By destroying attributes of female sexuality, Frida has committed a vengeful act that serves to heighten her loneliness. A lock of hair hangs between her legs like a murdered animal. She holds the scissors that did the cropping poised near her genitals, in exactly the position of the surgical pincers that cut the vein connecting her with Diego’s miniature portrait in The Two Fridas. In both paintings one senses that some macabre act has been performed—a violent rejection of femininity, or a desire to excise the part of herself that possesses the capacity to love. The symbolic cutting away of vulnerability and attachment does not, of course, arrest the malignancy of sorrow. In The Two Fridas, blood keeps on dripping from the cut vein. In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida is surrounded by sinisterly animate strands of her hair that spread all over the earth and entwine themselves like vines or snakes in the rungs of her yellow chair. Because these black locks do not diminish in size as they recede in space, they seem to float in the air, thus recalling the veins, vines, roots, and ribbons that in other self-portraits are symbols of Frida’s feeling of being (or desire to be) linked with realities beyond herself. Here, as in The Two Fridas, anger and pain join forces to sever Frida’s connections with the outside world—and most specifically, with Diego. Frida is utterly alone in a vast, empty plain beneath a sunless sky. At the top of the painting are the words of a song: “Look if I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are bald, I don’t love you anymore.” Frida makes a rueful jest of her feckless retaliation: cutting off a sign of femininity becomes nothing more than the illustration of a popular song. Defiant, alone, surrounded by a testimony to her vengeance that is as gruesome as the drips and splotches of blood in other paintings, Frida is an unforgettable image of anger and of injured sexuality.
Rivera’s observation that Frida turned out some of her best work during their divorce was well taken. She worked hard because she was determined not to accept money from Diego. In her October 13, 1939, letter to Muray she had said: “Darling, I must tell you that I am not sending the painting with Miguel [Covarrubias]. Last week I had to sell it to somebody thru Misrachi because I needed the money to see a lawyer. Since I came back from New York I don’t accept a damn cent from Diego, the reasons you must understand. I will never accept money from any man till I die. I want to beg you to forgive me for doing that with a painting that was done for you. But I will keep my promise and paint another one as soon as I feel better. It is a cinch.” (The painting was probably a self-portrait. To replace it, she painted the Self-Portrait in which a hummingbird hangs from her necklace of thorns.)
She tried to live off her paintings, making more efforts than ever before to sell them, sending them in small groups to Julien Levy. Her friends rallied around and were there when she needed them. Conger Goodyear, for example, wrote to Frida on March 3, 1940: “I think you are quite right to take nothing from [Diego]. If you really need money let me know and I will send you some. I want another picture of yours anyway. Will you give me first choice of those you are sending [to Julien Levy]?” Anita Brenner wrote to offer help with medical expenses, and said that Dr. Valentiner wanted to know if Frida needed money. Mary Sklar and Nickolas Muray sent her money every month. “Nick darling,” she wrote Muray on December 18, 1939, “You will say that I am a complete bastard and a s. of a b.! I asked you [for] money and didn’t even thank you for it. That is really the limit Kid! Please forgive me. I was sick two weeks. My foot again and grippe. Now I thank you a million times for your kind favor and about the paying back I want you to be so sweet to wait till January. The Arensberg from Los Angeles will buy a picture. [Walter G. Arensberg was a well-known collector who fell in love with Cubism at the time of the Armory Show in 1913 and later expanded his taste to include Surrealism.] I am sure I will have the bucks next year and immediately I will send you back your hundred bucks. It is OK with you? In case you need them before, I could arrange something else. In any case I want to tell you that it was really sweet of you to lend me that money, I needed it so much . . . I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive!!” To raise money, she thought of renting her house to tourists, but the scheme came to nothing: “to fix the house would of cost a lot of money which I didn’t have and Misrachi didn’t lend me,” she told Muray, “and in second place because my sister wasn’t exactly the person indicated to run such a business. She doesn’t speak a damn word of English and would of been impossible for her to get along well. So now I am hoping only in my own work.”
Friends encouraged her to enter the Guggenheim Foundation’s 1940 Inter-American competition, in hopes that she would get a grant. Mary Sklar’s brother, the critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro, and Carlos Chávez were two of her sponsors. Others who wrote letters of reference were William Valentiner, Walter Pach, Conger Goodyear, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Diego Rivera. Schapiro said: “She is an excellent painter, of real originality, one of the most interesting Mexican artists I know. Her work looks well beside the best pictures of Orozco and Rivera; in some ways it is more natively Mexican than theirs. If she hasn’t their heroic and tragic sentiment she is nearer to common Mexican tradition and feeling for decorative form.”
Frida’s own statements (in Spanish) in her application are a model of modesty (and misspelling); perhaps she would have done better to sound more complex and self-important, for she was not awarded the fellowship.
PROFESSIONAL ANTECEDENTS:
I began to paint twelve years ago, during convalescence from an automobile accident that forced me to stay in bed for almost a year. During all these years I have worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I have never followed any school or anyone’s influence, I have not expected to get from my work more than the satisfaction of the fact of painting itself and of saying what I could not say in any other way.
WORK:
I have done portraits, figure compositions, also subjects in which landscape and still life take on great importance. I have been able to find, without being forced by any prejudice, a personal expression in painting. For twelve years my work consisted of eliminating everything that did not come from the internal lyrical motives that impelled me to paint.
Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.
EXHIBITIONS AND PAINTING SALES:
I did not exhibit until last year (1938) in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. I took twenty-five paintings. Twelve were sold to the following people:
Conger Goodyear New York
Mrs. Sam Lewison New York
Mrs. Claire Luce New York
Mrs. Salomon Sklar New York
Edward G. Robinson Los Angeles (Hollywood)
Walter Pach New York
Edgard Kauffman Pittsburgh
Nicholas Murray New York
Dr. Roose New York
and two other people whose names I do not remember, but that Julien Levy can identify. The exhibit took place from the 1st to the 15th of November, 1938.
Afterward I had an exhibition in Paris, organized by André Breton in the Renou et Colle Gallery, from the 1st to the 15th of March, 1939. My work interested the critics and artists of Paris. The Louvre Museum (Jeux de Paume) acquired one of my paintings.
Although Frida wanted to live off her paintings, she did not compromise her art in any way in order to make it salable. Only friends would purchase such painful and bloody works as the Self-Portrait sold to Muray. And on those rare occasions when a painting was commissioned, she did not necessarily produce what the patron expected, but rather turned the commission into another opportunity to transmit her private despair. Even when the commission was a portrait of someone other than herself, Frida could not help but make it a personal statement—one intimately connected with events in her own life
.
This is certainly the case with one of the paintings Frida completed during her separation from Diego, Suicide of Dorothy Hale (figure 54), a work so gory it recalls the horror of A Few Small Nips. The suicide is shown in three successive stages. First there is the tiny upright figure close to the high window of the Hampshire House, from which Dorothy Hale jumped on October 21, 1938. Next we see a much larger upside-down falling figure, eyes wide open and looking at us. Cottony clouds partially obscure her, making her plunge through space all the more palpable. Finally there is a large figure lying stiff as a china doll on the ground in a pool of blood. Blood trickles out of her ear, mouth, and nose, curiously accentuating the beauty of her face. Her eyes are still open, and they look at us with all the plaintive calm of a wounded animal.
Clare Boothe Luce, who commissioned the portrait at the opening of Frida’s New York exhibition, says that Frida had known Dorothy in Mexico and New York. She was part of a small coterie of friends connected with Vanity Fair (of which Mrs. Luce was managing editor), a group that included Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias, Muray, and Noguchi.
“She was a very beautiful girl,” Noguchi recalls. “All of my girls are beautiful. I went to London with her in 1933. Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] and I were there the night before she did it. I remember very well, she said, ’Well, that’s the end of the vodka. There isn’t any more.’ Just like that, you know. I wouldn’t have thought of it much, except afterward I realized that that’s what she was talking about. Dorothy was very pretty, and she traveled in this false world. She didn’t want to be second to anybody, and she must have thought she was slipping.”
In her own words, Mrs. Luce tells the story of the portrait: “Dorothy Donovan Hale was one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. Not even the young Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled, was more beautiful. A former Ziegfeld showgirl, she was the wife of Gardiner Hale, a fashionable New York portrait painter. The young Hales had many friends, not only in society, where Hale garnered his portrait commissions, but among the artists of the period, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
“Hale was killed in an automobile accident on the West Coast in the mid-thirties, leaving Dorothy with very little money. When she flunked out on Hollywood screen tests, she returned to New York, where friends—among them myself—gave her enough money from time to time to go on living in the style to which her life with Gardiner had accustomed her.
“We all believed that a girl of such extraordinary beauty and charm could not be long in either developing a career or finding another husband. Unhappily, Dorothy had very little talent and no luck.
“As I remember, it was in the spring of 1938 that she joyfully confided in me that she had met ’the great love of her life’—Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most trusted political adviser and closest personal confidant. The engagement, she said, would soon be announced. She and Hopkins would be married ’from the White House.’ But meanwhile, well, she needed money to pay the rent on her suite at the Hampshire House.
“Items about her engagement to Hopkins appeared in some of the gossip columns. But other gossip columnists quoted ’White House sources’ as denying that the Hopkins-Hale affair would end at the altar. The marriage never came off. Those in the know in Washington said that FDR had ordered Harry Hopkins to end his affair with Dorothy, and to marry instead Lou Macy, a close friend of the Roosevelts, which Hopkins did. Most of the gossip columnists made it brutally clear that Dorothy had been jilted.
“So once again, poor Dorothy needed money to pay her rent. And once again I said OK. But this time, I also said, ’What you badly need, Dorothy, is a job.’ We decided that she could easily handle a job as hostess in the American Art Pavilion at the World’s Fair. Bernard Baruch, a good friend of mine, was a good friend of Bob Moses, the head honcho at the fair. So I set up an appointment for Dorothy to meet Baruch and get a letter of introduction to Moses.
“Some days later, I was fitting a dress in the made-to-order department of Bergdorf Goodman. A model pirouetted in, wearing a really gorgeous evening gown. I asked the price. It was about five hundred to six hundred dollars—an enormous price for one dress forty years ago. I said, ’Too expensive for me.’ The saleswoman said, ’Mrs. Gardiner Hale has just ordered it.’ I thought angrily: So that’s how she spends the money she says she needs so badly for the rent!
“When she telephoned a few days later, I was so annoyed with her I hardly listened to what she said. This was that she had decided to go on a very long trip. For the time being, she wanted to keep her destination a secret, but as she would be gone for a long time, she was giving herself a farewell cocktail party, and was inviting only her dearest friends. So would I come, and ’Darling, what do you think I should wear at my farewell party?’
“It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ’How about that gorgeous Bergdorf dress you bought with the rent money I gave you?’ But I didn’t. If she really was going on a long trip, the wretched rent-money story was ended anyway. What I said, rather coldly, was: ’I’m sorry I can’t make your party. The thing you look best in is your old Madame X black velvet. Hope the trip lives up to your expectations.’ And hung up.
“In the early morning of the day after the party, the police telephoned. At about 6:00 A.M., Dorothy Hale had jumped out of the window of her top-story suite in the Hampshire House. As the cocktail party had ended sometime before midnight, she had had a long time to think.
“She was wearing my favorite—her black velvet ’femme fatale’ dress, and a corsage of small yellow roses, which Isamu Noguchi, it turned out, had sent to her.
“The only message she had left in the apartment was a note addressed to me. She thanked me for my friendship and asked me to see that her mother, who lived in upstate New York, was notified so that arrangements could be made to have her buried in the family plot.
“It was such a waste. Dorothy was so beautiful. And so vulnerable. Bernie Baruch telephoned the minute he read the news in the papers. He told me that when Dorothy had asked him to use his influence with Bob Moses to get her a job, he had told her that it was too late in life for her to try to get a job that would provide her with the kind of life she was used to. What she needed to get was not a job, but a husband. The best way to do that, he told her, was to go out to parties, looking as beautiful as possible. So he said he gave her a thousand dollars, but only on one condition—that she would use it to buy the most beautiful dress she could find in New York.
“A short while after that, I went to a gallery exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s paintings. The exhibition was crowded. Frida Kahlo came up to me through the crowd and at once began talking about Dorothy’s suicide. I didn’t want to talk about it, as my conscience was still bothering me because I had been accusing Dorothy falsely—in my thoughts—of taking advantage of me. Kahlo wasted no time suggesting that she do a recuerdo of Dorothy. I did not speak enough Spanish to understand what the word recuerdo meant. I thought it meant a portrait done from memory. I thought Kahlo would paint a portrait of Dorothy in the style of her own Self-Portrait [dedicated to Trotsky], which I bought in Mexico (and still own).
“Suddenly it came to me that a portrait of Dorothy by a famous painter friend might be something her poor mother might like to have. I said so, and Kahlo thought so too. I asked the price, Kahlo told me, and I said, ’Go ahead. Send the portrait to me when it is finished. I will then send it on to Dorothy’s mother.’
“I will always remember the shock I had when I pulled the painting out of the crate. I felt really physically sick. What was I going to do with this gruesome painting of the smashed corpse of my friend, and her blood dripping down all over the frame? I could not return it—across the top of the painting there was an angel waving an unfurled banner which proclaimed in Spanish that this was ’The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, painted at the request of Clare Boothe Luce, for the mother of Dorothy.’ I would not have requested such a gory picture of my worst enemy, much less of my unfortunate fri
end.
“Among Dorothy’s many ardent admirers were Constantin Alajalov, a well-known New Yorker cover artist, and Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor. I don’t remember now which one I telephoned, asking him to come to see me on an urgent matter about Dorothy. In any event, I told whichever one arrived that I was going to destroy the painting with a pair of library scissors, and I wanted a witness to this act. In the end, however, I agreed not to destroy the painting, if the banner proclaiming I had commissioned it could be scrubbed off, and painted over. So Dorothy’s admirer took the painting away and wiped out the offensive legend.”
Frida’s memorial to Dorothy Hale turned out to be more like a retablo than a recuerdo, inasmuch as it shows the disaster taking place (as well as the protagonist’s death) and there was, as Mrs. Luce points out, an angel in the sky. A gray strip along the lower edge of the portrait has a legend written in blood-red script: “In the city of New York on the 21st of the month of October, 1938, at six in the morning, Mrs. DOROTHY HALE committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory, [now comes a blank space where the words have been painted out] this retablo, having executed it FRIDA KAHLO.” At the right side of the inscription, under the words “committed suicide” and above the word “KAHLO," is a patch of red from which blood dribbles downward. And as in A Few Small Nips, blood, painted illusionistically and in the viewer’s scale, besmirches the painting’s frame. It seems that in her two most terrifying images of women’s violent deaths—both of them, significantly, painted during periods when Diego was causing her great pain—Frida felt compelled to extend the painting’s space out into the real space of the spectator, bringing the horror of the subject home. She has enhanced this feeling of immediacy by painting one of Dorothy Hale’s shoeless, stockinged feet so that it appears to protrude into our space. The trompe l’oeil foot casts a shadow on the word “HALE" in the painting’s inscription.
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