In both paintings, cosmic and sexual forces are linked. The sun is clearly a force for fertility. An explosion of life-starting sperm from a phallus in Flower of Life (originally titled Flame Flower) can also be seen as rays of holy light descending on a fetus that emerges from a womb. A flash of lightning heightens the drama. In Sun and Life, the drops of seminal fluid that spurt from various phallic plants are echoed in the sun’s tears and in a weeping fetus that is enclosed in a leafy womb. The tears indicate that for Frida, nature’s fecundity was sometimes a painful reminder of her own thwarted procreative urge. And indeed, about the time she painted Sun and Life she had another miscarriage; this time it was a lover’s child, not Rivera’s. Three concerns impelled her to make art, she told a critic in 1944: her vivid memory of her own blood flowing during her childhood accident; her thoughts about birth, death, and the “conducting threads” of life; and her desire to be a mother.
By the second half of the decade, Frida’s work was well enough regarded in her native country to be included in most major group exhibitions. And the Mexican “art scene” was changing as well. Although the muralists were still painting their social-realist frescoes, they no longer overshadowed either modernist or surrealizing easel painting. Rufino Tamayo, whose work had formerly been scorned as being too European, now led the avant-garde. Foreign influences were less suspect, and more was known about art developments in other countries. Whereas Inés Amor’s Galería de Arte Mexicano had once been the only important art gallery, now many new ones were opening up. Galleries need portable paintings to show and sell, so the easel painting, which had been considered an emblem of bourgeois decadence, became the painter’s most frequent and popular production. Frida, of course, had been painting little easel paintings all along.
One sign of Frida’s growing reputation was her selection in 1942 to be a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, an organization (under the auspices of the education ministry) that at first comprised some twenty-five artists and intellectuals, and whose purpose was to promote the spread of Mexican culture through lectures, exhibitions, and publications. (When Alejandro Gómez Arias nominated Frida to be one of the founding members of the more prestigious Colegio Nacional, an institution comparable to the Académie Française, the nomination was opposed. As Gómez Arias recalls, “The education minister asked me to help found the Colegio Nacional in 1942, and I proposed two women—one a famous biologist who had written a classic volume on cacti, and Frida. Both were rejected, Frida because there were already two painters in the Colegio Nacional—Orozco and Rivera—and the biologist because her teacher was already a member.” Or so the other committee members said. Gómez Arias implies that they were rejected because they were women.)
The Seminario de Cultura Mexicana published a scholarly journal, the second issue of which included Rivera’s “Frida Kahlo and Mexican Art.” And Frida was asked by her old friend and fellow Cachucha Miguel N. Lira, who headed the Seminario, to contribute one or two articles each month for the radio or the press. In 1943, as part of her work for this organization, she helped to arrange the first of the jury-free exhibitions called “Salon Libre 20 de Noviembre” (to celebrate the day when the Mexican Revolution began) that took place in the Palace of Fine Arts. In addition, she helped arrange a National Painting Fair in the Alameda Park, and in 1944 she was invited to participate in a conference on popular mural painting sponsored by the Ministry of Education.
Frida was selected as one of six artists to receive a government fellowship in 1946, but the greatest honor came in September of that year, at the annual National Exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts. Orozco was awarded the National Prize of Arts and Sciences for his Hospital de Jesús murals in Mexico City, but a special agreement between the President and the Minister of Education made it possible to give out four other painting prizes, of five thousand pesos each. These went to Frida (for her Moses), and to Doctor Atl, Julio Castellanos, and Francisco Goitia. Though encased in a plaster cast after an operation on her spine, she appeared at the opening reception dressed like a princess and received her prize.
There were government commissions as well. In 1941 she was asked to paint a series of portraits of “The five Mexican women who have most distinguished themselves in the history of the ’pueblo,’ ” as she put it, for the dining room of the National Palace. “Now they’ve got me trying to find out what kind of cockroaches those women were,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser,
what kind of faces they had, and what kind of psychology oppressed them, so that at the hour when I daub them the public will know how to distinguish them from the vulgar and common females of Mexico—who I will tell you, in my opinion, would include more interesting and more terrific women than the group of ladies in question. If among your curiosities you find some fat book that speaks of Doña Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez—of Doña Leona Vicario [both women were connected with the movement for independence]—of Doña [illegible] Xochitl [during the reign of the Toltec king, Xochitl popularized the intoxicating drink named pulque, made from the fermented juice of the maguey]—of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [the great Mexican poet-nun (1651–1695)]—do me the huge favor of sending me a few facts or photographs, engravings—etc. of the epoch and of their very prudent effigies. With this job I am going to earn a few bucks which I will dedicate to the purchase of some billy goats that give pleasure to my eye, smell and touch—and to the purchase of some very lovely tall flowerpots that I saw the other day in the market.
Unfortunately, the portraits of notable women were never completed. A second, smaller government commission was, but the painting, an extraordinary tondo still life Frida produced in 1942 for President Manuel Avila Camacho’s dining room, was rejected. Perhaps Señora Avila Camacho found it too full of fruits, vegetables, and flowers that hinted disquietingly at human anatomy.
Frida thus continued to have a hard time finding and satisfying clients. Diego often sent the Americans who flocked to his studio over to Coyoacán to look at her work, but for the most part, there were bites, not buyers. Walter Arensberg, for example, was still dithering two years after Frida told Nickolas Muray that he would “buy a picture.” On December 15, 1941, she wrote to Emmy Lou Packard:
From what you tell me about the Arensbergs I want you to tell them that Kaufmann has the painting of the “Birth.” I would like them to buy the one of “Me Suckling” [My Nurse and I] since they would give me a nice pile. Above all, now that I am going about like a complete wretch. If you have the opportunity go to bat for me with them, but do it as though it came from you. Tell them that it is a painting that I painted at the same time as “the birth” and that you and Diego like it very much. You already know which one it is, right? The one where I am with my nurse suckling puritita leche [pure milk]. Do you remember? I hope you will encourage them to buy it from me, since you cannot imagine how much I need the bucks now (Tell them it is worth 250 dollars)—I’ll send you the photo so that you will tell them lots of nice things and you will promote their interest in that “work of art.” OK kid! Also tell them about the one with “the bed” [The Dream] that is in New York, it could be that they will be interested in that one—it is the one with the skeleton on top, do you remember? That one is worth 300 bucks. Let’s see if you can give me a little push, sweetie, for I tell you that truly I urgently need dough.
Emmy Lou wrote back, predicting the final outcome: “I am going to battle for you. Who knows what the results will be. It appears to me that Arensberg only wants the painting of birth—as a document—he is spending all his dough now on trying to show that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Stendahl [a Los Angeles art dealer] says that he does not buy any paintings now.”
Far from courting patrons, Frida made neither herself nor her paintings ingratiating. “I did not feel so sad about the death of Albert Bender,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser, “because I don’t like Art Collectors, I don’t know why, but now each day art in general gives me less of a kick, and above all those pe
ople that exploit the fact of being ’connoisseurs of art’ in order to boast of being ’chosen by God,’ many times I get on better with carpenters, shoemakers, etc. than with all that crowd of stupid, so-called civilized, chatterboxes, called ’cultivated people.’ ”
Even when sales picked up, in the mid-1940s, earning a living was not easy. A 1947 entry in Frida’s account book, for example, shows that she sold The Two Fridas to Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art for four thousand pesos; it was purchased, according to the museum’s director, Fernando Gamboa, because Frida desperately needed money and no one else wanted to buy it. By that time, however, Frida did have several enthusiastic patrons, who competed sporadically to purchase her work. Chief among them was Eduardo Morillo Safa, an agricultural engineer and a diplomat, who bought, over the years, some thirty Kahlos and in 1944 commissioned portraits of his two daughters, Mariana and Lupita, of his mother, Doña Rosita Morillo, of his wife and son and of himself.
Frida’s portraits of others are almost always less vibrant and original than her subject paintings and self-portraits—perhaps because, in painting a specific individual, she did not feel free to project all her complex fantasy and feeling—her “own reality"—onto the image.
There is, however, one major exception. Certainly the most extraordinary portrait of a friend that Frida ever produced is that of Doña Rosita Morillo, and here she did not hesitate to make the painting an expression of deep personal emotion (figure 68). Although Frida’s style did not develop in a linear way—in the same year, she could paint portraits with meticulous realism or with primitivistic simplification—Doña Rosita Morillo shows her general move toward an extremely refined, miniaturistic realism that is a far cry from the broader handling of the mural-style Mexicanist portraits of 1929–1930 or the naïve portraits of 1931 which are based on a folk limner tradition.
Wise but judging, powerful but worn, Doña Rosita embodies the essence of grandmotherliness. She seems the concretization of a basic human longing for such familial values as comfort, communion, and continuity. Like Van Gogh’s La Berceuse, who holds a rope that leads out of the painting to an unseen cradle she is rocking, Doña Rosita holds her knitting, and from it a length of wool leads our eye out of the painting to the very space in which we stand. Knowing the way Frida used ribbons and other such connectors to establish emotional linkage, we can assume that the length of wool was meant to offer the viewer a concrete tie to the portrait subject. Doña Rosita’s consoling bulk fills the canvas from side to side; pushed up close to the picture plane, she is as solid as a bulwark.
The tangle of vegetation that closes off space just behind the old woman reflects what she is. Darkness in the gaps between leaves shows that the time is night, which to Frida meant the end of life. Other signals of old age and death are brown leaves, and five desiccated, gray, leafless sticks. But as always, Frida presents death as part of the cycle of life: the dead sticks form props for a tangle of live, green, prickly flowering plants that loop and snake across the surface of the painting. In her own way, Doña Rosita is prickly-looking too. For all the wisdom and compassion in her eyes, the set of her mouth suggests that she possesses the critical cantankerousness of old women who watch successive generations making all the predictable errors.
Frida has given unusually close attention to specific textures in this painting, building up the image with heavy layers of pigment, and painting each detail with a different touch. The woolliness of Doña Rosita’s sweater and shawl, like the hairy texture of the flowering plant, is carefully painted with numerous tiny strokes. The old woman’s soft white hairs are picked out one by one. Indeed, the richness of surface detail is almost obsessive; it is as though Frida wanted Doña Rosita herself to materialize. Frida is the opposite of the kind of artist who abbreviates or synthesizes the visual world, conjuring up verisimilitude with broad bravura brush strokes. Instead, she paints every iota of what she sees, bit by bit, centimeter by centimeter, stroke by stroke. Essentially hers is an urge to recreate the world as a solid, palpable reality on the canvas.
The portrait of Mariana Morillo Safa, Doña Rosita’s granddaughter, displays the same focus on minute detail and the same peculiar intensity that reflects Frida’s fondness for her subject (figure 67). With her fawnlike gaze, and her huge pink bow, this child has all the qualities that oil painting was invented to create; she looks so real that we feel we could reach out and pinch her cheek or tickle her chin. Like a dewy peach in a Dutch seventeenth-century still life, she is an object of desire.
Frida adored children. She treated them as equals, and both in her art and in life she allowed them their own special dignity. As early as 1928, when Rivera, knowing she needed money, found her a job teaching art to children, her approach to her pupils was both that of a child among peers and that of an adult not wanting to “spoil” youthful creativity. Like Rivera, who wrote an elegy to children’s art, Frida felt that before children were “turned into idiots by schools or by their mamas,” they possessed purer creative powers than adults. “Diego got me a job as a drawing teacher,” Frida said, “and I lay on the floor on my stomach with all the boys on their bellies too. And we drew, and I said to them, ’Don’t copy anymore, paint your houses, your mothers, your brothers, the bus, things that happen.’ We played marbles and spun tops and I became a better and better friend of theirs.”
Later in life Frida may no longer have been able to play marbles on the floor, but her attitudes had changed not a whit. Her second cousin Roberto BeHar remembers visiting Frida during the 1940s, when he was attending a Catholic boarding school. Noticing one day that he was wearing a scapulary, she cried, “What’s that?” He explained that if you wore it and you happened to die, you would go straight to heaven. “Who gave it to you?” Frida asked. A nun, Roberto replied. "Dile a la madrecita que vaya chingar a su madre pero no a ti!" she shrieked. “Go tell the little nun to screw her mother but not you!” Another time, Roberto showed Frida a map he had traced for homework. “What?!” Frida cried in disapproval. “You must paint it freehand.” Roberto did, reluctantly, because he was afraid that the contours of the countries would not be accurate. He was right—his teacher gave him a zero. On his next visit with Frida, he showed her this result. She put a number one in front of the zero, and announced, “I am the teacher!”
Frida needed to be (and was) an important person in all “her” children’s lives. Not long ago Mariana Morillo Safa reminisced about posing for Frida. “I loved her, and she loved me and petted me all the time. I am sure that because she did not have children of her own, she loved me and my sister more. My father said to us: ’Be affectionate with Frida. She does not have children and she loves you very much.’ ”
Mariana’s parents would drop their youngest daughter at Frida’s house on Saturday mornings and return to fetch her in the late afternoon. Since Frida could not paint for much more than an hour at a stretch, and rested for several hours in between, the portrait took two or three months to complete.
Frida would sit her model on a little chair that she had bought especially for her, and which Mariana took home when the portrait was done. “She kept me very quiet and still. I got tired, but she talked to me all the time and told me funny stories. She would tell me to keep a straight face, which I couldn’t do. She was always so tender.”
Frida loved to give Mariana presents. She had a Tehuana dress specially made for her, and another time, when Mariana won in a game, she gave her a red coin purse shaped like a boot. When Eduardo Morillo Safa came to fetch his daughter, he told her that she was badly brought up to accept the gift. Frida was angry. "Metiche [meddler]!” she cried. “This is a game between Mariana and me!” and Mariana kept the purse.
Frida’s affection for Mariana continued over the years. From 1946 to 1948, the Morillo Safa family lived in Caracas, where the engineer served as Mexican ambassador to Venezuela. Frida was recuperating from one of her many spinal surgeries when she received a letter from Mariana that so delighted her th
at she answered her "Cachita, changa, maranga" with a note and a long poem, a sample of which follows:
From Coyoacán, so sad
oh, Cachita of my life,
I send you these mushy verses
from your real pal, Frida.
Don’t think that I’m playing “dead,”
and that I’m not writing to you,
since singing with all my love I
send this ballad to you.
You went to Caracas
in a powerful airplane,
and from here I miss you
with all my heart. . . .
Don’t forget your Mexico,
it is the root of your life,
and always keep in mind that with songs
your pal Frida awaits you.
Besides Morillo Safa, another of Frida’s favorite patrons was the engineer José Domingo Lavin, who commissioned a circular portrait of his wife in 1942, and in 1945 commissioned Moses (figure 69). The painting was the result of a chance conversation that took place at lunch at the Lavins’ house. Her host showed Frida his recently purchased copy of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. She read a few pages and asked him to lend it to her. She was fascinated, and when she had finished the book, he suggested that she try to put her ideas about the book into a painting. Within three months Moses was finished. Two years later, Frida gave an informal lecture about it to a gathering in Domingo Lavin’s home.
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