63“Since I was young”: Antonio Rodríguez, “Frida Kahlo, Expresionista de su Yo Interno,” p. 67. This article is one of several given to me in the form of Xerox copies of clippings. Rodríguez does not recall the exact dates of his articles. Also, “Una Pintora Extraordinaria,” n.p., and Antonio Rodríguez, private interview, Mexico City, August 1977.
63She briefly entertained: Gómez Arias, private interviews.
63She . . . never stopped drawing capricious interlaces: González Ramírez, “Frida Kahlo.” Prophetically, González Ramírez saw that the webs of lines Frida drew looked like charts of the human circulatory system, a subject that would be, along with intertwining lines of all sorts, a constant preoccupation in her mature work. Similarly, the self-portrait as a triangle with a beard that she used as an emblem looks forward to her emphatic mustache in self-portraits from her adult years.
63“I never thought of painting”: Wolfe, “Rise of Another Rivera,” p. 131. Frida told Parker Lesley that she had painted her first self-portrait in bed, using a special easel and looking at her reflection in a mirror suspended over her bed (Lesley notes), but the portrait is too large to have been painted in bed. Some people who knew her at the time say Frida began painting before the accident. In a 1953 interview, Frida told Raquel Tibol about an almost certainly fictitious exchange between herself and her mother: “As soon as I saw my mother I said to her: ’I have not died, and what’s more, I have something to live for.’ This something was painting. Since I had to remain lying down in a plaster corset from the clavicle to the pelvis, my mother managed to prepare for me a very funny apparatus from which hung a piece of wood which served as a support for my papers” (Tibol, Crónica, p. 33).
64“My father had had”: Rodríguez, “Frida Kahlo, Expresionista,” p. 67.
64Her first subjects: Adelina Zendejas remembers Frida lying in bed and producing little landscapes in watercolor or colored pencil on pieces of cardboard that Guillermo Kahlo brought her (Zendejas, private interview). No such landscapes exist, either from this time or from later in her career, but an undated 1926 letter to Gómez Arias testifies to the fact that she did sometimes paint in oil out of doors. “I do not think that I will go to the convent to paint,” she wrote, “because I do not have any oil and haven’t felt like buying it.”
Frida’s niece, Isolda Kahlo, owns a round tray painted with poppies that she says Frida made before her accident, as a gift for her grandmother. Although the flowers are skillfully depicted, they hardly seem original to Frida. They look as if they had been copied from some decorative art source such as a needlepoint pattern. Indeed, the tray was probably intended to be a handicraft object, not a work of art. In addition, there is a tattered and faded pencil Self-Portrait in the Frida Kahlo Museum on which is written “Frieda Kahlo 1927 In my house at Coyoacán First Drawing in my Life.” Given the fact that she started painting in 1926, it is unlikely that this inscription tells the truth. Perhaps she meant it was the first drawing of the new life that began when she met Diego, for both the pre-Columbian necklace and the work shirt she wears in it, and the background—in which she contrasts skyscrapers labeled “United States,” “Large Houses,” and “Without a style of their own” with mountains labeled “Coyoacán” and “Valley of Mexico"—surely indicate Rivera’s influence.
The tray painted with poppies and other works discussed but not illustrated in Frida can be seen in the illustrations that accompany my dissertation, “Frida Kahlo: Her Life, Her Art.”
64“la Boticelinda Adriana” and “a cardboard cutout”: from Frida’s letters to Gómez Arias, June 24 and July 23, 1927.
65spindly trees and scalloped clouds: The scalloped clouds might also derive from Botticelli, who painted similarly shaped clouds—for example, in his portrait entitled Young Man with a Medal in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Other possible sources for the first portraits, especially the first Self-Portrait, are Roberto Montenegro, whose Art Deco mural and decorative plaques in the Ibero American Library Frida knew well, and Doctor Atl, the Mexican painter best known for his intense self-portraits with the volcano Popocatépetl in the background; his influence on Frida’s earliest paintings, remarked upon by Diego Rivera (Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 243), seems all the more likely, since he worked with her father in the mid-1920s on the books entitled Las Iglesias de Mexico.
Frida is said to have studied the Art Nouveau illustrations in a series of paperback books or reviews published by Editorial Aurora and collected by Guillermo Kahlo (Gómez Arias, private interviews). A few years after she completed her first Self-Portrait, she produced a highly stylized book illustration of her own—the frontispiece and the cover of Ernesto Hernández Bordes’s volume of poems entitled Caracol de Distancias, privately printed in an edition of 250 in 1933 by Cachucha Miguel N. Lira. The illustration, which depicts two women, reveals Frida’s familiarity with Art Deco design.
65“How much I would like to explain”: Letter to Gómez Arias, Apr. 31, 1927.
65“pity is stronger than love”: Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., private interview, New York City, May 1978.
66“in order to cool off his close relationship”: Tibol, Crónica, p. 35, note 4.
71“It will be called ’Panorama’ ”: Miguel N. Lira’s article was not published, but he did participate in the publication of a small pamphlet on Frida after her death, written by fellow Cachucha Manuel González Ramírez.
74“I tease and laugh at death”: Enrique Morales Pardavé, private interview, Mexico City, April 1978.
74she had wanted to [paint the accident]: Lesley notes. Frida did have a retablo illustrating the scene. Some twenty years after the accident, when she came across an existing retablo showing a crash between a streetcar and a bus, a collision almost identical to her own, she, or one of her students, altered a few details so that the bus’s sign says “Coyoacán,” the streetcar says “Tlalpan,” and the girl sprawled on the tracks has joined eyebrows like Frida’s. They also added a dedicatory inscription: “The couple Guillermo and Matilde C. de Kahlo gives thanks to the Virgin of Sorrows for having saved their child Frida from the accident that occurred in 1925 on the corner of Cuahutemotzín and the Calzada de Tlalpan.”
74“I paint myself”: Rodríguez, private interview, and “Una Pintora Extraordinaria,” n.p.
74“I look like many people”: Mario Monteforte Toledo, “Frida: Paisaje de Sí Misma,” p. 1.
74“From that time”: Antonio Rodríguez, “Frida Kahlo: Heroína del Dolor,” p. 1.
75“Frida is the only painter”: Dolores Alvarez Bravo, interviewed by Karen and David Crommie.
75“Why do you study so much?”: Letter to Gómez Arias, Sept. 29, 1926. This letter was published in Zendejas, “Frida Kahlo,” p. 64.
75“no one in my house believes”: Letter to Gómez Arias, Apr. 25, 1926.
76“she always acted happy”: Reyes, private interview.
76“When we went to visit her”: Adelina Zendejas, article by Zendejas dictated to the author in a private interview. The article was originally published in Boletín del Grupo Preparatorio 1920–1924, no. 44.
76three months in the Red Cross Hospital: Tibol, Crónica, p. 32.
77her hips wrapped in a cloth: According to Arturo García Bustos (private interview, Mexico City, March 1977), Frida’s hips and thighs were originally left naked. Deciding that the depiction of her sex diverted attention from the painting as a whole, Frida painted a sheet wrapped around her hips.
CHAPTER 6: DIEGO: THE FROG PRINCE
79“Samurai of my country”: Dromundo, Mi Calle, p. 262.
79“We will not be convinced”: Alejandro Gómez Arias, “Aquella Generación; Esta Generación,” essay published in En Torno de una Generación: Glosa de 1929, p. 75.
79“Germancito el Campirano”: Letter to Gómez Arias, June 24, 1927.
80“Now as never before”: Letter to Gómez Arias, June 14, 1928.
81“I am not merely an ’artist’ ”: Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego R
ivera, p. 342.
81“It’s like the tenderest young pig”: Lucienne Bloch, private interview.
81It is an odd work: In Idols Behind Altars, a delightful account of Mexican culture and history by Anita Brenner, there is a dialogue heard in 1923 at a gathering of intellectuals and university professors that took place in the home of Lombardo Toledano. Antonio Caso pronounced Rivera’s mural to be “stupendous!” To his brother Alfonso Caso it showed “an excess of genius!” Lombardo Toledano said, “Mexico palpitates in his work.” The verdict of Mrs. Caso and four female members of her family was that the mural whould be whitewashed. Alejandro Gómez Arias, who was also there, said Rivera had succeeded “by virtue of quantity, but certainly not by virtue of quality” (Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 139).
82Mexican art “is great”: MacKinley Helm, Modern Mexican Painters, p. 32.
83“the art of the Mexican people”: Ibid. The rise of folklorism in the 1920s was seen in other ways as well. On September 15, 1921, folk art was given a great boost by the first exhibition of popular art in Mexico, organized by the painter Doctor Atl (who three years later would collaborate with Frida’s father on the six volumes of Las Iglesias de Mexico) in collaboration with painter Adolfo Best Maugard and Diego Rivera. (Doctor Atl was born in 1877 as Gerardo Murillo. He forsook his Spanish patronymic, taking as his pseudonym the Indian word for “water.”) Doctor Atl’s exhibition catalogue Folk Arts of Mexico remains to the this day the basic book on the subject; back then it served to make the richness of popular art available as a source to painters.
Not all Mexican artists supported the idea that for art to be Mexican it had to “return” to the naïve themes and primitive style of folk art. Orozco, recognizing the danger that such art could easily descend into trite picturesqueness or even exploitation of Indian themes and forms for self-promoting or tourist-enticing purposes, and as deft a debunker as Rivera was an eloquent enthusiast, scorned the cult of retablos and pulquería murals (the naïve murals that decorated bars selling the alcoholic beverage pulque) and sneered at the popularization of folklore: “Indeed we Mexicans are the first ones to blame for having concocted and nurtured the myth of the ridiculous charro and the absurd china as symbols of so-called Mexicanism. . . . At the. sight of a charro or a china, at the opening notes of the horrible jarabe one is automatically reminded of the nauseating Mexican stage, and all this, amalgamated becomes our own” (Chariot, Mexican Mural Renaissance, p. 60).
83“the principal imprint of the Indian”: Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (New York: New American Library, 1959), p. 98.
84he fulminated against the “false artists”: Diego Rivera, “Frida Kahlo y el Arte Mexicano,” pp. 96–97.
85He later claimed: Henry Beckett, “Rivera Denies Red ’Hate Hymns,’ ” New York Evening Post, Sept. 19, 1933.
85“green eyes so transparent”: Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 126.
85The cause of the separation: Alan Robinson, “Lupe Marín Recalls Life with Diego Rivera,” News (Mexico City), Dec. 2, 1977, p. 12.
85before an astonished group of guests: Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 186.
85she smashed some of Diego’s . . . idols: Robinson, “Lupe Marín,” p. 12.
85Diego had more love affairs: Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 245.
86“Men are savages by nature”: Undated newspaper clipping c. Dec. 27, 1931, private archive, New York City.
86his reputation as a womanizer: There are many people who do not believe that Rivera actually became sexually engaged with the innumerable women who passed through his life. His obesity, his incredibly long hours of work, his concentration on art and politics, and, finally, his hypochondria and frequent bad health must have kept him from enjoying sex as often as the gossip columnists delighted in supposing he did. When painter Lucienne Bloch was living with the Riveras in Detroit, she recalls, “one morning Diego kissed me on the cheek and said to me, ’You know, in love, I’m not all what I’m made up to be’ ” (Lucienne Bloch, private interview).
José Gómez Robleda says that “Diego was full of sexual perversities and anomalies, and he was suspicious that he was deficient in normal sexual relations because of his fatness, etc.” (Robleda, private interview).
86“The meeting with Diego”: Bambi, “Frida Kahlo Es una Mitád.”
87“He gave me an abrazo”: Frida mentioned Orozco’s response to her painting to a U.S. journalist, Robert Lubar. See also Time, “Mexican Autobiography,” Apr. 27, 1953, p. 90. Frida had known Orozco at least since her days at the Preparatoria. His studio was near her home in Coyoacán, and it is said that he and she often traveled to and from Mexico City together, and that Orozco followed her and waited for her on corners so that they would be on the same bus. “He was a little fascinated by Frida, but he was also a little shy,” says Rosa Castro, a writer and a friend of Frida’s (Rosa Castro, private interview, Mexico City, November 1977).
87“As soon as they gave me permission”: Bambi, “Frida Kahlo Es una Mitád,” and Rodríguez, “Frida Kahlo, Expressionista,” p. 68.
87Diego’s version of the meeting: Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 169–72.
CHAPTER 7: THE ELEPHANT AND THE DOVE
93“When I went to the Secretary of Education”: Radar, “Etcetera” column in a Mexico City newspaper. Undated clipping, Isolda Kahlo archive.
94his fond recollection: Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 175.
94“He is irritated by only two things”: Frida Kahlo, “Retrato de Diego.” This essay was also published in Hoy (Mexico City), Jan. 22, 1949, and in the exhibition catalogue for Rivera’s 1949 retrospective published in 1951, Diego Rivera: 50 Años de su Labor Artística, Exposición de Homenaje Nacional, Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Parts of Kahlo’s essay appeared in Rivera’s My Art, My Life, pp. 301–3. More recently, the essay was reprinted in Exposición Nacional de Homenaje a Diego Rivera, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1977, pp. 11–23.
94“The trouble with Frida”: Private interview with an old friend of Frida’s who did not wish to be identified.
94“her face was painted”: Radar, “Etcetera.”
94“She no longer wore white blouses”: Gómez Arias, private interviews.
95“You have a dog face”: Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 244. Unlike Lupe Marín, who was the model for Rivera’s most vibrantly sensual nudes, Frida was never to be Rivera’s ideal of feminine sensuality and charm. Only in a 1930 lithograph did he depict her nude. The picture has all the accouterments of eroticism: Frida sits on the edge of a bed. She is in the process of undressing. Her garter lies on the pillow. Stockings and high-heeled shoes and a necklace have not yet been removed. Her arms are raised above her head in a position that reveals her breasts to advantage. All this should be provocative, but it isn’t. Frida’s body is scrawny. She looks companionable, not sexy. A contemporaneous lithograph that was printed from the opposite side of the same stone shows Rivera’s longtime friend Lola (Dolores) Olmedo. Where Frida looks self-possessed and of this world, Lola Olmedo is an idol to be possessed. Dolores Olmedo recalls that Rivera said she and Frida complemented each other (private interview). Presumably this was an excuse for him to love them both.
95“I was terribly anxious”: Tibol, Crónica, p. 49. The two following quotes are from the same source.
95“Diego showed me”: Rafael Lozano, Mexico City dispatch to Time, Nov. 10, 1950.
96a figure from one of Diego’s murals: Frida said that at the time when she took her first paintings to show to Rivera she was longing to paint murals. Although her physical frailty made the pursuit of a career as a muralist impossible, there exists an unfinished fresco panel, perhaps by Frida, showing a girl of about thirteen (possibly Frida) wearing a navy-blue tunic and a white blouse. The fresco panel is in the collection of Rivera’s eldest daughter, who believes that Frida painted it at the time when she became reacquainted with Rivera in 1928 (Lupe Rivera de Iturbe, private telephone interview, Mexico City,
July 1977). Very possibly Rivera helped Frida experiment with fresco technique, and this experimentation might have further encouraged Frida’s turn toward a simplified realism in which a painting consists of a few relatively thinly painted color shapes. The fresco panel could also have been produced in 1934, when Frida mentioned in a letter that she was planning to paint a small fresco in a children’s school near Tacuba in Mexico City.
96Frida’s [paintings of children] are always particularized: Only in Portrait of Isolda Kahlo as a Baby, 1929, did Frida paint a “cute” child—perhaps because Isolda was her goddaughter and niece and the painting was to be a gift to her sister Cristina.
98“bright as an eagle”: Wolfe, Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, p. 244. The meaning of the juxtaposition of the clock set on the pedestal and the airplane in the sky in Frida’s second Self-Portrait is uncertain. One possibility is that they refer to the modern technological world for which Rivera had such enthusiasm. Rivera said of a detail of his 1930 mural in the San Francisco Stock Exchange: “As a symbol of the future I showed a young Californian boy facing the sky with a model airplane in his hands” (My Art, My Life, p. 177). Or Frida could have intended the combination of airplane and clock to mean something as banal as “time flies"; she was perfectly capable of such visual puns.
98“Marry him”: Jesús Ríos y Valles, private interview, San Miguel de Allende, November 1978.
98“By the time she became involved with Rivera”: Dromundo, private interview.
99Matilde Calderón de Kahlo . . . could not accept: Gómez Arias, private interviews.
99“At seventeen”: Bambi, “Frida Kahlo Es una Mitád.” Frida’s statement that she borrowed her wedding clothes from her maid is probably an embroidery on the truth. The dress she wears in her wedding photograph, though definitely Mexican, does not look like the “skirt and blouse” of a servant.
99The couple were married in a civil ceremony: Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 173.
99La Prensa (Aug. 23, 1929): Newspaper clipping, Isolda Kahlo archive.
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