Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

by Carole Maso

A little song at the people’s altar: The revolution is harmony of form and of color and everything that exists and moves….

  Frida and Diego would amuse themselves by drawing cadavres exquis or singing corridos. Although Diego couldn’t carry a tune, he loved to sing, and he took pleasure in listening to Frida, for she sang with great spirit and could handle the falsetto breaks in songs like “La Malagueña” beautifully.

  O beauty Mexico convulsive

  I am the flower, I am the feather, I am the drum and the mirror of the gods. I am the song. I rain flowers. I rain songs.

  I am the flower. I weep songs. I weep paint.

  the parrot Bonito outside drinking tequila and beer and squawking I can’t — I can’t get over this hangover ¡No se me pasa la cruda!

  swearing

  the alegría girl with glee

  a little dog howling

  the alegría girl on fire

  Accident: dance! dance! A pair of red legs severed from their body and between them a pair of lips.

  her theater of the ferocious and absurd

  her love of the circus, boxing matches, movies, street theater

  And she sings in the glade

  I am a poor little deer that lives in the mountains.

  Since I am not very tame, I don’t come down to drink water during the day.

  At night little by little, I come to your arms, my love.

  Accident:

  Everybody tells me not to lose patience, but they don’t know what being bedridden for three months means to me … after having been a real street wanderer all my life. But what can one do? At least la pelona did not take me away.

  Everywhere skeletons hanging from the ceilings and walls and furniture. Big skeletons clothed in popular dress and little skeletons in all corners of the bed

  arrangements of jewels, glass balls, embroidered costumes, bells, feathers

  and skeletons dancing

  la pelona dancing

  layers of petticoats the hems embroidered by Frida with ribald Mexican sayings

  Her Tehuana dress

  hair decorated bows clips combs bougainvillea blossoms

  an embroidered blouse and long skirt with a ruffle of cotton on the hem

  long necklaces of gold coins

  elaborate headdresses with starched lace pleats

  and jewelry — glass beads, pre-Colombian jade, colonial pendant earrings

  the elaborate stage of you

  She raises a ringed hand

  I am only one cell of the complex revolutionary mechanism of the people for peace and of the new Soviet-Chinese-Czechoslovakian-Polish people who are bound by blood to my own person and to the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Amongst these large multitudes of Asiatic peoples there will always be my own faces — Mexican faces — of dark skin and beautiful form, limitless elegance, also the blacks will be liberated, they are so beautiful and so brave …

  and she paints.

  Accident: Alejandro

  “The electric train with two cars approached the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more and more, but for a time it did not break. It was a bus with long benches on either side. I remember that at one moment my knees touched the knees of the person sitting opposite me, I was sitting next to Frida. When the bus reached its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the train kept moving. It ran over many people.

  “I remained under the train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis. When I was able to stand up I got out from under the train. I had no lesions, only contusions. Naturally the first thing that I did was look for Frida.

  “Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, ‘¡La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.”

  Votive: Diego

  … Upon your form, at my touch the cilia of flowers, the sounds of rivers respond. All the fruits were in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate…. of the mamey and pure pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated through all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Odor of essence of oak, of the memory of walnut, of the green breath of ash.

  You are present, intangible and you are all the universe that I form in the space of my room. Your absence shoots forth trembling in the sound of the clock, in the pulse of the light; your breath through the mirror. From you to my hands I go over all your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours.

  She draws

  his image on her forehead

  their faces forming a single head Diego.

  Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. My body fills with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent light of lightning. The dampness of the earth. Your armpit is my refuge. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel your life shoot forth from your flower-fountain which mine keeps in order to fill the paths of my nerves which belong to you.

  spoken and signed with magenta kisses.

  Gringolandia

  “He is enchanted with the factories, the machines, etc., like a child with a new toy. The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is, as in all of the United States, ugly and stupid.”

  On its letterhead, the Wardwell called itself “the best home address in Detroit.” What that meant, the Riveras discovered after a few weeks, was that the hotel did not take Jews. “But Frida and I have Jewish blood!” Diego shouted. “We are going to have to leave! I won’t stay here no matter how much you lower the price unless you remove the restriction.” Desperate for customers, the management promised to comply and also reduced the rent.

  New York:

  Apparently the thought that capitalists might do well not to hire an avowed communist to decorate one of the world’s truly great urban complexes did not occur to the young Nelson Rockefeller. Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.

  When an acquaintance suggested that she buy herself some stylish clothes, Frida briefly gave up her long native skirts for the amusement of wearing chic Manhattan modes — even hats — and twitching her hips along the Manhattan sidewalks in a parody of the confident strut of a Manhattan socialite. She poked fun at everything that struck her as funny, and that was a lot.

  Weekly Sales in Millions!

  Nine months later, after the Riveras had left New York, the mural was chipped off and thrown away…. When he repainted the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1934, he placed John D. Rockefeller, Sr., among the revelers on the capitalist side of the mural, in close proximity to the syphilis spirochetes that swarm on the propeller.

  American drugstores, for example, were a fantasy world. Once when she was passing a pharmacy in a taxi, the word Pharmaceuticals written on the outside struck her as so ponderous that she composed a song called Pharmaceuticals and much to the driver’s mirth, sang it loudly during the remainder of the ride.

  She adored department stores, shops in Chinatown, and dime stores. Frida went through dime stores like a tornado. Suddenly she would stop and buy something immediately. She had an extraordinary eye for the genuine and the beautiful. She’d find cheap costume jewelry and she’d make it look fantastic.

  In the morning when they read newspapers, Frida would burst into laughter over the little photographs of columnists that accompanied their texts. “Look at those crazy heads!” she would say. “It’s not possible. They must be crazy in this cou
ntry!”

  Weekly Sales in Millions!

  Directly in the middle of a composite image that shows Manhattan as the capital of capitalism as well as the center of poverty and protest in the Depression years hangs Frida’s Tehuana costume. My Dress Hangs There.

  … Frida mocks the North American obsession with efficient plumbing and the national preoccupation with competitive sports by setting upon pedestals a monumental toilet and a golden golf trophy…. Snaking around the cross in the stained glass window in Trinity Church is a large red S that turns the crucifix into a dollar sign … instead of showing Federal Hall’s marble steps, Frida has pasted on her canvas a graph showing “Weekly Sales in Millions”: in July 1933, big business seemed to be doing fine, but the masses — tiny, swarming figures at the bottom of the painting — were not the beneficiaries.

  The garbage overflows with a human heart, a hand.

  … Also their lifestyle seems most dreadful to me: those fucking parties where everything is solved after imbibing a bunch of aperitifs (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a happy way.) …

  You will reply that you can also live there without aperitifs or parties, but in that case, you can never do anything and it seems to me that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and to become “somebody,” and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to be anybody.

  and she watches—

  other people dance—

  at the parties the rich have, all day and all night.

  and she floats—

  missing home.

  San Francisco Nov 21, 1930

  Lovely papá,

  … I send you all my affection and a thousand kisses. Your daughter who adores you

  Frieducha here is a kiss

  Write to me

  everything you do

  and everything that happens to you.

  Beautiful Chabela, Tell me how Uncle Panchito, Aunt Lolita and everybody else is doing.

  As soon as I arrive you must make me a bouquet of pulque and quesadillas made of squash blossoms, because just thinking about it …

  turkey mole, chiles and tamales with atole

  Don’t forget me here

  Weekly Sales in Millions! she croons.

  Pharmaceuticals!

  The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is as in all the United States, ugly and stupid.

  Votive: Vision

  You watch you scrutinize your pain

  and

  paint it grief

  and

  paint it

  the consolation of your face.

  You watch you observe your desire

  close up and afar

  and

  at the same time

  you paint

  You sanctify your pain

  and

  paint it

  with care

  love

  with utmost tenderness

  you watch and tend it

  paint.

  the limping line

  you write

  beautiful faltering

  You double yourself

  or triple yourself

  placed on the various stages of your psyche

  floating past now on a sponge there you go

  a swooning woman with another woman

  loving or with a

  monkey curling

  or a fetus curled up or

  the self—

  its thousand consolations.

  Resourceful, wouldn’t you say? laughing you paint

  Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

  Self-Portrait with Braid, or with Monkey, or with Cropped Hair

  A series of self-portraits. Self-portrait with pompier. Self-portrait with young Arlesian. Self-portrait in red by a fountain. Self-portrait as lighthouse keeper. Or on the rue Saint Jacques.

  What the language gave. What the paint—

  drawn to the longing

  Each mark a door

  Each word a boat

  The Chinese yin and yang sign,

  a mystical griffin,

  and in the upper-right-hand corner

  the outlined footprint often found in Mexican codices indicating the direction of events.

  a red pressure

  or yellow — a yellow feeling—

  Yellow—

  color of madness, sickness, fear

  leaf green: leaves, sadness, science. The

  whole of Germany is this color.

  you paint:

  a skeleton running down the page or a Frida caressed by paws—reddish purple — old blood of the prickly pear, the brightest, the oldest, and brown — color of mole, of leaves becoming earth.

  real and imaginary celebrating animals

  and the smeared mouth.

  Hayden Herrara: she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil and ink and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.

  there, there … touch me there

  and you add paint tenderly sweetly

  touch me—

  and she puts a little paint—there

  something blooms

  a ripe fruit

  her face

  the dark corridors of sensibility

  A skull with flowers

  look

  She smiles.

  dalliance grief in the afternoon, love

  navy blue: distance. Also tenderness can be of this blue.

  from the near and far

  Blood in the corner now saturating the page

  Accident: the landscape is day and night.

  Obscene

  obscene

  and the little deer

  In Aztec mythology and iconography, the image of the deer stands for the right foot, and it was this part of Frida’s body that was now full of pain.

  you watch

  you scrutinize

  a human head with antlers weeping

  the heart—

  extract it

  the pain—

  isolate it

  paint

  the deer in the glade

  the way the face separates from

  the lace of the costume

  the way the face seems to floaton one side on the other side

  detached like that for a moment.

  in the dissimulation

  or the multiplication

  mirrored

  She paints with her heart and blood and she is adored and scorned now for it — disparaged — mocked.

  worshipped adored

  all the Frida icons. She smiles.

  Three concerns impelled her to make art, she told a critic in 1944: her vivid memory of her own blood flowing during her childhood accident, her thoughts about birth, death and the “conducting threads” of life, and the desire to be a mother.

  Running through the glade, the deer is pierced by 9 arrows.

  She laughs and weeps. She winks through tears. Eyebrows like hummingbirds—hummingbirds as magic charms to bring luck in love.

  confront the self one more time and look.

  2 of you.

  after the accident she always saw herself as two Fridas: one Frida who was dead and one who was alive.

  4 quadrants

  earth and sky

  day and night

  3 times she tried to have a child.

  Fruit weeps with you.

  The knife through the succulent melon paint.

  foregrounded against all that encroaches. Whole

  Diego don’t go

  The vegetation tangle of cactus and thrusting flowers

  Paint solitude.

  the foliage encroaching and night

  devotion

  Behind the skeleton, in the middle distance, what does she see? Like the nail, sinister and threatening. Silky and yellow — yellow
for illness and madness—

  She sees

  on a scaffold he seduces a line of actresses — her daily

  hallucination

  Diego!

  2 Fridas

  one dead Frida and observer and observed

  and one who was alive

  how to paint feeling

  maroon fruit split open more madness and mystery

  heart, heart

  3 days of blood (no child)

  Diego!

  she paints

  Even the table is wounded. And the skeleton has a broken right foot.

  Stripped this time of her Tehuana costume

  dressed in a man’s suit

  shorn hair yellow chair

  To be sung: Look if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that your hair is cropped short I don’t love you anymore.

  She sits in a desolate yellow chair alone. Yellow for—

  Diego, Diego.

  Avenida Engaño

  A tree with chopped-off branches, 20 numbered, Diego’s affairs.

  Deceit Avenue

  Ruin

  House for birds

  Nest for love.

  All for nothing.

  yellow chair alone.

  She paints—

  Paint the dress without the woman when you can’t find her

  When you can’t bear it paint—

  When you can’t bear it anymore

  And Diego says, and Diego — he smiles with pride

  “Look at her work … ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.”

  paint:

  Bonito

  paint sadness

  Papa! Papa!

  Do not flinch. Do not turn away — enter pain. Paint love. What the water gave you

  What the language

  pleasure, sadness in the afternoon and death

  greenish yellow: All the phantoms wear suits of this color … or at least underclothes.

  The death of my father was something terrible for me. I think that it’s owing to this that I became much less well and I grew rather thin again. You remember how handsome he was and how good?

  Darling Papa, write to me here is a kiss

  Self-Portrait with Bonito shows Frida in a dark blouse, wearing no jewelry or hair ornaments — Bonito who had recently died is perched on her shoulder.

  paint:

  the recumbent Frida — deep incisions in her back

  the seated Frida holding court and corset and scorn.