Frida Read online

  HAYDEN HERRERA is an art historian and biographer. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Mary Frank; Matisse: A Portrait; Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Frida Kahlo: The Paintings; Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. She lives in New York City.

  ALSO BY HAYDEN HERRERA

  Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

  Mary Frank

  Matisse: A Portrait

  Frida Kahlo: The Paintings

  Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work

  Joan Snyder

  Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi

  For Philip

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART 1

  1The Blue House on Londres Street

  2Childhood in Coyoacán

  3The National Preparatory School

  PART 2

  4Accident and Aftermath

  5The Broken Column

  6Diego: The Frog Prince

  PART 3

  7The Elephant and the Dove

  8Newlywed: The Tehuana Frida

  9Gringolandia

  10Detroit: Henry Ford Hospital

  11Revolutionaries in the Temple of Finance

  PART 4

  12A Few Small Nips

  13Trotsky

  14A Painter in Her Own Right

  15This Pinchisimo Paris

  16What the Water Gave Me

  PART 5

  17A Necklace of Thorns

  18Remarriage

  19Patrons, Politics, Public Recognition

  20The Little Deer

  21Portraits of a Marriage

  PART 6

  22Naturaleza Viva: Alive Still Life

  23Homage to Frida Kahlo

  24Night Is Falling in My Life

  25Viva la Vida

  Plates

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Preface

  IN APRIL 1953, less than a year before her death at the age of forty-seven, Frida Kahlo had her first major exhibition of paintings in her native Mexico. By that time her health had so deteriorated that no one expected her to attend. But at 8:00 P.M., just after the doors of Mexico City’s Gallery of Contemporary Art opened to the public, an ambulance drew up. The artist, dressed in her favorite Mexican costume, was carried on a hospital stretcher to her four-poster bed, which had been installed in the gallery that afternoon. The bed was bedecked as she liked it, with photographs of her husband, the great muralist Diego Rivera, and of her political heroes, Malenkov and Stalin. Papier-mâché skeletons dangled from the canopy, and a mirror affixed to the underside of the canopy reflected her joyful though ravaged face. One by one, two hundred friends and admirers greeted Frida Kahlo, then formed a circle around the bed and sang Mexican ballads with her until well past midnight.

  The occasion encapsulates as much as it culminates this extraordinary woman’s career. It testifies, in fact, to many of the qualities that marked Kahlo as a person and as a painter: her gallantry and indomitable alegría in the face of physical suffering; her insistence on surprise and specificity; her peculiar love of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity. Above all, the opening of her exhibition dramatized Frida Kahlo’s central subject—herself. Most of the some two hundred paintings she produced in her abbreviated career were self-portraits.

  She started with dramatic material: nearly beautiful, she had slight flaws that increased her magnetism. Her eyebrows formed an unbroken line across her forehead and her sensuous mouth was surmounted by the shadow of a mustache. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped, with an upward slant at the outer edges. People who knew her well say Frida’s intelligence and humor shone in those eyes; they also say her eyes revealed her mood: devouring, bewitching, or skeptical and withering. There was something about the piercing directness of her gaze that made visitors feel unmasked, as if they were being watched by an ocelot.

  When she laughed it was with carcajadas, a deep, contagious laughter that burst forth either as delight or as a fatalistic acknowledgment of the absurdity of pain. Her voice was bronca, a little hoarse. Words tumbled out intensely, swiftly, emphatically, punctuated by quick, graceful gestures, that full-bellied laughter, and the occasional screech of emotion. In English, which she spoke and wrote fluently, Frida tended to slang. Reading her letters today, one is struck by what one friend called the “toughisms” of her vernacular; it is as if she had learned English from Damon Runyon. In Spanish, she loved to use foul language—words like pendejo (which, politely translated, means idiotic person) and hijo de su chingada madre (son of a bitch). In either language she enjoyed the effect on her audience, an effect enhanced by the fact that the gutter vocabulary issued from such a feminine-looking creature, one who held her head high on her long neck as nobly as a queen.

  She dressed in flamboyant clothes, greatly preferring floor-length native Mexican costumes to haute couture. Wherever she went she caused a sensation. One New Yorker remembers that children used to follow her in the streets. “Where’s the circus?” they would ask; Frida Kahlo did not mind a bit.

  In 1929 she became the third wife of Diego Rivera. What a pair they made! Kahlo, small and fierce, someone out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, if you will; Rivera, huge and extravagant, straight out of Rabelais. They knew everybody, it seemed. Trotsky was a friend, at least for a while, and so were Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, Dolores del Rio and Paulette Goddard. The Rivera home in Mexico City was a mecca for the international intelligentsia, from Pablo Neruda to André Breton and Sergei Eisenstein. Marcel Duchamp was Frida’s host in Paris, Isamu Noguchi was her lover, and Miró, Kandinsky, and Tanguy were admirers. In New York she met Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, and in San Francisco she was photographed by Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

  Thanks to Rivera’s mania for publicity, the Rivera marriage became part of the public domain; the couple’s every adventure, their loves, battles, and separations, were described in colorful detail by an avid press. They were called by their first names only. Everybody knew who Frida and Diego were: he was the greatest artist in the world; she was the sometimes rebellious priestess in his temple. Vivid, intelligent, sexy, she attracted men (and took many as lovers). As for women, there is evidence that she had lesbian liaisons too. Rivera did not seem to mind the latter, but objected strenuously to the former. “I don’t want to share my toothbrush with anybody,” he said, and threatened to shoot one interloper with his pistol.

  In talking to those who knew her, one is continuously struck by the love people felt for Frida Kahlo. They acknowledge that she was caustic, yes, and impulsive. But tears often form in their eyes while they recall her. Their vibrant memories make her life sound like a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald—full of fun and glamour until its end in tragedy. The truth is bleaker. On September 17, 1925, when she was eighteen, the bus that took her home from school was rammed by a streetcar in Mexico City. She was literally impaled on a metal bar in the wreckage; her spine was fractured, her pelvis crushed, and one foot broken. From that day until her death, twenty-nine years later, she lived with pain and the constant threat of illness. “I hold the record for operations,” she said. She lived as well with a yearning for a child she could never have—her smashed pelvis led only to miscarriages and at least three therapeutic abortions—and with the anguish
of being often deceived and occasionally abandoned by the man she loved. Frida flaunted her alegría the way a peacock spreads its tail, but it camouflaged a deep sadness and inwardness, even self-obsession.

  “I paint my own reality,” she said. “The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration.” What passed through Frida Kahlo’s head and into her art was some of the most original and dramatic imagery of the twentieth century. Painting herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open, she transmuted her pain into art with remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy. Always specific and personal, deep-probing rather than comprehensive in scope, Frida’s autobiography in paint has a peculiar intensity and strength—a strength that can hold the viewer in an uncomfortably tight grip.

  The majority of her paintings are small—twelve by fifteen inches is not unusual; their scale suits the intimacy of her subject matter. With very small sable brushes, which she kept immaculately clean, she would carefully lay down delicate strokes of color, bringing the image into precise focus, making fantasy persuasive through the rhetoric of realism.

  The results pleased the Surrealists, who welcomed her into their number in the late 1930s. The paintings also appealed to a few discerning collectors—Edward G. Robinson, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., A. Conger Goodyear, Jacques Gelman—but for the most part they languished in undeserved obscurity, until recently.

  In the fall of 1977, the Mexican government turned over the largest and most prestigious galleries in the Palace of Fine Arts to a retrospective exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s works. It was a strange sort of homage, for it seemed to celebrate the exotic personality and story of the artist rather more than it honored her art. The grand, high-ceilinged rooms were dominated by huge blown-up photographs of incidents in Frida’s life, which made the jewel-like paintings look almost like punctuation points.

  The art—the legend Frida herself had created—won out in the end, however. Because her paintings were so tiny in relation to the photographs and to the exhibition space, the spectator had to stand within a few feet of each one to focus on it at all. And at that proximity their strange magnetism exerted its pull. Taken from separate, poignant moments in her life, each was like a smothered cry, a nugget of emotion so dense that one felt it might explode. The paintings made the photographic panels mounted on an architectural structure in the middle of the room seem as precarious and piecemeal as a house of cards.

  On November 2, 1978, to celebrate the Day of the Dead, one of Mexico’s most festive holidays, the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission district opened its own “Homage to Frida Kahlo.” It was an exhibition of works in various media by some fifty artists (mostly Chicano), who were invited to send contributions made “in the spirit of Frida Kahlo’s symbolism.” Against the back wall of the gallery was the traditional ofrenda, an altar to the deceased, covered with candles, candy skulls, straw crosses, “bread of the dead” shaped like human bones, a coffin containing birds made of sugar, and a toy bed on which lay a miniature Frida. Filling the remaining walls and the room itself were the works of the artists, many of whom juxtaposed their own portraits with Frida’s, as if to identify with her. Frida was portrayed as political heroine and revolutionary fighter, as suffering female, mistreated wife, childless woman, and “Mexican Ophelia.” Many saw her as a person plagued by but defiant of death. One of the artists explained her reverence: “Frida embodied the whole notion of culture for Chicano women. She inspired us. Her works didn’t have self-pity, they had strength.”

  Since then, Frida Kahlo’s audience has been growing: a retrospective of her work traveled to six U.S. museums in 1978–1979, and in 1982 London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery organized an exhibition entitled “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” which traveled to Germany and to New York. For women, especially, the extremely personal and female nature of Kahlo’s imagery, and her artistic independence, have become significant. In her art, she neither competed with nor deferred to Rivera, and there are not a few astute critics who feel she was the better painter. Indeed, Diego himself was often heard to say as much, flourishing the letter in which Picasso said of her, “Neither Derain, nor I, nor you are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.”

  Frida would have been gratified by the multifarious memories she left behind. She was, in fact, one of the creators of her own legendary stature, and because she was so complex and so intricately self-aware, her myth is full of tangents, ambiguities, and contradictions. For that reason, one hesitates to disclose aspects of her reality that might undercut the image she created of herself. Yet the truth does not dispel the myth. After scrutiny, Frida Kahlo’s story remains every bit as extraordinary as her fable.

  Chapter 1

  The Blue House on Londres Street

  THE STORY OF FRIDA KAHLO begins and ends in the same place. From the outside, the house on the corner of Londres and Allende streets looks very like other houses in Coyoacán, an old residential section on the southwestern periphery of Mexico City. A one-story stucco structure with bright blue walls enlivened by tall, many-paned windows with green shutters and by the restless shadows of trees, it bears the name Museo Frida Kahlo over the portal. Inside is one of the most extraordinary places in Mexico—a woman’s home with all her paintings and belongings, turned into a museum.

  The entrance is guarded by two giant papier-mâché Judas figures nearly twenty feet tall, gesticulating at each other as if they were engaged in conversation.* Passing them, one enters a garden with tropical plants, fountains, and a small pyramid decked with pre-Columbian idols.

  The interior of the house is remarkable for the feeling that its former occupants’ presence animates all the objects and paintings on display. Here are Frida Kahlo’s palette and brushes, left on her worktable as if she had just put them down. There, near his bed, are Diego Rivera’s Stetson hat, his overalls, and his huge miner’s shoes. In the large corner bedroom with windows looking out onto Londres and Allende streets is a glass-doored cabinet enclosing Frida’s colorful costume from the region of Tehuantepec. Above the cabinet, these words are painted on the wall: "Aquí nació Frida Kahlo el día 7 de julio de 1910" (Here Frida Kahlo was born on July 7, 1910). They were inscribed four years after the artist’s death, when her home became a public museum. Another inscription adorns the bright blue and red patio wall. "Frida y Diego vivieron en esta casa 1929–1954" (Frida and Diego lived in this house 1929–1954). Ah! the visitor thinks. How nicely circumscribed! Here are three of the main facts of Frida Kahlo’s life—her birth, her marriage, and her death.

  The only trouble is that neither inscription is precisely true. In fact, as her birth certificate shows, Frida was born on July 6, in 1907. Claiming perhaps a greater truth than strict fact would allow, she chose as her birth date not the true year, but 1910, the year of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Since she was a child of the revolutionary decade, when the streets of Mexico City were full of chaos and bloodshed, she decided that she and modern Mexico had been born together.

  The other inscription in the Frida Kahlo Museum promotes an ideal, sentimental view of the Rivera-Kahlo marriage and home. Once again, reality is different. Before 1934, when they returned to Mexico after four years of residence in the United States, Frida and Diego lived only briefly in the Coyoacán house. From 1934 to 1939 they lived in a pair of houses built for them in the nearby residential district of San Angel. After that there were long periods when Diego, preferring the independence of his San Angel studio, did not live with Frida, not to mention the one year when the Riveras separated, divorced, and remarried.

  The inscriptions, then, are embroideries on the truth. Like the museum itself, they are part of Frida’s legend.

  The house in Coyoacán was only three years old when Frida was born; her father had built it in 1904 on a small piece of land he acquired when the hacienda “El Carmen” was broken up and sold. But the heavy walls it presents to the street, its
one-story structure, flat roof, and U-shaped plan, with each room giving onto the next and onto the central patio instead of being linked by hallways, make it seem to date from colonial times. It stands only a few blocks from the town’s central plaza and the parish Church of Saint John the Baptist, where Frida’s mother had a particular bench that she and her daughters occupied on Sundays. From her house Frida could walk by way of narrow, often cobblestoned or unpaved streets to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a forest park graced by a slender river winding among trees.

  When Guillermo Kahlo built the Coyoacán house, he was a successful photographer who had just been commissioned by the Mexican government to record the nation’s architectural heritage. It was a remarkable achievement for a man who had arrived in Mexico without great prospects, just thirteen years before. His parents, Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann Kahlo, were Hungarian Jews from Arad, now part of Rumania, who had migrated to Germany and settled in Baden-Baden, where Wilhelm was born in 1872. Jakob Kahlo was a jeweler who also dealt in photographic supplies; when the time came he was wealthy enough to be able to send his son to study at the university in Nuremberg.

  Sometime around the year 1890 the promising career of Wilhelm Kahlo, scholar, ended before it had begun: the youth sustained brain injuries in a fall, and began to suffer from epileptic seizures. At about the same time, his mother died, and his father married again, a woman Wilhelm did not like. In 1891 the father gave his nineteen-year-old son enough money to pay for his passage to Mexico; Wilhelm changed his name to Guillermo and never returned to the country of his birth.

  He arrived in Mexico City with almost no money and few possessions. Through his connections with other German immigrants, he found a job as a cashier in the Cristalería Loeb, a glassware store. Later, he became a salesman in a bookstore. Finally, he worked in a jewelry store called La Perla, which was owned by fellow countrymen with whom he had traveled from Germany to Mexico.