I am going now—because I have to go to Mexico [City] to buy paintbrushes and colors for tomorrow and it is getting late.
Let’s see when you write me a very long letter. Say hello to Stack and Ginette [Ralph and Ginette Stackpole] and to the St. Lukes [Hospital] nurses. Above all to the one that was so good to me—you know which one—I can’t remember her name right now. It begins with M. Goodbye Doctorcito Chulo [cute]. Don’t forget me.
Lots of love and kisses from
Frida
The death of my father was something terrible for me. I think that it’s owing to this that I became much less well and I grew rather thin again. You remember how handsome he was and how good?
Poor health and her father’s death depressed Frida; the war in Europe intensified her distress. She shared Diego’s anguish over the people, places, and political values that were being threatened or destroyed, an anguish that deepened after the invasion of Russia in June.
Diego had always loved Russia and Russians. In his Paris years he had learned to speak Russian with Angelina Beloff and his numerous Russian friends, and the ideals of the Russian Revolution had filled his heart and mind through all the intervening years—not less because he considered these ideals to have been betrayed by Stalin. “At least the revolutionary masses are on the march in Russia,” he wrote to Emmy Lou Packard after her return to the United States. “I am in despair because I can’t be with them.”
His despair was compounded by the fact that, having left the Trotskyite movement, and still under attack by the Communist party, he had no organizational base through which to channel his feelings into action. Thus, though his pro-Russian fervor was not immediately accompanied by a reappraisal of Stalin—it was some time before “the executioner” would be transformed into “Uncle Joe"—he began during this period to reconsider his attitude toward both the Soviet leader and the Communist party. If his pact with Hitler had made Stalin look like a traitor, the valiant defense of the Russian homeland made him look like a hero. And moral outrage at the Soviet purges changed to surprise when numerous people presumed to be dead reappeared, freed from prison camps so they could fight at the front. Emmy Lou Packard recalls that when she read the newspaper to him, “all Rivera wanted to hear about was news of the Russian front. I would read the name of some Russian general, and Diego would say, ’So it wasn’t true that they killed all those people that were on the list of the people who were purged!’ ”
Frida, though her politics were less intense than Diego’s, understood his feelings. "Pobrecito!" she said of him to Emmy Lou. “Poor thing! He is lonely now that he is not in the Communist party and not in the midst of the movement.”
On New Year’s Eve, 1942, Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser from her bed, where she was confined by grippe, angina, and “all the other troubles”: “I believe the war will continue in its apogee for the whole of this year that will just be born tomorrow and we cannot hope for very happy days. . . . I don’t have much to tell you because I live the simplest life you can imagine. Diego is working in the Palace, and I stay home painting moninches [Frida’s word for monkeys] or scratching my belly, now and then I go to a movie in the afternoon and there’s nothing more to tell you. Every day I dislike more the ’right’ people and parties and the shitty bourgeois fiestas, so that I flee from all this as much as I can.”
Frida’s somberness was reflected most eloquently, of course, in her paintings. Self-Portrait with Braid, 1941, is one of the first bust-length self-portraits that she produced after her return to Mexico from San Francisco (figure 57). It can be seen as a comment on her remarriage—as a counterpart to Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, from the period of her divorce. One imagines that the hair strewn all over the ground in the earlier self-portrait has been gathered, braided, and shaped into the pretzel on top of Frida’s head. Putting back her hair is a reaffirmation of the femininity she had denied, but the affirmation is not joyous. Unruly strands seem as disconcertingly alive as the hair she had cropped and painted the year before; they are nerve ends of an anxious psyche. No less disquieting are the huge predatory jungle leaves with sharp, serrated edges that hide Frida’s nakedness. Their swirling rhythm suggests a turmoil held in check’ behind her calm features. Thick stems, recalling the blood vessel in The Two Fridas, encircle her chest, preventing free movement. Oppressiveness is reinforced by the heavy choker of pre-Columbian beads and the painting’s muted colors add to the mood of melancholy. Though her remarriage might, as she put it, “function well,” it will not be roses without thorns.
In Self-Portrait with Bonito, 1941, Frida is dressed uncharacteristically in a simple dark blouse that suggests mourning—for her father, for the victims of war, and perhaps also for the death of Bonito, who perches on her shoulder. The foliage that surrounds her face literally crawls with life. Caterpillars have eaten holes in several leaves; life’s perishability is the message here. One caterpillar is trapped in a spider’s web spun between Frida’s hair and a leaf, a link—albeit a spooky one—between Frida and the world. When she was unhappy, Frida always sought ways to reaffirm her grip on life. One way that was to become more and more important as the years went on and her life became increasingly confined was to make her connectedness with nature not just a matter of habit—adoring her pets, tending her flowers, arranging bowls of fruit, etc.—but a matter of faith.
Perhaps it was to reaffirm that faith and to build something permanent in a world gripped by death and destruction that the Riveras in 1942 began building Anahuacalli, a bizarre, gloomy temple-museum on a lava bed in the Pedregal district—pedregal means “stony ground"—near Coyoacán. “Frida and I started a strange kind of ranch,” Rivera said. “Here we planned to raise our own food staples, milk, honey, and vegetables, while we prepared to build our museum. In the first weeks, we erected a stable for our animals. . . . During the war, this building was ’home’ for Frida and me. After the war, it was converted exclusively into a home for my idols.” Building a “home” together helped to cement their remarriage and it was a project that allowed them to “flee” from bourgeois society and the war-torn world by putting down their roots in the Mexican earth.
In the end, what was built was an anthropological museum (it opened to the public in 1964) that serves as a monument to one man’s passion for his native culture. In a style he described as a composite of Aztec, Mayan, and “Rivera Traditional” (the same style in which he built the new wing to the Coyoacán house), Rivera constructed, out of the gray volcanic rock of the surrounding fields, a building that is both brutal and elegant. Because of its ceremonial grandeur, Anahuacalli has been alternately called Diego’s “pyramid” or his “mausoleum,” and he poured into it every penny he could spare. Frida did what she could to help. She gave her husband title to a piece of land that she had bought with her own money in order to house a Spanish refugee and his family, and sold her apartment on Insurgentes. On February 14, 1943, she wrote to her friend, patron, and portrait subject Marte R. Gómez, a prominent agricultural engineer who then headed Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture:
I have been worried about Diego for a long time. First for his health, and for economic difficulties which, as a consequence of the war, he begins to have, precisely in the moment when I would have wanted him to feel calm and sure in order to paint and to do what he wants after an untiring life of work. It is not exactly the immediate problem of getting enough to live on more or less normally that worries me. It is a question of something that for Diego has enormous importance, and that I don’t know how to help him solve. As you know, after painting, what interests him most in life, and the only thing that really gives him joy and enthusiasm, is his idols. For more than 15 years he has spent most of what he earns by means of his incessant work on forming his magnificent collection of archaeological pieces. I don’t think there is a better collection in Mexico, and even in the national museum certain pieces that are so very important do not exist. Diego has always had the idea of constructing a house for
his idols, and a year ago he found a place that truly merits the “house of idols,” in the Pedregal of Coyoacán. He bought a piece of land in a little town called San Pablo Tepetlapa. He began to build the house just eight months ago. You cannot imagine with what love and enthusiasm he made the plans, working whole nights after painting all day. Believe me, no one has seen anyone build something with the joy and affection Diego Rivera has when dealing with what he likes and admires most. Beyond that, the piece of land is marvelous for what he wants to do, and the landscape which you can see from this place is the most magnificent that you can imagine, with the Ajusco [mountain] in the background. I would like you to see it with your own eyes because I cannot describe it.
The fact is, that with the war, and all the circumstances that you know about, Diego does not have the money to finish the construction which is barely finished up to half of the first floor. I have no words to tell you the tragedy that this means for Diego, and the pain that I have in being impotent to help him in anything. The only thing I can do, and I already have done it, was to sell a little house that I had on Insurgentes in order to lessen expenses, but naturally this was only a partial solution.
Frida went on to ask if the government might be willing to help by financing an archaeological museum for Rivera’s collection. She proposed that the museum should be the property of Mexico, with the condition that until his death, Diego could live and work near his idols in his own study at the top of the pyramid. Such a museum, Frida argued, “would be the pride of the present civilization. . . . You know how much I love him, and can understand how it pains me to see him suffer by not having something that he so deserves, because what he asks is nothing in comparison with what he has given.”
Six years later, when she wrote her “Portrait of Diego,” Frida had not lost her enthusiasm: “The stupendous work that he is constructing . . . grows in the incredibly beautiful Pedregal landscape like an enormous cactus that looks at the Ajusco, sober and elegant, strong and refined, ancient and perennial; from its entrails of volcanic rock it cries out with voices of centuries and days: Mexico is alive! Like Coatlicue, it contains life and death; like the magnificent terrain on which it is built, it embraces the earth with the firmness of a living and permanent plant.”
So, too, does Frida embrace the stony earth in Roots (plate XXVII), which expresses her and Diego’s love for the vast sea of volcanic rock where they built Anahuacalli, and which was, in fact, entitled El Pedregal when in 1953 she sent it and four other works to the British Arts Council’s Mexican art exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. Indeed, starting in 1943, the Pedregal with its rough gray crevassed rock appears in the backgrounds of many of her self-portraits. Whether the Riveras ever did carry out their plan to cultivate vegetables in their terrain in the Pedregal is not certain, but in Roots, Frida plants her own body there. By rooting herself in the land Diego loved, she was able to attach herself more closely to him. That this brought her relative contentment is evident in this small panel which is one of her least tormented self-portraits.
Roots gives brilliant evidence of Frida’s growing desire to become deeply embedded in nature. In her diary in 1944, she wrote of the “vegetable miracle of my body’s landscape.” Her wish for fertility transformed itself into an almost religious belief that everything under the sun was intimately linked and that she could partake in the flow of the universe. Roots is like a reversal of (or counterpart to) My Nurse and I. In the 1937 painting, Frida was an infant suckling at an earth mother’s plant-like breast. In Roots, it is Frida who nourishes nature by giving birth to a vine.
With her elbow propped on a bed pillow, Frida dreams that her body extends over a large expanse of desert terrain. Her solitary presence in the wilderness is as mysteriously dream-like—and as natural—as that of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, a painting that Frida surely knew and loved. A window in her torso opens to reveal not broken bones or barren womb, but the rocky landscape beyond. From this mystic womb the pliant green vine emerges and spreads luxuriantly along the desert floor. Frida’s blood courses through its arteries, and continues in red vesicles that extend like creeping roots beyond the edges of its leaves. Thus does Frida become a source of life rooted in the parched Mexican earth. Roots may also allude to the idea of the body fertilizing nature’s cycles after death: in front of Frida the earth cracks open to form a dark ravine, and a grave-like cavern lies at her feet. Frida’s suspension over these precipices depends on the continuance of her dream.
Just as Frida grows into the earth, so Diego’s temple, with “its entrails of volcanic rock,” was to “grow like an enormous cactus,” embracing life and death as well as the soil of Mexico like “a living and permanent plant.” To gain immortality, Diego constructed; Frida, in Roots, linked her very body with the chain of life.
Chapter 19
Patrons, Politics, Public Recognition
IN THE 1940S, perhaps as a result of the acclaim that came from her exhibitions abroad, and from her participation in the big International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City, Frida’s career took on momentum. Recognition brought patrons, commissions, a teaching job, a prize, a fellowship, participation in cultural organizations, conferences, art projects, and even the occasional invitation to write for periodicals. All this must have been an incentive for her to take herself more seriously as an artist. Besides, she was determined to earn her keep, and therefore worked more diligently than ever before.
The paintings she produced were generally larger-scale than those she had done in the 1930s, and they appear to have been aimed at a broader audience, to be less like private talismans or votive images intended for her own needs or for Diego’s personal pleasure. As her technical proficiency grew, her realism became more meticulous in terms of texture and modeling, her imagery more sophisticated, less full of girlish charm. She painted more of the highly detailed, bust-length (and relatively salable) self-portraits than the narrative portraits such as The Broken Column and Tree of Hope, in which her figure appears in fantastical, always painful situations and which relate more to the retablo-like paintings of the early 1930s. Nevertheless, painting remained first and foremost a vehicle of personal expression. “Since the accident changed my path, and many other things,” she told Antonio Rodríguez, “I was not permitted to fulfill the desires which the whole world considers normal, and nothing seemed more natural than to paint what had not been fulfilled. . . . my paintings are . . . the most frank expression of myself, without taking into consideration either judgments or prejudices of anyone. I have painted little, and without the least desire for glory or ambition, but with the conviction that, before anything else, I want to give myself pleasure and then, that I want to be able to earn my living with my craft. . . . many lives would not be enough to paint the way I would wish and all that I would like.”
She continued to be self-deprecating about her art. “As far as painting goes, I keep at it,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser on July 18, 1941. “I paint little but I feel that I am learning something.” And she still needed prodding of various sorts in order to motivate herself to paint. Rivera helped, often by praise, sometimes by withholding money, but her erratic work habits, together with her physical disabilities, prevented her from producing paintings quickly, and hence from amassing enough salable works for another one-woman exhibition in a commercial gallery. She nonetheless did exhibit in a number of important group shows. In 1940, besides participating in the Surrealist show in Mexico City and in the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco, she sent The Two Fridas to the Museum of Modern Art’s “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” prompting Frank Crowninshield to write in Vogue that “the most recent of Rivera’s ex-wives” was “a painter apparently obsessed by an interest in blood.” In 1941 her Frida and Diego Rivera was exhibited in the Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts “Modern Mexican Painters” exhibition, which traveled to five other U.S. museums, and in 1942, Self-Portrait with Braid was included in "20th Century Portrai
ts,” organized by Monroe Wheeler for the Museum of Modern Art. The Two Fridas, What the Water Gave Me, and the 1940 Self-Portrait in which she wears a thorn necklace and is accompanied by a monkey and a cat were shown in 1943 in “Mexican Art Today” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in the same year a 1940 Self-Portrait was included in “Women Artists” at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. (Some years later, in her Confessions of an Art Addict, Guggenheim commented that while she hated the enormous frescoes of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, she very much liked the work of Frida Kahlo, “having included her in my women’s shows, realizing how gifted she was in the true Surrealist tradition.”)
Because the exposure her art was given in Mexico came later and was, during her lifetime, less prestigious, Frida always acknowledged that her value as an artist was first recognized in the United States. Nevertheless, her reputation in Mexico was growing. In January and February of 1943, she participated in an exhibition of a hundred years of Mexican portraiture at the Benjamin Franklin Library, an English-language institution on the Paseo de la Reforma. The following year the library presented another historical survey, “The Child in Mexican Painting,” and Frida contributed a painting called The Sun and the Moon (now lost). In 1944, works by Frida and Diego inaugurated a new (but short-lived) gallery called Galería de Arte Maupassant at 128 Paseo de la Reforma. An undated exhibition announcement from the Galería Orozco-Rivera (situated at the same address) says the gallery will present work by Orozco, Rivera, and Kahlo, as well as sculpture by María Teresa Pinto.
Frida was also invited to participate in the “Salon de la Flor,” an exhibition of flower paintings that was part of an annual flower show in Mexico City. The invitation to paint flowers must have been welcome; Frida’s special kinship with the natural world grew more intense as the years went on and as her childlessness became an undeniable fact of life. She sent Flower of Life (figure 64) to the “Salon de la Flor,” and it is likely that Magnolias, 1945, and Sun and Life (plate XXXII) were intended for that show as well. One can imagine how surprising the overt sexual symbolism of the 1944 and 1947 paintings must have been to the flower-loving public of Mexico City: in both Flower of Life and Sun and Life Frida transforms tropical-looking plants into male and female genitals.
Frida Page 38
