Each Frida has one hand placed near her sexual organs. The unloved woman holds surgical pincers, the Tehuana Frida a miniature portrait of Diego Rivera as a child, taken from an old photograph that is now among the memorabilia in the Frida Kahlo Museum. From the crimson frame of the oval-shaped miniature springs a long red vein that also resembles an umbilical cord emerging from a placenta. Diego’s egg-shaped portrait thus seems to stand for both a lost baby and a lost lover. To Frida, Diego was both.
The vein winds around the Tehuana Frida’s arm, continues through her heart, then leaps across space to the other Frida, circling her neck, entering her broken heart, and finally ending on her lap, where she shuts off its flow with the surgical pincers. A note to Diego in Frida’s journal says: “My blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours.” In anger and despair at the divorce, she cuts off this magical flow with surgical pincers. But the blood continues to drip, and in her white lap it forms a pool that overflows to make another puddle. Below, stains on her skirt echo red embroidered flowers. The striking image of blood on white cloth makes one think of martyrdom, of miscarriage, of sheets besmirched with blood in several of Frida’s paintings. But even in the face of tragedy, Frida is sardonic: some of the small embroidered flowers are slyly transformed into dripping splotches of blood.
The two Fridas’ willfully impassive faces are profiled against a gray-and-white sky as turbulent as the one El Greco painted above the hilltop at Toledo: dark rents in the jagged clouds at once reflect the figures’ inner turmoil and heighten the disturbing paralysis of pose and demeanor. As often in her full-length self-portraits, Frida is alone in an endless, flat, empty space. (In bust-length self-portraits, walls of vegetation often close off space directly behind the figure.) Except for the Mexican bench on which she sits, she is completely disconnected from any solid objects that might provide the comfort of familiarity. All her powers of observation are fixed instead on her own image—a focus that makes the self-contained image all the more explosive.
And all the more alone: Frida’s only companion is herself. The doubling of her self deepens the chill of loneliness. Abandoned by Diego, she holds her own hand, and links her two selves with a blood vein. Her world is thus self-enclosed, a dead end. Frida once said that The Two Fridas showed the “duality of her personality.” Like those other self-portraits that show her twice (Two Nudes in a Forest and Tree of Hope), The Two Fridas is an image of self-nurture: Frida comforts, guards, or fortifies herself.
There are other kinds of duality at work here too. The long hours spent scrutinizing her reflection in the mirror and reproducing that reflection must have accentuated Frida’s sense of having two identities: the observer and the observed, the self as it is felt from within and the self as it appears from without. Thus Frida not only depicted herself twice, here and in other self-portraits; she approached the body and face schismatically. Her body, either nude or dressed in ruffles and ribbons, she painted as a subject for the artist’s scrutiny; the female in the passive role of pretty object, victim of pain, or participant in nature’s cycles of fecundity. By contrast, looking at her face in the mirror, she perceived herself as depictor, not as object depicted. She thus became both active artist and passive model, dispassionate investigator of what it feels like to be a woman and passionate respository of feminine emotions. Rivera recognized this dichotomy as male-female when he called Frida “la pintora mas pintor"—using both the feminine and the masculine terms.
In her January 1940 letter to Nickolas Muray, Frida mentioned that she was “working like hell” to finish a big painting for the Surrealist show, and on February 6 she said she intended to send this same painting to Julien Levy, and that she was working hard for the exhibition Levy had offered her in October or November. (The exhibition was never held because, Levy said, the war in Europe made it impossible.) The work to which she referred is The Wounded Table—yet another painting full of dripping blood (figure 55). Like The Two Fridas, it is a dramatization of loneliness. In the double self-portrait Frida accompanied herself. Here she is accompanied by her niece and nephew, Isolda and Antonio Kahlo, by her pet fawn, El Granizo (meaning “hail,” presumably because his spots resembled hailstones), and by a Judas, a pre-Columbian idol, and a skeleton, but their presence is not consoling.
Behind a long table, Frida and her three inanimate companions face us like a tribunal. The brutish, overalls-clad Judas embraces her, his network of phallic fuses seeming to ensnare her as well. The elongated arm of the Nayarit idol (based on a sculpture of an embracing seated couple now in the Frida Kahlo Museum) is painted in such a way that it appears both to hug Frida and to be a continuation of her right arm. Equally intimate with her, the grinning clay skeleton fondles a lock of her hair, entangling it in the coiled spring that forms its forearm. The Judas’s chest and right foot are bleeding, the idol has peg legs, and the skeleton has a broken right foot (like Frida). Even the table is wounded. Blood oozing from its knots drips onto the floor, onto the Judas’s and the skeleton’s feet, and onto the ruffle of Frida’s Tehuana skirt; each of its legs is a flayed human leg like that of an écorché. As a symbol of domesticity, the wounded table must stand for Frida’s broken marriage.
Frida has staged this painting carefully. Two heavy fringed curtains are pulled back to reveal a wooden platform in front of a backdrop that consists of a stormy sky and predatory jungle plants. The characters are in a moment of suspended animation, like actors just after the curtain is raised. Their stasis is that of the storm’s eye: they seem frozen by the heroine’s panicked loneliness. Probably the play being performed was a way of sending a message to Diego: the actors sit in judgment, and the judgment they hand down as they stare at the viewer is clearly an angry one.
Frida’s preoccupation with death at the time of her divorce is revealed again in The Dream, 1940, where she sleeps in her four-poster bed floating in the lavender, cloud-filled sky of her dream—a sky that appears to be a continuation of the lavender shadows on the rumpled white garment that envelops her (plate XV). Once again, she pairs herself with a skeleton, this time one in the form of the Judas that she actually did keep on top of her bed’s canopy, and that she explained to frightened or bewildered visitors as an amusing reminder of her own mortality. While Frida sleeps, the plant embroidered on her bright yellow bedspread (she did, in fact, have a bedspread embroidered with flowers) springs to life, becoming a thorny vine that bursts into foliage around her face and grows away from the bedspread and into the air as though it were a real plant, not just stitches of embroidery thread. It is as if Frida were dreaming of a time, long after death, when plants would sprout from her grave.
Like Frida, the skeleton rests its head on two pillows, but instead of a vine, it is entwined with wires and explosives, and it holds a bouquet of lavender flowers. Unlike Frida, whose face is calm in sleep, the skeleton stares and grimaces. At any moment, one feels, it could explode, making Frida’s dream of death a reality. The skeleton is Frida’s “lover,” as Diego once teasingly said. It is her other half.
In almost all the self-portraits from the year of her divorce, Frida gives herself companions—skeletons, a Judas, her niece and nephew, her own alternate self, and her pets. The most intriguing of these are her monkeys, who often embrace her like intimate friends.
In her first self-portrait with a monkey, the 1937 painting Fulang-Chang and I, Frida’s companion is primarily a symbol of promiscuity. But it is also her offspring and her ancestor (in Moses, 1945, she put a male and a female ape next to the original man and woman): Frida draws a parallel between her pet’s simian features and her own and then goes on to emphasize her feeling of connectedness to the animal by wrapping a lavender silk ribbon around its neck and hers. All of this is done in the spirit of affection and humor. When, on the other hand, in the 1940 Self-Portrait with Monkey (plate XVII) she winds a blood-red ribbon around her own neck four times and then uses it as a metaphoric bloodline to tie herself to her mo
nkey, the feeling is one of desperation; and the way the animal wraps its arm around her so that its paw merges with, or seems to be an extension of, her braided hair is sinister.
After the divorce, Frida’s monkeys, and especially the spider monkey called Caimito de Guayabal (meaning guava-patch fruit), which Diego had brought her upon his return from a trip to southern Mexico, helped to fill some of the place vacated by her great mischievous, jealous child, Diego; they also took the place of the children she would now surely never have. Thus in her art, monkeys play a more complex and subtle role. Beginning in 1939, when she portrayed herself in bust-length self-portraits with things like ribbons, veins, vines, thorny branches, monkeys’ paws, or strands of her own hair encircling her neck, one feels that these “connectors” threaten to choke her, and they heighten the sense of claustrophobia created by walls of intertwining jungle plants that close off space directly behind her. And though they console her and provide company, the monkeys underscore her terror at being alone. Their physical proximity is disturbing. For all their child-like innocence, spider monkeys are emphatically not children; they are wild jungle animals. In Frida’s paintings their animal restlessness heightens the tension of her regal calm, and hints at a bestial wildness hidden beneath her skin.
In another 1940 Self-Portrait, which Frida sold to Nickolas Muray, she is accompanied by Caimito de Guayabal and a black cat, and from her necklace of thorns dangles a dead hummingbird (plate XVI). The monkey combines what appears to be an almost human capacity for empathy toward his abandoned mistress with simian unpredictability. As he gingerly fingers Frida’s necklace of thorns, the viewer feels that with one ill-considered tug, he could deepen her wounds. The cat is a menace too. Poised to pounce, his ears forward, he fixes his eyes on the hummingbird, which hangs against Frida’s bare, already bleeding flesh. Since the hummingbird not only represents a species with which Frida felt closely associated (she turned her eyebrows into a bird in a 1946 drawing and people said she moved with the swift lightness of a hummingbird), its lifeless body probably refers to the fact that once again Frida felt “murdered by life.” It has another meaning as well: in Mexico, hummingbirds are used as magic charms to bring luck in love.
Frida wears Christ’s crown of thorns as a necklace again in yet another bust-length Self-Portrait from the same year, one in which a hand-shaped brooch holds a ribbon on which she has written: “I painted my portrait in the year 1940 for Dr. Eloesser, my doctor and my best friend. With all love, Frida Kahlo” (plate XIX). As in the Muray Self-Portrait, and in The Broken Column—indeed, in many of her self-portraits—Frida has amplified her personal misery by giving it Christian significance. She presents herself as a martyr; the thorns draw blood. Although she had rejected religion, Christian imagery, especially the theatrically bloody martyrdoms familiar in Mexican art, pervades Frida’s work. The bloodiness and self-mortification goes back, of course, to Aztec tradition, for the Aztecs not only practiced human sacrifice, they also pricked their own skin and punctured their ears to draw blood so that crops would flourish. But it was Christianity that brought to colonial Mexico the depiction of pain in realistic and human terms, with the result that almost every Mexican church has a frighteningly veristic sculpture of Christ, either whipped at the post, dragging his cross, or dead, his body always full of bloody, suppurating wounds. Frida, who owned a particularly stomach-turning painting of Christ on the road to Calvary, used the same extreme pain and realism to get her private message across; if she borrowed the rhetoric of Catholicism, it was because her paintings were, in their own way, about salvation.
Although she was at this time trying to accelerate production in order to be able to make a living from her work, and although there are similarities in the various bust-length self-portraits’ formats, Frida did not use a formula. To be sure, the angle at which her head is turned is often the same; this was clearly the angle that minimized the movement involved in turning back and forth between canvas and mirror. But each painting is treated as a separate self-confrontation. Acute attention to details, like the way the hummingbird is tied to the necklace of thorns, the choice and placement of plants (white buds next to dried brown twigs in the Eloesser Self-Portrait, for example), or the precise rhythm and tightness of an encircling ribbon, makes each portrait marvelously distinct. In all of them, Frida appears grave, her head held high with her characteristic hauteur. Her face is older, tenser, and more wary than it was in self-portraits done before her separation from Diego. One feels a charge of emotion behind the mask of control as Frida braces herself against her own vulnerability, and at the same time makes sure that the viewer recognizes her suffering. Her elaborate self-mythologizing performance provides psychological distance from what might otherwise be overwhelming grief. Calling perhaps upon the pieties of her Catholic childhood, she turns herself into an icon that she—and others—can worship, thus transcending pain.
The self-portraits from 1940 also show clearly the degree to which Frida had by this time grasped the power of color to communicate emotion. To eyes accustomed to the French tradition in the visual arts, Frida’s color choices—olive, orange, purple, many earthy tones, and a hallucinatory yellow—are jarring. Although her bizarre palette reflects her love of the untutored color combinations in Mexican popular art, Frida cunningly makes color set off psychological drama. Pink is often used in ironic contrast to violence or death; in several self-portraits a yellow olive accentuates the feeling of claustrophobic oppression; the gray blue of Frida’s skies and the lavender or burnt sienna of her earth give an edge to the expression of alienation and despair. Since not much black is used to model forms, her paintings often have a visionary brilliance.
In her diary in the mid-1940s, Frida explained the meaning of colors in a sort of prose poem: “I will try,” she wrote, to use “the pencils that are sharpened to the infinite point that always looks forward.” There follows a list of hues, some of them designated by small patches of colored lines arranged in patterns, others identified by name:
GREEN: warm and good light
REDDISH PURPLE: Aztec. Tlapali [Aztec word for “color” used for painting and drawing]. Old blood of prickly pear. The most alive and oldest.
BROWN: color of mole, of the leaf that goes. Earth.
YELLOW: madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and of joy.
COBALT BLUE: electricity and purity. Love.
BLACK: nothing is black, really nothing.
LEAF GREEN: leaves, sadness, science. The whole of Germany is this color.
GREENISH YELLOW: more madness and mystery. All the phantoms wear suits of this color or at least underclothes.
DARK GREEN: color of bad news and good business.
NAVY BLUE: distance. Also tenderness can be of this blue.
MAGENTA: Blood? Well, who knows!
The Eloesser Self-Portrait has lurid colors—pink, greenish ocher, yellow, the bright red of Frida’s lips and blood. Its baroque opulence and the predominance of an opalescent pink contrasts in the strongest way with the painful image of Frida’s bleeding neck. One is reminded of the lacerated Christ figures in Mexican churches, where gruesome wounds are surrounded by pretty flowers, luxurious laces, velvets, and gold. By contrast, Self-Portrait with Monkey is dark and austere; black in the interstices between leaves in the foliage wall suggests that the time is night; the nocturnal gloom is only intensified by the blood-red ribbon circling and recircling Frida’s neck. In the Self-Portrait (figure 56) commissioned by Sigmund Firestone, on the other hand, the combination of a bright yellow-green background with purple ribbons in black hair, plus jade beads and the lavender embroidery on the white huipil (shirt or blouse), sets the viewer’s teeth on edge, as Frida surely knew it would. If yellow and greenish yellow meant madness, Frida must have been feeling crazy, for she used a lot of yellow in the paintings produced during her divorce from Diego.
Frida painted another self-portrait in 1940 in which color’s unnerving bite transmits her distress at being se
parated from Diego. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair shows the artist sitting on a bright yellow Mexican chair in the midst of a large expanse of reddish-brown earth that is covered with strands of her shorn black hair (plate XVIII). The sky is full of pinkish, nacreous clouds that should be soft and lovely, but are instead airless and oppressive, like the clouds in the Self-Portrait dedicated to Dr. Eloesser. The chair is gay and folkloric, but the way Frida has made it the only bright object in the painting accentuates the feeling of desolation.
A month after her divorce came through, Frida did what she had done in 1934 in response to Rivera’s affair with Cristina: she cropped her hair. On February 6, she wrote to Nickolas Muray: “I have to give you bad news: I cut my hair, and look just like a ferry [fairy]. Well, it will grow again, I hope!” One story has it that Frida warned Diego that she would cut off her long hair, which he adored, if he persisted in his current liaison (perhaps with Paulette Goddard). He persisted, and she carried out her threat. Whether the story is true or not, it is certainly typical of Frida. A mood of angry retaliation is expressed in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, in which she has also stripped herself of the Tehuana costume Diego liked her to wear. Instead, she is dressed in a man’s suit that is so large it must be Diego’s. She sits with her legs apart like a man, and she wears men’s black lace-up shoes and a man’s shirt. Earrings are her only vestige of femininity.
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