Frida has died. Frida has died.
The brilliant and self-willed creature who, in our day, lit up the classrooms of the National Preparatory School has died. . . . An extraordinary artist has died: alert spirit, generous heart, sensibility in living flesh, love of art even unto death, intimate of Mexico in vertigo and in grace. . . . Friend, sister of the people, great daughter of Mexico: you are still alive. . . . You live on. . . .
Carlos Pellicer read his sonnets to Frida. A verse from one of them says: “You will always be alive on the earth,/you will always be a mutiny full of auroras,/the heroic flower of successive dawns.” Adelina Zendejas spoke about her memories of Frida at the Preparatoria and about Frida’s life and work as an example of the “iron will to live.” Juan Pablo Sainz, a member of the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party, spoke in the name of the party, seizing the occasion to discuss the problems of the contemporary world.
At a quarter past one, Rivera and various family members lifted Frida out of the coffin and laid her on an automatic cart that would carry her along iron tracks to the crematory oven. Rivera stood by her side with his hands clenched into fists, his face and body sunken in sorrow. He bent to kiss her forehead. Friends crowded near to say goodbye.
Rivera wanted to send Frida off with music. With arms held high and hands in fists, the gathering sang the Internationale, the national anthem, “The Young Guard,” Lenin’s funeral march, and other political songs. At one-fifty the door of the oven opened, and the cart carrying Frida’s body began to move toward the fire. Now the mourners sang ballads of farewell: “Adios, Mi Chaparita,” “Adios, Mariquita Linda,” “La Embarcation,” and “La Barca de Oro,” which goes:
I’m off now to the port where the golden ship lies
Waiting to take me away.
I’m leaving you now, this is goodbye.
Farewell, my love, goodbye forever.
You’ll never see me again, nor hear my songs,
But the seas will overflow with my tears
Goodbye, my love . . . goodbye.
“Rivera stood with his hands in fists,” Monroy recalls. “When the door to the oven opened to receive the cart with Frida in it, there was an infernal heat that forced us all to press up against the back wall of the room because we could not stand the heat. But Diego did not move.”
It was at this point that something almost as grotesque as one of Goya’s Los Caprichos took place. Adelina Zendejas remembers: “Everyone was hanging on to Frida’s hands when the cart began to pull her body toward the oven’s entrance. They threw themselves on top of her, and yanked at her fingers in order to take off her rings, because they wanted to have something that belonged to her.”
People were crying. Cristina became hysterical and began to scream when she saw her sister’s body slide toward the oven. She had to be carried outside. With good reason: at the moment when Frida entered the furnace, the intense heat made her sit up, and her blazing hair stood out from her face in an aureole. Siqueiros said that when the flames ignited her hair, her face appeared as if smiling in the center of a large sunflower.
The fires in the old-fashioned crematorium took four hours to do their job. During the wait, the crowd kept on singing. Diego wept and dug his nails into the palms of his hands again and again, making them bleed. Finally, the oven door opened, and the red-hot cart containing Frida’s ashes slid out. A blast of suffocating heat sent people once again reeling back against the walls of the room, covering their faces for protection. Only Rivera and Cárdenas calmly stood their ground.
Frida’s ashes retained the shape of her skeleton for a few minutes before being dispersed by currents of air. When Rivera saw this, he slowly lowered his clenched fist and reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket to take out a small sketchbook. With his face completely absorbed in what he was doing, he drew Frida’s silvery skeleton. Then he fondly gathered up her ashes in a red cloth, and put them in a cedar box. He asked that his ashes be mixed with Frida’s when he died. (The request has never been fulfilled; it was deemed more fitting for the great muralist to lie in the resting place of Mexico’s most famous citizens, the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres.)
In his autobiography, he wrote: “July 13, 1954, was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida, forever. . . . Too late now, I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.”
Not long after Frida died, Rivera’s granddaughter was baptized in the Coyoacán house. For the occasion, Diego dressed up a Judas figure, perhaps a skeleton, in Frida’s clothes, and a bag containing her ashes and her plaster corset was laid in a cradle. It was a gesture Frida would have applauded, a festive and Mexicanista approach to the ancient duality of birth as the cradle of death and death as the bearer of life.
When the Frida Kahlo Museum first opened, in July 1958, Frida’s ashes were placed in a sack on her bed; over them was her plaster death mask, wrapped in one of her rebozos—a ghostly Frida sitting in bed. A garland of flowers formed an arc over the assemblage, the flowers echoed in the garland that decks the dead child in the antique painting above Frida’s bed.
Later, the ashes were placed in a pre-Columbian jar in the shape of a rotund, headless female, and a bronze cast of the death mask was set on a pedestal above it. The urn seems pregnant with life, just like the clay idol in Four Inhabitants of Mexico, which Frida described as pregnant, “because, being dead, she has something alive inside.”
Today, Frida’s home is open, as it was in her lifetime, to visitors. Rivera gave the house, complete with its art collection, including the paintings by Rivera and others that Frida owned, and with all its folkloric furnishings, to the Mexican people in 1955, in order to perpetuate his wife’s memory. “I made one other stipulation,” said Rivera, “that a corner be set aside for me, alone, for whenever I felt the need to return to the atmosphere which recreated Frida’s presence.”
Some visitors to the museum are Frida’s friends. Others never knew Frida, but they leave the house feeling that they did, for the relics displayed there—Frida’s costumes, jewelry, toys, dolls, letters, books, art materials, her love notes to Diego, her marvelous collection of popular art—offer a vivid picture of her personality and of the ambience in which she lived and worked. They create the perfect setting for those of her paintings and drawings that hang in what was once her living room. Upstairs, in Frida’s studio, her wheelchair is drawn up before her easel. One of her plaster corsets, decorated with plants and thumbtacks, sits on her four-poster bed with its mirror-lined canopy. The Chinese dolls that substituted for children still stare from the shelf. Beside her bed is a doll bed, now empty. A skeleton dangles from the canopy of another four-poster bed, and Frida’s crutches lean against the footboard.
The museum does more than recreate an atmosphere; it serves to convince us of the specificity and realism of the fantastic imagery in Frida’s paintings and of the intimate bond between her life and her art. Because she was an invalid, the house in Coyoacán became her world. Because she was an artist, the paintings hanging in that house were an expansion and a transformation of that world; they powerfully evoke and commemorate the remarkable life she lived within it.
Frida’s last painting hangs on the living room wall (plate XXXV). In it, set against a brilliant blue sky that is divided into lighter and darker halves, are watermelons, the most loved of Mexican fruit, whole, halved, quartered, and otherwise carved into pieces. The paint is laid on with far more control than in other late still lifes; shapes are solidly defined and composed. It is as if Frida had gathered and focused what was left of her vitality in order to paint this final statement of alegría. Sliced and chopped, the pieces of fruit acknowledge the imminence of death, but their luscious red flesh celebrates the fullness of life. Eight days before she died, when her hours were darkened by calamity, Frida Kahlo dipped her brush in blood-red paint and inscribed her name plus the date and the place of execution, Coyoacán, Mexico, across the crimson pu
lp of the foremost slice. Then, in large capital letters, she wrote her final salute to life: VIVA LA VIDA.
PLATES
I Self-Portrait, 1926
II Self-Portrait, 1929
III Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931
IV Henry Ford Hospital, 1932
V Retablo
VI My Birth, 1932
VII The Goddess Tlazolteotl in the Act of Childbirth
VIII A Few Small Nips, 1935
IX Engraving (1890) by José Guadalupe Posada
X My Nurse and I, 1937
XI The Deceased Dimas, 1937
XII Self-Portrait, 1937
XIII Fulang-Chang and I, 1937
XIV The Two Fridas, 1939
XV The Dream, 1940
XVI Self-Portrait, 1940
XVII Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1940
XVIII Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940
XIX Self-Portrait, 1940
XX Self-Portrait with Monkeys,
XXI Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, 1943
XXII Thinking About Death, 1943
XXIII Self-Portrait with Small Monkey, 1945
XXIV Self-Portrait, 1947
XXV Self-Portrait, 1948
XXVI Diego and I, 1949
XXVII Roots, 1943
XXVIII The Broken Column, 1944
XXIX Without Hope, 1945
XXX Tree of Hope, 1946
XXXI The Little Deer, 1946
XXXII Sun and Life, 1947
XXXIII The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Señor Xolotl, 1949
XXXIV Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, 1951
XXXV Viva la Vida, 1954
1. Wedding photograph of Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderón, 1898.
2. My Grandparents, Parents and I, 1936.
3. Frida (lower right) after recovering from polio, with members family. Back row, second from right, her mother; fifth from right, her grandmother; seated with legs crossed, her sister Cristina.
4. They Ask for Planes and Only Get Straw Wings, 1938.
5. Four Inhabitants of Mexico, 1938.
6. Self-portrait by Guillermo Kahlo, c. 1907.
7. Portrait of Don Guillermo Kahlo, 1952.
8. Frida as a schoolgirl, 1923.
9. Alejandro Gómez Arias, c. 1928
10. Frida's drawing of her accident.
11. Frida (standing, left, wearing a man's suit) with members of her family. Back row, from left: her aunt, her sister Adriana, Adriana's husband Alberta Veraza; middle row: her uncle, her mother, her cousin Carmen; front row: Carlos Veraza, Cristina. Photograph by Guillermo Kahlo, 1926.
12. Portrait of Adriana, 1927.
13. Portrait of Cristina Kahlo, 1928.
14. Diego Rivera's portrait of Frida distributing arms, in his Ministry of Education mural, 1928.
15. Niña, 1929.
16. The Bus, 1929.
17. Frida and Diego on their wedding day, August 21, 1929.
18. Self-Portrait, 1930.
19. Portrait of Eva Frederick, 1931.
20. Portrait of Mrs. Jean Wight, 1931.
21. Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser, 1931.
22. Luther Burbank, 1931.
23. Frida and Diego at the Rouge plant of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, 1932.
24. On the scaffold at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1932.
25. With (from left to right) Lucienne Bloch, Arthur Niendorff and Jean Wight, on the roof of the Detroit Institute of Arts, watching the solar eclipse, August 31, 1932.
26. Frida and the Abortion, lithograph, 1932.
27. After the death of her mother. Photograph by Guillermo Kahlo, 1932.
28. Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, 1932
29. Painting Self-Portrait on the Borderline.
30. Self-Portrait, 1933
31. Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural as repainted in the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City, 1934.
32. With Diego and an unidentified friend at the New Worker's School, New York City, 1933.
33. With Nelson Rockefeller and Rosa Covarrubias in 1939.
34. My Dress Hangs There, 1933.
35. Rivera's portrait of Frida, Cristina and Cristina's children, his mural at the National Palace, 1935.
36. With Ella Wolfe in New York, 1935.
37. Self-Portrait, 1935.
38. Isamu Noguchi. Photograph by Edward Weston, 1935.
39. Memory, 1937.
40. Remembrance of an Open Wound, 1938.
41. With her niece and nephew, Isolda and Antonia Kahlo.
42. With Diego in front of the organ cactus fence at San Angel.
43. The Riveras' linked houses in San Angel.
44. With the Trotskys on their arrival at Tampico, 1937.
45. Frida and Trotsky, 1937.
46. With, from left, Trotsky (seated), Diego, Natalia Trotsky Reba Hansen, André Breton, and Jean van Heijenoort, an outing near Mexico City, June 1938
47. A gathering in Lupe, Marín's apartment in 1938. From left, Luis Cardoza Aragón, Frida, Jacqueline and André Breton, Lupe, Diego, and Lya Cardoza.
48. Me and My Doll, 1937.
49. Escuincle Dog with Me, c. 1938
50. What the Water Gave Me, 1938.
51. At her New York exhibition, 1938.
52. With Nickolas Muray. Photograph by Nickolas Muray, c. 1938.
53. Two Nudes in a Forest, 1939.
54. Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939.
55. The Wounded Table, 1940.
56. Self-Portrait, 1940.
57. Self-Portrait with Braid, 1941
58. Ceramic clocks, one with the date of the divorce (Frida wrote on it, “The hours were broken ”), the other with the date of the remarriage.
59. Frida and Diego with Caimito de Guayabal.
60. During World War II. Photograph by Nickolas Muray.
61. In the dining room of the blue house in Coyoacán. Photograph by Emmy Lou Packard.
62. Diego and Frida 1929-1944, 1944
63. Self-Portrait, drawing, 1946.
64. Flower of Life, 1944.
65. Still Life, 1942.
66. Fruits of the Earth, 1938.
67. Portrait of Mariana Morillo Safa, 1944
68. Doña Rosita Morillo, 1944
69. Moses, 1945.
70. With Granizo ( “the little deer ”) when he was a fawn, c. 1939. Photograph by Nickolas Muray.
71. With Diego at a political rally, c. 1946.
Frida Page 53
