In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  And so we sweep along having a great time and hoping our enthusiasm engages the listeners. The Icelandic sagas, Rabindranath Tagore, The Anatomy of Melancholy (which shot up the Amazon sales list), and John Clare, the ‘peasant poet’, so patronised for so long, so terribly confined to what was then called a lunatic asylum – ‘I am, yet what I am, none cares or knows … ’ – now emerged as one of our leading poets whom more readers wished to embrace.

  FRIDA KAHLO

  The painter Frida Kahlo was born near Mexico City in 1907. Though not widely known by the time she died in 1954, her reputation has grown dramatically in the past thirty years and she’s now seen as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Her self-portraits are at the core of her work. She’s often dressed in the traditional costume of native Mexican women and she emphasises her one continuous dark eyebrow and the faint shadow of a moustache. Many show her body damaged by polio and broken by the bus crash that almost killed her and left her with chronic pain for life. She became part of the cultural revolution that followed the violent Mexican Revolution. She sheltered Trotsky in her home when Stalin had exiled him from the Soviet Union, leading to one of many affairs.

  With Melvyn to discuss Frida Kahlo were: Patience Schell, chair in Hispanic studies at the University of Aberdeen; Valerie Fraser, emeritus professor of Latin American art at the University of Essex; and Alan Knight, emeritus professor of the history of Latin America at the University of Oxford.

  Patience Schell introduced the political background to Frida Kahlo’s life, which was so important to her that, although she was born in 1907, she later claimed she was born in the year in which the Mexican Revolution started, 1910, so that she would then be a child of the revolution. This revolution had started with the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz and then continued among different factions for a decade, with the moderate reformists winning eventually.

  PATIENCE SCHELL: The decade following 1910 was one of mass movements of people, mass disruption. Mexico City, near where Kahlo grew up, although it wasn’t itself a battlefield, was a prize for these different factions. Invading armies were coming and going, there were problems with disease, with shortages of food, so there was a lot of disruption in the first years of her life.

  When she was a teenager in the 1920s, Mexican civil society was trying to figure out what the revolution meant, how Mexico would be reformed, and Frida Kahlo wanted to be part of that reimagining.

  Her family, Alan Knight told us, was an interesting mix of cultures. Her father was intellectual and austere, an immigrant from Germany with a Hungarian Jewish background, who had moved from jobs in retail to be a successful photographer, becoming almost the official photographer of the Porfirio Díaz regime. The fall of that regime hit him hard financially. Frida Kahlo was the favourite of his six daughters and she helped him in his darkroom from time to time, work that may have had an impact on her art.

  ALAN KNIGHT: Her mother was a Mexican woman, from the southern state of Wahaca, of part Indian parentage. Frida did have tenuous claims to have Indian ancestry as well. She had this family background, part European Jewish, rather intellectual, reading Schopenhauer, playing the piano. On the other hand, she had this much more traditional maternal Mexican background, also very Catholic.

  With her mother’s influence, Frida Kahlo was brought up as a Catholic until her teenage years, and she went to communion and to confession. As a teenager, she went to a secular college with about 2,000 boys and only three dozen girls, and this is where she broke with the Church and became strongly anti-clerical.

  ALAN KNIGHT: She stopped going to church entirely, and clearly her whole lifestyle, her beliefs, her communism, were repudiations of the Church in almost all senses. But she used a lot of religious motifs; one particular would be the St Sebastian image of a saint being punctured by arrows and stab wounds, and she repeats that in a lot of her pictures, including of herself.

  There was a lot of poor health at home. Her father was chronically ill, with epileptic seizures, and Frida Kahlo’s childhood illness with polio damaged her right leg and left her isolated in bed, recuperating, for a long time. Much worse was to come, though, as Valerie Fraser explained, after a terrible accident.

  VALERIE FRASER: She was travelling on the bus and a tram ran into it and it was the most horrific accident – a handrail of the bus went right through her abdomen. She broke her leg in twenty-two places, she broke her collarbone, she broke her spine, she broke her pelvis. It’s astonishing that she survived it all.

  Again, Kahlo was confined to bed for a very long time at home, with plaster corsets supporting her back and her legs, and she later had to go through over thirty operations. She did initially recover and she could even dance in her twenties and early thirties, before becoming less mobile and spending more time in bed. Ironically, she had planned to take up medicine before her accident. She had always doodled and made drawings, and she loved medical illustrations in particular.

  VALERIE FRASER: She loved medical drawings, she loved the insides of bodies as well as the outsides of bodies. She has to abandon her medical studies, except that she doesn’t, because she becomes her object of study, it’s her body, she’s now become the subject of her medical investigations, if you like. And a lot of her paintings are of the insides of bodies, as well as the outsides of bodies.

  Kahlo extended this into the natural world, often showing the veins of plants as well as how things were put together, and Valerie Fraser thought that came from her medicine. All the while she was recuperating in bed after the bus crash, her mother was helping her, providing her with a special easel that fitted on the bed, with a mirror above the bed so that Kahlo could look at herself and paint. That is where her interest in depicting herself began.

  As she recovered, she met Diego Rivera, a pre-eminent muralist of the Mexican muralist period who was twenty years her senior, and, in 1929, she married him. He had made a name for himself by creating enormous murals of Mexican history, reimagining this through the prism of the revolution and affirming Mexican history and culture, using techniques he had learnt in Italy.

  PATIENCE SCHELL: He was a massive man. He had a big belly and he had bulging eyes and even he admitted that he looked a bit like a toad. By the time he and Frida got married, he had already had many affairs. He was a total womaniser throughout his life, and he had a habit of leaving the women who bore him children – he’d done that three times by the time he and Frida got married.

  Although he fashioned himself a revolutionary and carried a pistol, Rivera had spent that turbulent decade in Europe, mostly in Paris, making friends with (and then falling out with) Picasso. Shortly before he and Frida Kahlo married, he had spent a year or so in Russia as part of his commitment to communism.

  On the face of it, to Melvyn at least, Kahlo and Rivera seemed an odd couple. As Alan Knight noted, Diego was a serial womaniser and Frida had numerous affairs with women and men, including one with Trotsky, so it was not a happy relationship in that sense. They had repeated separations, with one of them culminating in divorce, only for them later to remarry.

  ALAN KNIGHT: On the other hand, it does seem to have been very creative. They encouraged each other’s work, they were each other’s most fervent admirer and critic. Although, of course, their work is substantially different. Diego was up on the scaffolding doing these vast wallscapes in Mexico or the US; she was doing these very small, precise, more miniaturist pictures.

  While Rivera was somewhat infantile in his behaviour, Kahlo was vivacious, lively, bohemian and quite hard-headed, so she was more capable than he was at managing finances. Oddly, for a Trotskyist, Rivera had a lot of commissions to create murals in America for Ford and the Rockefellers, and, in these, he combined a Marxist message and a populist message for the people, along with his reverence for the Ford V8 engine. Diego Rivera was entranced by American modernity, something that Frida Kahlo did not like.

  ALAN KNIGHT: She continued to paint in the U
S, but she was in some ways an appendage of Diego while he was working, and he was a workaholic when he was doing the murals. She felt isolated and their relationship was on and off. She had a very serious miscarriage when in Detroit in 1932, and she yearned to go back to Mexico. In the end, they did, partly because he fell out with the Rockefellers. There was a huge spat, because he put Lenin in a picture without telling them.

  One of Frida Kahlo’s most famous paintings dates from this time, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States. Melvyn invited Valerie Fraser to describe it, and she set this image very much as a product of the time, when Kahlo was dislocated, with her miscarriage, when she was travelling to and from Mexico when her mother was dying. Kahlo depicted herself in ‘a fancy frilly pink prom gown, with nice lacy gloves, but carrying a Mexican flag and a cigarette’.

  VALERIE FRASER: On the right-hand side, behind her, there are windowless, very tall tower blocks and strange anthropomorphic machinery heading towards her, and, in the clouds, in the steam, there are four chimneys that say ‘Ford’ written across them. On the other side, in contrast, there’s a lot of crumbling Aztec ruins and bits of Aztec sculpture. Kahlo herself stands on a little plinth, plugged in on the US side to three machines, and on the other side to ridiculously fecund Mexican plant life.

  It is unclear, she said, whether Kahlo in the middle is generating the electricity that makes all these things work; it is weird. At this point, though, Kahlo’s works had not yet been put on public display or made available for sale. She was so powerful and self-confident, it was almost as if it did not matter whether she was going to have exhibitions at this point; she was simply going to paint.

  This self-confidence appears in the gaze with which Frida Kahlo stares out at the viewer. One of Valerie Fraser’s favourite Kahlo paintings is My Nurse and I.

  VALERIE FRASER: There is a huge brown woman with an Olmec mask, holding in her arms a tiny little baby Frida, but with an adult body, and feeding from these gigantic breasts that are oozing milk. And there’s this sense of X-ray; you’re looking inside as well, so there’re all the glands of the milk, bubbling out.

  The rain in this painting, coming down behind, is milky, and the huge trees and leaves around the image are so full of life and fertility. And, as with Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, Frida Kahlo herself is a part of the fullness of life; she is being fed by it and she is also feeding it.

  Frida Kahlo was inspired by Mesoamerican culture and pre-Columbian art and ruins, and, Patience Schell said, many of the objects that she painted were in Kahlo and Rivera’s personal collection. Kahlo dressed in the loose clothes of indigenous Mexicans that her mother wore, which concealed her injured leg and appealed to Diego. She was also very influenced by Catholic iconography and by popular art such as retablos, portraits of saints and particularly the Virgin Mary, showing their suffering, including ex-voto images, which were narrative paintings of the intercession of a saint or of Mary to save someone.

  PATIENCE SCHELL: They’re very small, painted on tin, and had an inscription on the bottom that would describe what was happening. The Catholic iconography also comes through in terms of the doves, in terms of the thorns that she uses, obviously coming from Christ’s crucifixion. And she also picked up on the popular press in Mexico in the late nineteenth century, which had lurid illustrations of crime and satire.

  One of these lurid illustrations inspired another work, which shows a woman who has been stabbed to death, called Unos Cuantos Piquetitos, or ‘A Few Small Nips’, inspired by a court case in which the accused defended himself by saying he did not really stab his victim so much as give her ‘a few small nips’, a phrase that incensed Frida Kahlo. Another translation of the Spanish phrase chosen by Kahlo for the title, offered by Alan Knight, would be ‘A Few Little Pricks’. It is a small image, about 12 x 15 inches, and is in the style of an ex-voto, while also picking up on the gruesome woodcuts of murders that were popular in the nineteenth century. The other important aspect of this picture is that it reflects Frida Kahlo’s personal turmoil at that time.

  ALAN KNIGHT: It was done in 1935. She’d returned to Mexico with Diego. Diego then began an affair with Frida’s younger sister, Cristina. This was more serious and prolonged and the fact it was her sister, to whom she was close, obviously made it worse. She and Diego separated for a time, but didn’t get divorced, and this picture is a cry from the heart about a woman being betrayed and stabbed. Interestingly, the woman lying there looks much more like Cristina than Frida, and the killer does look a bit like Diego.

  Frida Kahlo’s continued choice of herself as subject was partly the consequence of her recurring need to be in bed while she recovered from injury and illness. She was also fascinated by herself, Valerie Fraser suggested, as a way of dealing with her own pain, with being confined, and yet presenting herself as a still-independent, powerful woman. Kahlo tended to emphasise aspects of her appearance, too, or exaggerate them.

  Frida Kahlo with one of her paintings.

  VALERIE FRASER: She had very bold black eyebrows, which met in the middle. And she has very, very black hair and olive-coloured skin and she emphasises the olive-coloured skin to emphasise the Indian associations. Very often she adds a slightly dusky moustache, and she wasn’t embarrassed about that – she would add the moustache, I think, and exaggerate it.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Why did she make the eyebrows into one continuous eyebrow so it looks like a stealth bomber?

  VALERIE FRASER: To make herself different, I think. She just didn’t want to be like anybody else, she wanted to be really independent. And the wonderful hair, and then (I think it’s after the divorce) she does this wonderful portrait where she cuts off all her hair and says, ‘Oh, well, you only loved me for my hair,’ and there’s this hair everywhere, like snakes, all over the floor and over the furniture.

  Before their divorce in 1939, Kahlo had been to collect some guests from the dock at Tampico as Rivera had been unwell. These were Trotsky, his wife and his secretary, whom Rivera had asked the president of Mexico to admit so that they could have a place of refuge from Stalin. They had already left Russia for Turkey, France and Norway and, needing somewhere new, they were being allowed into Mexico on the condition that they did not interfere with domestic politics.

  ALAN KNIGHT: The Trotsky entourage stayed for two years, rent-free, in Frida’s childhood home. And the couples became very close. We’ve heard already about the affair that Frida had with Trotsky, and there was a falling-out between the couples afterwards, not directly related to the affair. Some of it was about politics; some of it was that Diego was a bit of a pain. He gave Trotsky a little candy skull that had ‘Stalin’ written on it, things like that.

  Rivera and Kahlo did not have to deal with Trotsky and his entourage for long. There were two assassination attempts on Trotsky while in Mexico, and the third one there in August 1940, with an ice pick, was successful.

  Slowly, as an artist, Frida Kahlo was starting to emerge from the shadow of Diego Rivera. People like Breton, Picasso and Kandinsky had seen some of her paintings and were saying she was someone to be reckoned with. What worked for her, when coming to wider attention, was a combination of her self-portraits and her persona. She had her first show in 1938 in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York where, Valerie Fraser said, ‘She would dress in her Tijuana outfit and people would crowd around behind her in the streets and say, “Where’s the circus?” ’ Kahlo was being advertised as the wife of Diego Rivera and was included as such in Vogue and Vanity Fair and she seemed happy to be used in this way. She began to be bought by galleries; the Louvre bought a painting, as did New York museums and big private collectors such as Edward G. Robinson, the film actor. She had a second solo show in Mexico in 1953, Patience Schell told us, but she was also starting to be featured in shows of Mexican art in the United States and Mexico, and it was then that she gained a name for herself in her own right in the last decade of her life, r
ather than being known mainly as Diego Rivera’s wife.

  Those last years of Kahlo’s life were sad and tragic, Alan Knight indicated. Again, she was confined to her bed and tried to control her pain with drugs and alcohol. She had remarried Diego Rivera by then, and he was supportive in his fashion, continuing his affairs on the side. She was still painting, but her work was becoming less precise and her journal, with its doodles and lack of structure, suggests that she was becoming disconnected from the world. At the same time as she declined physically, Alan Knight added, she was becoming more and more respectful of Stalin as the great hope for humanity, and she was working on a portrait of him when she died.

  Kahlo lived long enough to be relatively famous in her own time, and her house in Mexico became a museum soon after her death. It was still another twenty years before she became truly prominent.

  PATIENCE SCHELL: It was in the 1970s in the United States, the Chicano movement, which was part of the civil rights movement, recognising the unique identity of the Mexican-American population in the United States. And she was seen as an artist who spoke to that experience and also a feminist icon, and she became quite prominent as a feminist icon in Europe as well.

  ALAN KNIGHT: She’s almost like a Che Guevara icon that’s instantly recognisable. And Diego’s reputation has gone down, partly because those great big historical murals have come to seem very passé, whereas she represented something different, something surreal, something more personal and, above all, something feminist.

  In the studio afterwards, Melvyn’s guests recalled the road trip that the Bretons, the Trotskys and the Riveras had all taken together around Mexico, an extraordinary combination of individuals, a story to be saved for another day. There was some debate about whether it was right to mention Rivera so much and to feature so much of Kahlo’s life story, though it was soon agreed that those elements were so intertwined with her art that they were inseparable, and the paintings do not make as much sense without knowing about Kahlo’s life. Valerie Fraser’s one concern was that there was a whole generation of wonderful women artists at the same time as Kahlo whose profiles could also be raised, though it was noted that this, of course, was not Kahlo’s fault. And there was a word of appreciation for Melvyn, whose cab had not turned up at all on that Tube strike day and who had jogged across Regent’s Park to reach the studio five minutes before the live broadcast. He was still catching his breath as the live programme began.