Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Although there is no question about where her sympathies lay, the intensity of Frida’s politics remains a subject of some controversy. Some people see her as a leftist heroine; others see her as basically apolitical. The heat or coolness of her concern seemed to depend on the political bias of the person to whom she was talking, and, of course, on Diego’s current views. Thus, leftists tend to perceive Frida as a vehement Communist, while those who are either naïve about, or indifferent to, politics, or those who disapprove of Frida’s communism, tend to see her as a nonpolitical creature. (Interestingly, it is her male students who portray her as a political being; her one female disciple, Fanny Rabel, does not remember her taking political stances: “She was a humanist, not a politicized woman.”) What can be said with certainty is that at least beginning in the 1940s, Frida stressed social content in art and took an interest in the political development of her young protégés, recommending Marxist literature and involving them in political discussions between herself and Diego. Painting, she said, should play a role in society. Quick to admit that she was incapable of making political paintings, she nevertheless encouraged her students to follow the Riveraesque tradition of socially conscious and “Mexicanist"realism rather than to attach themselves to the current of European-inspired, modernist easel painting.

  Eventually the “Fridos” formed an organization of left-wing painters who shared their ideal of bringing art to the people. Known as the Young Revolutionary Artists, the group grew to include forty-seven members, and held various ambulatory exhibitions on market days in different working-class sections of Mexico City. To this day, they credit Frida with their political formation. Years after her death, Arturo Estrada eulogized Frida at the opening of a retrospective exhibition of her work: “Her roots in the tradition of our people made her always alert to problems of the majority, attending humanely also to the particular problems of her neighbors, the humble women of the district of El Carmen in Coyoacán, where women young and old found in Frida a friend who spiritually and economically gave help to their pains, calling her affectionately, ’niña Fridita.’ . . . Her active political militancy made of the maestra Frida Kahlo an authentic daughter of the people, with whom she was identified in all their manifestations.”

  The four original disciples of Frida Kahlo maintain their solidarity even today. To them, being called “Los Fridos” is a matter of pride. Yet they never modeled their art on their teacher’s, and each works in a distinct style. What unites them is their sympathy for the Mexican poor and their love for Mexican culture. When the “Fridos” finished the course of studies at La Esmeralda, Frida said to them, “I’m going to be very sad, because you are not going to be here anymore.” Rivera knew just how to reassure his wife: “It is the moment in which they are going to walk alone,” he told her. “Even though they go their own ways, they will come and visit us as always, because they are our comrades.”

  Chapter 20

  The Little Deer

  IN ONE of Frida’s most stoic images, Self-Portrait with Small Monkey, painted in 1945, a spider monkey holds a ribbon that starts by circling Frida’s signature, winds around the neck of a pre-Columbian idol, then proceeds to form a noose-like loop around Frida’s neck, enlaces both her dog’s and her monkey’s neck, and finally loops around a sharp, illusionistically painted nail that is driven into the painting’s background (plate XXIII). The ribbon, always for Frida a symbol of connectedness, is here, like the nail, sinister and threatening. Silky and yellow (yellow for illness and madness), it hints at some psychic asphyxiation, while the nail evokes the martyrdom of physical pain.

  When Frida reduced her teaching schedule in 1944, it was because of steadily worsening health. The pain in her spine and foot was increasing. A bone surgeon, Dr. Alejandro Zimbrón, prescribed complete rest, and he ordered a steel corset (she wears it in The Broken Column), which for a while somewhat lessened her suffering. Without its support she felt that she could not sit or stand. She had no appetite, and she lost thirteen pounds in six months. Fainting spells and a slight fever confined her to bed. Then, after yet another battery of tests, Dr. Ramíriz Moreno pronounced that she had syphilis and prescribed a series of blood transfusions, sunbaths, and a treatment with bismuth. Other doctors did other examinations, including X-rays and spinal taps. Dr. Zimbrón said her spine needed to be reinforced, and he recommended an operation, but none was performed. On June 24, when Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser from her bed, because her spine hurt too much for her to sit in a chair, she had been wearing Dr. Zimbrón’s apparatus for five months.

  Each day I am worse. . . . In the beginning it was hard for me to get accustomed to it, since it is a hell of a thing to put up with this type of apparatus but you cannot imagine how badly I felt before putting it on. I could no longer really work because no matter how insignificant they were, all movements exhausted me. I got a little better with the corset but now I feel just as sick again, and I am now very desperate because I cannot find anything to improve the condition of my spine. The doctors tell me that my meninges are inflamed, but I can’t understand what’s going on because if the reason is that the spine should be immobilized to avoid irritation of the nerves, how is it that with all this and the corset I again feel the same pains and the same annoyances?

  Listen, Lindo, this time when you come, for the love of God, explain to me what kind of screw up I have and if it has any remedy or if la tostada [death] is going to take me one way or the other. Some doctors again insist on operating on me but I will not allow myself to be operated on unless, if it is indeed absolutely necessary, you were to do it.

  At one point in 1945 Frida was encased in a new plaster corset ordered by Dr. Zimbrón, but the pains in her spine and leg worsened, and the device was removed after two days. Her medical record says that she was injected with Lipidol (for a spinal tap), and that the Lipidol was not “removed.” The result was an increase in “pressure” in her brain and constant headaches. (Alejandro Gómez Arias recalls that the Lipidol, instead of going down into the area of Frida’s spine, traveled up into her brain, where it could be seen in X-rays.) As the months wore on, her spine hurt more than ever, especially when she was excited.

  Toward the end of her life Frida described the succession of orthopedic corsets she wore after 1944 and the treatments that went with them as “punishment.” There were twenty-eight corsets in all—one made of steel, three of leather, and the rest of plaster. One in particular, she said, allowed her neither to sit nor to recline. It made her so angry that she took it off, and used a sash to tie her torso to the back of a chair in order to support her spine. There was a time when she spent three months in a nearly vertical position with sacks of sand attached to her feet to straighten out her spinal column. Another time Adelina Zendejas, visiting her in the hospital after an operation, found her hanging from steel rings with her feet just able to touch the ground. Her easel was in front of her. “We were horrified,” Zendejas recalls. “She was painting and telling jokes and funny stories. When she got too tired and couldn’t stand it any longer they came and lowered her with an apparatus and laid her in bed, but again with the rings so that her spine would not contract and so that the vertebrae would not get stuck together.”

  Yet another gruesome tale comes from Frida’s friend the pianist Ella Paresce. A Spanish doctor friend who knew nothing about orthopedics put a plaster corset on Frida. “It was very exciting, and we laughed a lot about the thing. Then during the night the corset began to harden, as it was supposed to do. I happened to be spending the night there in the next room, and about half past four or five in the morning, I heard a crying, nearly shrieks. I jumped out of the bed and went in, and there was Frida saying she couldn’t breathe! She couldn’t breathe! The corset had hardened, but it hardened so much that it pressed her lungs. It made pleats all around her body. So I tried to get a doctor. Nobody would pay any attention at that hour in the morning, so finally I took a razor blade and knelt on the bed over Frida. I began slowly,
slowly cutting that corset right over her breast. I made about a two-inch cut so that she could breathe, and then we waited until a doctor appeared, and he did all the rest. Afterward we laughed to tears over this thing, and she painted the corset, which is still visible in the museum in Coyoacán.”

  Though publicly she made light of it, Frida was obsessed by her suffering. She wanted to find out everything she could about her physical condition, and kept herself informed (but confused) about her ailments by reading articles and medical books, and consulting numerous doctors. An invalid can be pardoned for hypochondria. In Frida’s case, of course, there also was an element of narcissism. Indeed, it is possible to argue that invalidism was essential to her self-image, and that if Frida’s physical problems had been as grave as she made out, she would never have been able to translate them into art. No less an authority than Dr. Eloesser believed that most of Frida’s surgical operations were unnecessary, that she was caught in a familiar psychological syndrome that impels patients to want surgery. After all, an operation is a way of getting attention. Many people believe that Rivera would have left Frida had she not been so sick, and Frida was quite capable of consenting to an unnecessary operation if it would strengthen her hold on Diego.

  In addition, a surgical incision is a sure thing: it provides a kind of certainty to people whose grip on reality, whose sense of actually being alive and connected with the world, is faltering. It also allows the patient to be passive, to make no decisions, and yet to have something concrete and real happen. Surgical intervention has a sexual aspect as well. Ultimately it can be an expression of hope—the next doctor, the next diagnosis, the next operation, will bring salvation.

  Frida’s wounded self-portraits were a form of silent crying. In images of herself footless, headless, cracked open, bleeding, she turned pain into the most dramatic image possible in order to impress on others the intensity of her suffering. And by projecting pain outward and onto the canvas, she also extracted it from her own body. Self-portraits were fixed, immutable replicas of her mirror image, and neither reflections nor canvases feel pain.

  As antidotes to pain, the wounded self-portraits may have served in another way. One thinks of the experience of catching a glimpse of one’s reflection in a mirror at a moment of physical or emotional anguish. The image in the mirror is astonishing—it looks like us, but it does not share our pain. The disjunction between our sense of ourselves in pain (perceived from the inside out) and the surface evidence, offered by the mirror, of an apparently pain-free self (seen from the outside in) can function as a steadying influence. The reflected image recalls to us our familiar physical self, providing a feeling of continuity. If Frida was drawn to mirrors because they comforted her in this way, painting the image she saw in the mirror was a way of making that reassuring image permanent. Thus self-portraits could serve as aids to objectivity or dissociation. Also, by looking at her wounded self in her paintings, Frida could sustain the illusion of being the strong, objective onlooker to her own misfortune.

  In Without Hope, 1945, Frida stages her drama in that vast, heaving sea of volcanic rock the Pedregal (plate XXIX). The faults and fissures of the land symbolize the violence done to her body. Dramatic action is not clear, but the horror is unequivocal. Frida lies weeping in bed. Between her lips she holds the tip of a huge, membranous funnel—a cornucopia of gore containing a pig, a chicken, brains, a turkey, beef, sausage, and a fish, plus a sugar-candy skull with “Frida” written on its forehead. These she may be vomiting onto the easel that straddles her bed, making the carnage the source of her art. Or the image could refer to those pre-Columbian speech symbols that look like comic strip balloons, with the funnel of butchery symbolizing a scream of rage and horror.

  Another explanation is that Frida painted Without Hope after convalescing from an operation, and that the funnel depicts her disgust when her doctor, full of the best bedside-manner cheer, announced: “Now you can eat anything!” Since she was so thin, the doctors made her eat puréed food every two hours. On the back of the painting’s frame Frida wrote a rhyme: "A mí no me queda ya ni la menor esperanza. . . . Todo se mueve al compás de lo que encierra la panza.” (Not the least hope remains to me. . . . Everything moves in time with what the belly contains.)

  The sheet that covers Frida’s naked body is dotted with round microscopic organisms that look like cells with nuclei or perhaps eggs waiting to be fertilized. Their form is echoed in the blood-red sun and pale moon that appear together in the sky. Thus Frida once again extends the meaning of her body’s misadventures into the opposite worlds of the microscope and the solar system. It could also be that she set the funnel of horror in Without Hope between cells and celestial orbs in order not to aggrandize but rather to minimize, by contrast with the great span of things, her own personal miseries.

  Very likely, too, the simultaneous presence of the sun and the moon refers, as in some of Frida’s other paintings, to the Aztec notion of an eternal war between light and dark, or to Christ’s crucifixion, where the sun and moon together indicate the sorrow of all creation at the death of the savior. Thus, whether the funnel is a hemorrhage, a miscarried child, a scream, or a force-fed meal, the gore gushing from (or to) Frida’s mouth and onto (or from) an easel that evokes a cross can be seen as a ritualistic offering, a personal and imaginary rite that redeems or renews through suffering.

  “Lovely Ella and Dear Boit,” Frida wrote to the Wolfes on February 15, 1946:

  Here the comet appears again! Doña Frida Kahlo, although you won’t believe it!! I write to you from my bed, because for four months I have been in bad shape with my crooked spine, and after having seen numerous doctors from this country, I have decided to go to New York to see one who they say is absolutely terrific. . . . Everyone here, the “bone men” or orthopedes, feel that I should have an operation that I think is very dangerous, since I am very thin, worn out and completely going to hell, and, in this state, I do not want to let myself be operated on without first consulting with some high up doctor of Gringolandia. Thus I want to ask you a very great favor, which consists in the following:

  I enclose here a copy of my clinical history that will serve to make you realize all that I have suffered in this damned life, but also if possible, you will show it to Dr. Wilson who is the one I want to consult with there. It is a question of a doctor specialist in bones whose complete name is Dr. Philip Wilson, 321 East 42nd Street, N.Y.C.

  What I am interested in is knowing these points:

  1) I could go to the U.S.A. more or less in the beginning of April. Will Dr. Wilson be in New York then? Or if not, when could I meet him?

  2) After he more or less knows about my case through the clinical history that you could show him, would he be willing to receive me to make a serious study of me and to give me his opinion?

  3) In case he accepts, does he think it necessary that I should go directly to a hospital or might I live in another place, and only go several times to his office?

  (All this is extremely important for me to know because I have to calculate the dough which is now meager.) You know what I mean kids?

  4) You can give him the following information, for greater clarity: I have been in bed 4 months and I feel very weak and tired. I would make the trip by plane to avoid worse disturbances. They would put a corset on me to help me to stand the discomforts. (An orthopedic corset or one of plaster.) How long does he think it will take him to do the diagnosis taking into account that I have X-rays, analyses and all kinds of things of that type. 25 X-rays from 1945 of the spine, leg and foot. (If it is necessary to take new ones there, I am at his disposal for whatever . . . !)

  5) Try to explain to him that I am not a “millionairess” or anything close to it. Rather the question of dough is a little “grey-green” shading into the color of the wing of a yellow cricket.

  6) VERY IMPORTANT

  That I put myself in his magnificent hands because besides knowing his great reputation through the doctors,
he was personally recommended to me in Mexico by a man who was his client and who is called ARCADY BOYTLER who admires him and adores him because he relieved him of something that was also in the dorsal spine. Tell him that Boytler and his wife spoke with great enthusiasm about him and that I am absolutely delighted to see him since I know that the Boytlers adore him and they esteem me enough to send me to him.

  7) If you think of other practical things (remember what kind of a mule I am) I would be grateful to you with all my little heart, adored children.

  8) In order to consult with Dr. Wilson, I will send you the dough that you indicate.

  9) You can tell him more or less what kind of a ranch-style cockroach your cuate Frida Kahlo pata de palo is. I leave you in complete liberty to give him any kind of explanations and you even may describe me (if it is necessary ask Nick for a photo so that he should know what I look like).

  10) If he wants some other information, proceed swiftly to write me so that everything will be in order before putting my foot in it (thin or fat).