Of necessity, Frida’s life and Diego’s were quite separate. They kept different hours. He left for work at eight and came home late, usually after Frida had eaten supper. They slept in different parts of the house, Frida upstairs in the modern wing, Diego downstairs in a room that, suitably, gave onto the dining room. “They lived together, but apart,” Ferreto said.
As an invalid, there was little Frida could do for Diego. Once she had been able to mother him, to cook for him and cater to his whims, to care for him when he was ill; now she could not help him (in 1952, he had cancer of the penis, which was arrested with X-ray therapy when he refused amputation), and had only her suffering to bind him to her. Her several suicide attempts were perhaps more than anything else a way of showing him how much she suffered. But being a man with a passionate appetite for all aspects of living, he could not limit himself to a life in which caring for Frida was his chief preoccupation. Sometimes tender, sometimes callous, he was always unreliable. There were terrible fights and periods of separation, and though she often said to friends that she no longer minded his love affairs because “he needs someone to take care of him,” and though she asked her women friends to look after Diego, even implying that they should give him romantic attention, when he was not with her, Frida cried out to him in anguish in her diary:
If only I had his caress near me the way the air caresses the earth. The reality of his person would make me happier. It would distance me from the feeling that fills me full of gray. Nothing would then be so deep in me, so final. But how do I explain to him my enormous need for tenderness! My loneliness of many years. My structure ill adapted because it is inharmonious. I think it is better to go, to go, to escape. Let everything pass in a second, Ojalá [God grant].
“I love Diego more than ever,” she told her journalist friend Bambi not long before her death, “and I hope to be of use to him in something and to keep on painting with all alegría and I hope nothing will ever happen to Diego, because the day that he dies I am going with him no matter what. They’ll bury us both. I have already said ’don’t count on me after Diego goes.’ I am not going to live without Diego, nor can I. For me he is my child, my son, my mother, my father, my lover, my husband, my everything.”
The isolation and pain that filled Frida “full of gray” was brightened in December 1952 by her participation in the repainting of La Rosita. Noting that her students’ earlier murals had faded, she decided that they should be replaced. This time, the participating artists included two of the “Fridos” (García Bustos and Estrada), plus a group of Rivera’s assistants and protégés. The students drew studies and, with Frida’s help, selected the best designs. She directed the project, walking on crutches out to the bar to watch her disciples work.
The walls were repainted in fresco in a single day and with new subjects, this time including much-publicized sentimental events and current celebrities. María Félix was portrayed twice. On one panel she was seated on a cloud above a group of upside-down men who illustrated the panel’s title: El mundo de cabeza por la belleza (The world head over heels in love with beauty). Another section showed Frida dressed as a Tehuana next to Arcady Boytler. She holds a peace dove, and below her is a scroll with the words: “We love peace.” Frida herself chose the grouping that included Rivera flanked by María Félix and Pita Amor.
Although Frida said the murals were painted “for pure pleasure, for pure alegría, and for the people of Coyoacán,” and that they were intended to resuscitate the “intentionally Mexican and critical spirit that has encouraged the best of our painters and engravers in the first quarter of the century, among them, José Guadalupe Posada and Saturnino Herrán,” the new decorations of La Rosita (lost when the bar was razed) were much less authentically popular and Mexican than the 1943 versions. The subjects were sophisticated in-jokes and famous personalities, close friends of the Riveras, instead of anonymous campesinos symbolizing the themes of pulque and the rose; there was even talk of changing the pulquería’s name to something like “The loves of María Félix.” Thus the repainting of La Rosita was more of a social event for cultured people than an effort to renew the culture of “the people.” It was as if Frida and Diego were amusing themselves by borrowing a popular tradition and turning a working-class bar into a celebration of upper bohemia.
The inauguration of the new murals was timed to coincide with Rivera’s sixty-sixth birthday, on December 8. Frida wanted to have a traditional Christmas posada with a parade of guests singing as they walked through the streets to the open doors of the blue house; the festivities were to become an even more celebrated event than the first opening of La Rosita. Rosa Castro recalled the dazzling but grotesque afternoon. Frida was talking to Rosa about the misery of being enclosed in orthopedic corsets, when suddenly, at dusk, she cried, “No more!” She ripped off her corset and sallied out to join the festivities, leaving Rosa Castro behind to watch the guests milling about the house. Rosa remembers especially the scene in Frida’s bedroom. There, hanging from the rafters—those same rafters from which Frida herself had hung while waiting for one of her plaster corsets to dry—was a multitude of Judases, dressed by Frida in her own and Diego’s clothes. They swung and twirled, their cardboard bones jostled by the continuous flow of people moving in and out of the room.
Shouting in the street outside called Rosa Castro to the door. There was Frida, her hair loose and flowing over her shoulders, her face wild with excitement that must have been partly the result of drugs taken so that she could endure the pain of walking without the support of her corset. She staggered toward her house, arms raised above her head, her voice joining in the general uproar of the crowd that followed her. In the dim evening light, a cloud of dust billowed up around the celebrants. And above the noise of the singing, laughing, whistling crowd, Frida’s voice could be heard. “Never again!” she cried triumphantly, referring to her imprisonment in corsets. “Never again, no matter what happens! Never again!”
Chapter 23
Homage to Frida Kahlo
A FEW MONTHS after the second opening of La Rosita, in the spring of 1953, Lola Alvarez Bravo decided to organize an exhibition of Frida’s paintings in her Galería Arte Contemporaneo at Amberes 12, in the city’s fashionable Pink Zone. “They had just performed a bone transplant, and unfortunately, the bone was diseased and they had to remove it again,” she recalled. “I realized that Frida’s death was quite near. I think that honors should be given to people while they are still alive to enjoy them, not when they are dead.” She proposed the idea to Diego. He was enthusiastic, and together they told Frida. “It was a very joyful announcement for her, and her health actually improved for a few days while she was planning and thinking about it. The doctors thought that she could not get any worse and that this might give her a boost.”
The show was to be Frida Kahlo’s first one-person exhibition in her native land, and to Frida, devastated by illness, it was a triumph. She sent out charming folkloric invitations—little booklets printed on colored paper, which she strung together with bright woolen ribbons. The message was in the form of a ballad written in Frida’s hand:
With friendship and love
born from the heart
I have the pleasure of inviting you
to my humble exhibition.
At eight in the evening
—since, after all, you have a watch—
I’ll wait for you in the gallery
of that Lola Alvarez Bravo.
It is at Amberes twelve
and its doors open on the street
so that you won’t get lost
because that’s all I’m going to say.
All I want is for you to tell me
your good and sincere opinion.
You are a learned person
your knowledge is first-class.
These paintings
I painted with my own hands
and they wait on the walls
to give pleasure to my brother
s.
Well, my dear cuate,
with true friendship
I thank you for this with all my heart
Frida Kahlo de Rivera.
The gallery also printed a brochure in which Lola Alvarez Bravo called Frida a “great woman and artist,” and stated the obvious truth that Frida had deserved this homage for a long time.
When the night of the opening approached, Frida was in such poor health that the doctors forbade her to move. But she did not want to miss her vernissage. And somehow her attendance was becoming, of its own momentum, an event. The phones at the gallery kept ringing: Would Frida be there? Was she too sick to come? Art reporters in Mexico and abroad called to ask about the show. The day before the exhibition opened, Lola Alvarez Bravo learned that Frida had taken a turn for the worse, but still insisted on coming to the inauguration. She would send her bed so that she could attend lying down. A few hours later, the huge four-poster arrived, and the gallery staff set about rearranging the paintings so as to include the bed as part of the show.
The day of the opening, tension mounted. The staff bustled about straightening paintings, checking labels, primping flowers, seeing that the bar was stocked, with the glasses in neat rows and the ice ready. As was the gallery’s custom, a short while before the appointed hour the staff closed the doors to give themselves a moment of peace in which to make sure the place was clean and well-arranged. It was at this point, Lola Alvarez Bravo recalls, that a crowd of hundreds of people gathered on the street: “There was a traffic jam outside, and people were even pushing at the door, because they insisted on getting into the gallery immediately. I didn’t want them to come in until Frida arrived, because it would be very hard for her to get in once the gallery was jammed with people.” Finally, the gallery was forced to open its door for fear that the restive crowd would break it down.
Minutes after the guests poured into the gallery, sirens were heard outside. People rushed to the door and were astonished to see an ambulance accompanied by a motorcycle escort and Frida Kahlo being carried from it into her exhibition on a hospital stretcher. “The photographers and reporters were so surprised,” says Lola Alvarez Bravo, “that they were almost in shock. They abandoned their cameras on the floor. They were incapable of taking any pictures of the event.”
Someone did, fortunately, have the presence of mind to take a photograph of this extraordinary moment in Frida’s life. It shows her dressed in native costume and jewelry, lying on the stretcher. As she is carried into the gallery, she is being greeted by friends. Old, lame, white-bearded Doctor Atl, the legendary painter, revolutionary, and volcanologist, looks down at her with an expression of intense feeling. Frida’s wide, staring eyes dominate her ravaged face; undoubtedly she had had to be heavily drugged.
She was placed in her bed in the middle of the gallery. A grinning skeleton Judas affixed to the underside of her bed’s mirror-lined canopy lay face down as if he were watching her. Three smaller Judas figures dangled from the canopy, and the four-poster’s headboard was covered with pictures of Frida’s political heroes, photographs of family, friends, and Diego. One of her paintings hung on the footboard. The bed was to remain in the exhibition even after the opening, its embroidered pillows scented with Schiaparelli’s “Shocking” perfume.
Like one of those lavishly gowned saints that recline on satin sheets and are cherished in Mexican churches, Frida held court. “We asked people to keep walking,” said Lola Alvarez Bravo, “to greet her and then to concentrate on the exhibition itself, because we were afraid the crowd might suffocate her. There was really a mob—not only the art world, the critics, and her friends, but quite a lot of unexpected people came that night. There was a moment when we had to take Frida’s bed out to the narrow terrace in the open air, because she could hardly breathe anymore.”
Carlos Pellicer acted as traffic policeman, dispersing the crowd when it gathered too closely around Frida, insisting that guests form a line in order to congratulate the artist one by one. When the “Fridos” came up to her bed, Frida said, “Stay with me a little while, chamacos," but they could not linger, because other well-wishers pressed them on.
Liquor flowed. The hum of talk was pierced by brays of laughter as people enjoying themselves cracked jokes and greeted friends. It was one of those parties where excitement reaches a feverish intensity. Everyone recognized it as a major event. Carlos Pellicer had tears in his eyes when he read aloud a poem he had written about Frida, who drank and sang corridos with her guests. She asked the writer Andrés Henestrosa to sing “La Llorona” (The Weeping Woman), and Concha Michel sang other favorites. After most of her friends had embraced her, the guests stood in a circle around the four-poster and sang:
Esta noche m’emborrachó
Niña de mi corazón
Mañana será otro día
y verán que tengo razón.
(Tonight I will get drunk
Child of my heart
Tomorrow is another day
And you will see that I am right.)
When Dr. Velasco y Polo told Diego that he thought Frida was getting tired and should be taken home, Diego was too caught up in the festivity to pay any attention. He brushed off the doctor with a mild curse: "Anda, hijo, te voy a dar!" (Beat it, kid, or I’ll let you have it!)
Like the sugar skulls she loved, or the grinning Judas, Frida’s opening was as macabre as it was gay. “All the cripples of Mexico came to give Frida a kiss,” Andrés Henestrosa remembers, and he described the various Mexican painters who attended. “María Izquierdo arrived supported by friends and family because she was an invalid. She leaned over to kiss Frida’s forehead. Goitia, sick and ghostly, arrived from his hut in Xochimilco with his peasant’s clothes and his long beard. Also Rodríguez Lozano, who was crazy. Doctor Atl came. He was eighty years old. He had a white beard and crutches, because one of his legs had recently been amputated. But he was not sad. He leaned over Frida’s bed and laughed boisterously at some witticism that made fun of death. He and Frida joked about his foot, and he told people not to look at him with pity, for his foot would grow again and be better than before. Death, he said, only exists if you fail to give it a little life. It was a procession of monsters, like Goya, or more like the pre-Columbian world with its blood, mutilation, and sacrifice.”
“Frida was very fixed up, but tired and sick,” Monroy recalls. “We were deeply moved to see all her work brought together and to see that she was loved by so many people.” But her former pupils felt, as did many of Frida’s friends, that the opening was exhibitionistic. “It was,” Raquel Tibol observed, “a little spectacular, a little bit like a Surrealist act, with Frida like the Sphinx of the Night, presenting herself in the gallery in her bed. It was all theater.”
“Everybody and his dog was there,” Mariana Morillo Safa says. “Frida was so thrilled welcoming everybody. But she was a different Frida from the one I had known as a little girl. She was not as natural. It is as if she were thinking of something else. She acted happy, but she was trying very hard.”
Certainly it is true that Frida’s presence turned the opening into a display of personal sentiment and emotion, rather than an artistic celebration. But if Frida had to perform to conceal her pain, this was the kind of performance that she loved—colorful, surprising, intensely human, and a little morbid, very like her theatrical self-presentation in her art.
Frida was amazed at the success of her exhibition. So was her gallery. Lola Alvarez Bravo recalls that “we received calls from Paris, London, and from several places in the U.S.A. asking us for details about Frida’s exhibition. . . . we were surprised that anyone outside Mexico should have heard of it.” The gallery had to extend the show for a month because of popular demand, and the press loved it, extolling Frida’s heroic presence at the opening as much as it admired her work.
The painter, poet, and prominent critic José Moreno Villa struck in Novedades the note that would resound over the years: “It is impossible,” he wrot
e, “to separate the life and work of this singular person. Her paintings are her biography.” Time magazine reported the news of Frida’s show in an article called “Mexican Autobiography.” Although her renown still had much to do with the fact that she was married to Diego Rivera, she was no longer “little Frida,” but a celebrity in her own right. The Time reviewer told the story of Frida’s accident, her marriage, her pride in her Communist convictions. The piece ends with this ominous assessment of her physical and moral state:
After seeing her show last week, Mexico could understand Frida Kahlo’s hard reality. And it is getting even harder. Recently, her condition had been getting worse; friends who remember her as a plump, vigorous woman are shocked by her haggard appearance. She cannot stand for more than ten minutes at a time now, and there is a threat of gangrene in one foot. But each day, Frida Kahlo still struggles to her chair to paint—even if only for a short while. “I am not sick,” she says. “I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
In his autobiography, Diego remembered Frida’s exhibition with pride and pleasure: “For me, the most thrilling event of 1953 was Frida’s one-man show in Mexico City during the month of April. Anyone who attended it could not but marvel at her great talent. Even I was impressed when I saw all her work together.” But he also recalled that at her opening Frida hardly spoke: “I thought afterwards that she must have realized she was bidding good-bye to life.”
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