The opening paragraphs of Frida’s explanation are interesting for what they reveal of the candid and completely unpretentious way in which she approached her art:
As this is the first time in my life that I have tried to “explain” one of my paintings to a group of more than three people, you will forgive me if I get a little mixed up and a little dusty. . . .
I read [Freud’s Moses] only once, and I began to paint the picture with the first impression it gave me. Yesterday, as I wrote these words for you, I reread it, and I must confess to you that I find the painting very incomplete and rather different from what the interpretation should be of what Freud analyzes so marvelously in his Moses. But now, there is nothing to be done, neither to take away from it nor to add to it, so I’ll tell about what I painted just as it is and about what you can-see here in the painting. Of course, the main theme is “MOSES” or the birth of the HERO. But I generalized in my way (a very confused way) the deeds or images that impressed me the most as I read the book. As for what is there “on my account,” you can tell me whether I put my foot in it or not.
Because of its broad theme and its multitude of tiny figures, many viewers have compared Frida’s Moses to a mural. But it is far from “public” art. By handling her historical subject in such a freely individualistic manner, Frida managed to turn it into an expression of her personal preoccupation with procreation as part of the cycle of life. Even the painting’s composition suggests procreation: Frida combined a naïvely additive method of organizing forms (seen in the painting’s various sections) with an overall coherence based on bilateral symmetry and recalling the anatomy of the female pelvic region. Moses’ birth is situated, quite appropriately, in the middle.
The child is born beneath a huge red sun emitting rays that end in hands. As a device, of course, this image has its origins in Egyptian reliefs of the Amarna period, but a more direct source for Frida’s conception is Rivera’s Preparatory School mural where hands at the ends of rays of light signify, according to Diego, “Solar energy, the life source of all.” In a similar vein, Frida explained in her essay on Moses that the sun in her painting was conceived as “the center of all religions, as First GOD and as creator and reproducer of LIFE.”
Moses’ birth stands for the birth of all heroes. On either side of the central natal event is a group of historical heroes that range from Christ to Lenin, from Buddha to Hitler—the “big wigs” Frida called them. Above them are gods; below them are the masses seething in the wars that make history. In the lower left corner is, Frida said, “the first man the constructor, in four colors (four races) accompanied by his near ancestor, the ape.” In the lower right corner is “the mother, the creator with the child in arms” accompanied by a female monkey, likewise holding her offspring. Between the heaven crammed with gods and the one arrayed with heroes are a human and an animal skeleton plus, for good measure, a devil. Large embracing fingers represent the earth opening its hands to protect and receive the dead, “generously and without distinctions"—just the kind of monumental, embracing hands Rivera sometimes depicted in his murals.
“On either side of the child,” Frida explained, “I put the elements of his creation, the fertilized ovum and cellular division.” A scattering of raindrops accompanies birth’s breaking of water, and (as in Flower of Life) fallopian tubes that look both like flowers and like human hands reach out from the central womb.
Dividing the central birth scene from the lateral historical sections are two ancient tree trunks, Frida’s favorite symbol for the life-death cycle. The decaying wood bursts forth with new green-leafed shoots, and old broken branches are made to resemble the fallopian tubes. New life, she said, always sprouts from “the trunk of age.” In the center foreground, entwined in a tracery of vein-like roots, a snail shell spurting fluid into a conch symbolizes “love.”
Moses reveals Frida’s urge to encompass all time and all space in one vision. Like Roots, it is an expression of her religion, a vitalistic form of pantheism which she shared, to a great extent, with Diego. Frida’s faith was an all-embracing view of the universe as an elaborate web of “conducting threads,” a "harmony of form and color" in which “everything moves according to only one law—life. No one is apart from anyone. No one fights for himself. All is all and one. Anguish and pain, pleasure and death are nothing but a process in order to exist.” Her diary (this passage was written in 1950) continues:
No one is more than a functioning or part of the total function. . . . We direct ourselves toward our own selves through millions of beings—stones—bird creatures—star beings—microbe beings—fountain beings to ourselves. Variety of the one incapacity to escape the two, the three, the etcetera of always—in order to return to the one. But not to the sum (sometimes called god, sometimes liberty, sometimes love)—No—We have always been hate-love-mother-child-plant-earth-light-lightning-etc.-world giver of worlds—universes and universal cells.
“La Esmeralda” does not refer to an emerald or a jewelry store in Mexico City. Rather it is the Ministry of Public Education’s School of Painting and Sculpture, renamed by its students after the street where it was first located. When the school opened, in 1942, there were more faculty than students, for the director, Antonio Ruiz, a painter of diminutive works full of humor and fantasy, started by hiring an impressive staff of twenty-two. By 1943 these included such prominent artists as Jesús Guerrero Galván, Carlos Orozco Romero, Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Francisco Zúñiga, María Izquierdo, Diego Rivera (who taught composition), and Frida Kahlo. Frida’s starting pay was 252 pesos for twelve hours of teaching, three days a week. Although her employment after the first three years was informal, to say the least, she was registered as a teacher for a decade.
Not all the instructors were Mexican—the French-born Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret taught French, for example—but their spirit was emphatically Mexicanista. Though the school’s plant was shabby and primitive, consisting of one large classroom and a patio where the students painted (when it rained, the patio flooded and the students had to walk about on planks), to the teachers at La Esmeralda, all Mexico was a studio. Instead of asking their students to draw from plaster casts or to copy European models, they sent them out into the streets and fields, to work from nature. Their aim was not to produce artists, but to “prepare individuals whose creative personality [would] later express itself in the arts"; the five-year program included courses in mathematics, Spanish, history, art history, and French. Each student’s initiative was to be kindled by direct contact with teachers. Since the students were mostly poor, tuition and art materials were free.
One of the first students, the painter Guillermo Monroy, recalls that “in the beginning there were only about ten students. Then from my barrio came a gang of about twenty-two boys. When I entered the school, I didn’t know anything about art, because I was a worker from a family of carpenters. I had only had six years of school, and I didn’t even know that art schools existed. I was a furniture varnisher and upholsterer. Later I wanted to learn to carve wood, because I worked in a colonial furniture shop. So, as a worker, I went to La Esmeralda.”
Frida’s arrival at La Esmeralda made a great impression. Some students were admiring; others, like Fanny Rabel (then called Fanny Rabinovich), were skeptical at first:
“It is an old vice of women not to have confidence in women. So, in the beginning, when they told me that I was going to have a woman teacher, I did not like the idea. I had only had male teachers and male companions. Almost everything in Mexico was managed by the masculine gender, and there were very few girls in the school. My landscape teacher, Feliciano Peña, had told me, ’Well, I have seen this Frida Kahlo in the office, and she looked at me and asked me, “Are you a teacher here?” and I said, “Yes.” Then Frida said, “What’s this about teaching? I don’t know anything about teaching.” ’ Peña was very angry and said to me, ’How can she be a teacher if she doesn’t know anything about teaching?’
“But the moment that I met Frida I was fascinated because she had a gift to fascinate people. She was unique. She had enormous alegría, humor and love of life. She had invented her own language, her own way of speaking Spanish, full of vitality and accompanied by gestures, mimicry, laughter, jokes, and a great sense of irony. The first thing she did when I met her was to say, ’Oh, you are one of the muchachitas here! You are going to be my student! Listen, how do you do this thing of giving classes? I don’t know. What’s it about? I don’t have the slightest idea how to teach. But I think it’s going to be all right.’ This disarmed me. She was very friendly, and her relationship with all her students began on the familiar tu a tu basis of equality. She became like a big sister, like a mother watching her muchachitos.”
As Guillermo Monroy remembers it, Frida was “brotherly, an extraordinary teacher, a comrade. She was like a walking flower. She told us to draw what we had in our houses—clay jars, popular art, furniture, toys, Judases—so we didn’t feel like strangers in the school.”
If Frida was a “walking flower,” her pupil Monroy retains something of what she taught: he is a writer of florid grace. Among his several impassioned articles about his beloved maestra is this description of Frida’s first day of teaching at La Esmeralda:
I remember her entering the school of Painting and Sculpture, “La Esmeralda,” for the first time. She appeared there all of a sudden like a stupendous flowering branch because of her joyfulness, kindness, and enchantment. This was owed, surely, to the Tehuana dress that she wore, and that she always wore with such grace. The young people who were going to be her students . . . received her with true enthusiasm and emotion. She chatted with us briefly after greeting us very affectionately, and then immediately told us in a very animated way: “Well, kids, let’s go to work; I will be your so-called teacher, I am not any such thing, I only want to be your friend, I never have been a painting teacher, nor do I think I ever will be, since I am always learning. It is certain that to paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult, it is necessary to do it, to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting. Once and for all I am going to tell you that if the little experience that I have had as a painter is helpful to you in any way, you will tell me so, and that with me you will paint everything you want and feel. I will try to understand you the best I can. From time to time I will permit myself to make a few observations about your work, but also, I ask you, as the cuates that we are, that when I show you my work, you will do the same. I will never take the pencil from you in order to correct you; I want you to know, dear children, that there does not exist in the whole world a single teacher who is capable of teaching art. To do that is truly impossible. We will surely talk a lot about some theoretical question or another, of the different techniques used in the plastic arts, of form and content in art, and of all those things that are intimately related to our work. I hope you will not be bored with me, and when I seem a bore to you, I ask you, please, not to keep quiet, all right?” These simple and rather pure words were pronounced in a way that was without affectation or posing, completely lacking in pedantry.
After a brief silence, la maestra Frida asked all her students what we wanted to paint. On hearing this very direct question, the entire group became disconcerted for a few moments, and looking at each other, we didn’t know what to answer right away, but I, seeing how pretty she was, asked her with great frankness to pose for us. She, visibly moved and with a slight smile of acceptance that blossomed on her lips, asked for a chair. As soon as she sat down, she was surrounded by easels and students.
Frida Kahlo was there before us; gravely, astonishingly quiet, keeping a silence so deep and so impressive that no one, none of us, dared to interrupt. . . .
Her students agree that Frida’s teaching was completely unprogrammatic. She did not impose her ideas on them; rather she let their talents develop according to their temperaments, and taught them to be self-critical. Her remarks were penetrating, but never unkind, and she mitigated both praise and blame by making it clear that what she said was only a personal view, which could be wrong. “It seems to me that this should be a little stronger in color,” she would say. “This should be in balance with that; this part is not very well done. I would do it this way, but I am me, and you are you. It’s an opinion and I could be mistaken. If it’s helpful to you, take it, and if not, leave it.”
“The only help she gave us was to stimulate us, nothing more,” says another of her pupils, Arturo García Bustos. “She did not say even half a word about how we should paint, or anything about style, as the maestro Diego did. She did not pretend to explain theoretical things. But she was enthusiastic about us. She’d say, ’How well you painted this!’ or ’This part came out very ugly.’ What she taught us, fundamentally, was love of the people, and a taste for popular art. She’d say, for example, ’Look at that Judas! How marvelous! Look at those proportions! How Picasso would like to succeed in painting something with that expressiveness, with that force!’ ”
Fanny Rabel believes that “Frida’s great teaching was to see through artist’s eyes, to open our eyes to see the world, to see Mexico. She did not influence us through her way of painting, but through her way of living, of looking at the world and at people and at art. She made us feel and understand a certain kind of beauty in Mexico that we would not have realized by ourselves. She did not transmit this sensibility verbally. We were very young, simple and malleable—one of us was only fourteen years old, another was a peasant. We were not intellectual. She did not impose anything. Frida would say, ’Paint what you see, what you want.’ We all painted differently, followed our own routes. We did not paint like her. There was lots of chatting, jokes, conviviality. She was not giving us a lesson. Diego, on the other hand, could make a theory about anything in a minute. But she was instinctive, spontaneous. She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.”
"Muchachos,“ she would announce, “locked up here in school we can’t do anything. Let’s go into the street. Let’s go and paint the life in the street.” And to the markets, slums, colonial convents and baroque churches, to neighboring towns like Puebla, to the pyramids of Teotihuacán they went. Once, on crutches, she escorted them to Xochimilco to visit Francisco Goitia, who years before had been commissioned by the government to paint the types and customs of the Indians, and who, having all but abandoned painting, continued to live in a primitive hut, teaching village children.
On the way to and from their destinations Frida taught her students corridos and revolutionary Mexican songs, and they taught her the songs they were learning in the Communist Youth Organization. Often they stopped in pulquerías, where balladeers sang the songs of la raza for a few pesos. Painter Hector Xavier, who was enrolled at La Esmeralda but not in Frida’s class, went along on one of her trips to Teotihuacán. “When we were leaving to return to the city,” he remembered, “the truck stopped in front of a pulquería. Frida was riding in front next to the driver—partly because she had discovered that he had a very interesting face and partly because it was more comfortable than the back. She called me to get down from the back of the truck. ’All the muchachos,’ she said, ’to the pulquería! As for me, I will stay with this gentleman who takes the wheel.’ So we got down and she gave us a little purse with money. We entered the pulquería, and for the first time I saw the calabash cups for pulque, and it seemed to me, also, that we could invite all the people there for a drink. Well, Frida was paying. Finally, Frida said, ’Everybody up,’ and we climbed back on the truck. She continued chatting with the driver, who was telling her very good anecdotes. Two blocks from the school, the truck stopped, and Frida said, ’Whoever feels in good enough shape to continue the trip and to go to school, come with us, and whoever does not, get down.’ So we arrived at the school with a smaller group, but very happy with the whole experience in Teotihuacán and the
pulque in the pulquería and the spirit of Frida.”
After a few months, Frida found the long commute between Coyoa-cán and La Esmeralda taxing to her health. She did not, however, want to give up teaching, so she asked her students to come to her home. At first, a large group commuted to Coyoacán, but most eventually dropped out of her class, discouraged by the long bus ride. In the lives of the four who remained—Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, Arturo Estrada and Fanny Rabel, Frida became as central a person as she was in the lives of Mariana Morillo Safa and Roberto BeHar. “We got so used to Frida, and liked her so much, that it was as if she had been there always,” Fanny recalled. “Everybody loved her in a strange way. It was as if her life was always so close to those around her that you were tied up with her, as if you couldn’t live without her.” They were to stay with her for years, even after they had finished school. Just as Rivera’s students were called “Los Dieguitos,” Frida’s came to be called “Los Fridos.”
When they first arrived at her house, Frida would say to them, “The whole garden is ours. Let’s go paint. This is your room to store your work things. I am going to work in my studio. I will not come out every day to see your work.” Indeed, her schedule was unpredictable. She gave critiques as seldom as once every two weeks and as often as three times a week, with Rivera sometimes present and commenting on the work as well. The occasions were like parties: Frida served food and drink, and sometimes afterward took her students to the movies. “I remember particularly one occasion when she came down into the garden dressed in black carrying a cane and with her hair adorned with an infinity of flowers,” says García Bustos. “We were all in love with Frida. She had a special grace and attraction. She was so alegre that she made poetry around her.” On another morning, in June 1944, Monroy was equally bewitched. A light fog inundated the garden, and he, having arrived early, was busy painting a maguey plant near a little fish pool. Full of pleasure in trying to capture what he saw, he burst into song. And then, he recalls, “I began to feel a strange, disquieting sensation on my shoulders, a light chill, afterward heat, later soft electric charges; I felt that my shoulder was split into blue streaks of lightning. . . . [I turned to find] nothing less than Frida Kahlo . . . who, full of smiles and coupling her eyes with mine, said: ’Continue singing, Monroycito, you know that I also like to sing. . . . How wonderful your painting is turning out, take lots of pleasure and thrill in that little maguey. How moving it is to paint, don’t you think? What a beautiful plant!’ ” Then Frida smiled softly, kissed Monroy on the left cheek, and as she took leave of him, advised, “Keep on working, continue painting, don’t ever stop singing.”
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