. Perhaps Frida simply liked the words’ sound. She wrote, for example (in Spanish):
Now he comes, my hand, my red vision. larger. more yours. martyr of glass. The great unreason. Columns and valleys. the fingers of the wind. bleeding children. the micron mica. I do not know what my joking dream thinks. The ink, the spot. the form. the color. I am a bird. I am everything, without more confusion. All the bells, the rules. The lands. the great grove. the greatest tenderness. the immense tide. garbage. bathtub. letters of cardboard. dice, fingers duets weak hope of making construction. the cloths. the kings. so stupid. my nails. the thread and the hair. the playful nerve I’m going now with myself. An absent minute. You’ve been stolen from me and I’m leaving crying. He is a vacilón.
The diary included love messages to Diego, pages of autobiography, declarations of political faith, expressions of anxiety, loneliness, pain, and thoughts about death. Frida loved nonsense, and the journal is full of it. There are areas of obsessive visual patterning where repeated marks are like lists of meaningless words. She invents fantastic forms and creatures, bizarre people, wild ceremonies. Two of her odder characters are the “strange couple from the country of the dot and the dash.” They are “One-eye,” a naked man, and “Neferisis,” a nude woman holding a fetus. “One-eye,” she says, “married the beautiful ’Neferisis’ (the immensely wise) in a hot and vital month. To them was born a son with a strange face called Neferunico, he being the founder of the city commonly called ’Lokura’ [madness].”
The drawings in the journal are done in bright colored inks, pencils, and crayon handled in a manner that is, if one takes into account the meticulousness of Frida’s oil painting style, astonishingly free and painterly. They often have the look of having been made in a trance or by someone drugged. Color bursts wildly out of outlines, lines hurtle or meander as if she were doodling. Figures are fragmented and distorted. Faces are often grotesque masks, and some have multiple profiles that show the influence of Picasso, whose exhibition at Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art Frida admired in the summer of 1944. There are pages full of bodies and parts of bodies that have no logical relationship to each other. The starting point for many images was a drop of ink. Or sometimes Frida began a drawing by putting a spot of color on a page and then, while the color was still wet, closing the diary, so that the spot changed shape and was doubled. Using these shapes as points of departure, she elaborated on them, inventing beasts or dragons like the “horrendous Ojosauro primitivo.”
Of such surrealistic procedures for incorporating accident into art, Frida wrote: “Who would say that spots live and help one live?! Ink, blood smell. I do not know what ink I would use that would want to leave its track in such forms. I respect its wishes and I will do what I can to flee from myself worlds, Inked worlds—land free and mine. Far away suns that call me because I form a part of their nucleus. Foolishness . . . What would I do without the absurd and the fleeting?”
The idea of using line and form to capture fantastic images from the unconscious occurs also in several drawings, done on small, loose sheets of paper in the 1940s. Several of these comprise highly intricate networks of lines in which images such as faces, breasts, feet, veins, and eyes seem to be metamorphosed out of the very substance of the lines’ energy and momentum. Frida’s webs and doodles appear as obsessive as lunatics’ drawings. Yet they sometimes look intentionally crazy. It is as if Frida self-consciously used the technique of Surrealist automatism to probe her own neuroses; what she came up with is not pure emotional authenticity (if there is such a thing). Her result is as full of artifice as any art.
And paradoxically, there is a kind of “realism” even in these drawings and diary sketches in which Frida tries to tap the spontaneous process of thought through free-flowing color and form. For an often bedridden invalid, the adventures of the unconscious mind and its ever-changing encounters at the crossroads of consciousness are, after all, a principal reality, just as “real” as daydreams. In the end, Frida was right when she said: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
Chapter 17
A Necklace of Thorns
IN NEW YORK, after her Paris sojourn, Frida stayed briefly with her friend the pianist Ella Paresce; she left precipitately for Mexico before the end of April. Her affair with Nickolas Muray had come to an end.
“Dear, Dear Frida,” Muray wrote in the middle of May:
I should have written you long ago. It is a difficult world you and I live in.
It has been pretty desperate for you but so no less for me when I left you in N.Y. and I heard from Ella P. [Paresce] everything about your departure.
I was not shocked or angry. I knew how unhappy you were, how much you needed your familiar surroundings, your friends, Diego, your own house and habits.
I knew N.Y. only filled the bill as a temporary substitute and I hope you found your haven intact on your return. Of the three of us there was only two of you. I always felt that. Your tears told me that when you heard his voice. The one of me is eternally grateful for the Happiness that the half of you so generously gave. My Dearest Frida—like you I’ve been starved for true affection. When you left I knew it was all over. Your instinct guided you so wisely. You have done the only logical thing for I could not transplant Mexico to N.Y. for you and I’ve learned how essential that was for your happiness. . . .
My affection for you curiously has not changed, nor ever
will. I hope you’ll understand that. I should like a chance to prove that. Your painting is a joy to me. Very soon I shall mail you your color portrait I promised you. It is on exhibition in Los Angeles Art Center. I want to know everything you want me to know.
Affectionately Nick
If Frida went home because she needed her “familiar surroundings,” it is also clear that Muray hurt her deeply, probably by an involvement with the woman who became his wife in June. One friend recalls that when Frida returned to Mexico, she was unhappy because a “handsome American man” had jilted her, and for a cruel reason: her physical ailments hindered the free physical expression of sexual love. The handsome man could well have been Muray. Certainly the closing paragraph of Muray’s May letter is fond rather than ardent.
In her despair, Frida telephoned him from Mexico, and he wrote:
Darling you must pull yourself together and lift yourself by your own bootstraps. You have at your fingertips a gift that love God or gossip cannot take away from you. You must work work paint paint work work. You must believe in yourself and in your own power. I also want you to believe that I will be your friend no matter what happens to you or me. You must know I mean this. I am self conscious writing to you of love and heart, because, because I am not sure if you won’t misconstrue what I say. . . .
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