Frida Read online

  Lupe said that when Frida first visited Diego on the scaffold, “her face was painted, she wore her hair Chinese style, her dress was décolleté a la ’flapper.’ ” Perhaps so. But before long, as a member of the Young Communist League, Frida was attending workers’ rallies, taking part in clandestine meetings, making speeches. “She no longer wore white blouses,” Alejandro Gómez Arias somewhat wistfully recalled. “Instead she wore black or red shirts and an enamel pin with a hammer and sickle.” Not bothering with coquetry, she often also wore blue jeans and a leather jacket with patches—a worker among workers. Perhaps this, too, was attractive to Diego, who, when they met, was putting a great deal of energy into Communist party activities, as a delegate of the Mexican Peasant League, general secretary of the Anti-Imperialist League, and editor of El Liberador.

  In 1928 he depicted Frida as a Communist militant in the Insurrection panel of his Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution mural series on the third floor of the Ministry of Education Building (figure 14). Flanked by Tina Modotti, Julio Antonio Mella, Siqueiros, and other fervent Communists, Frida appears as a grown-up tomboy, her hair cut short, her wiry body clad in a man’s red work shirt with a red star on its pocket. With a charmingly eager and righteous expression on her face, she hands out rifles and bayonets—a political heroine and a fit companion for a Communist leader. While she modeled for her portrait, Rivera is said to have quipped, “You have a dog face.” Not in the least put off, Frida retorted, “And you have the face of a frog!”

  During their courtship Frida began to paint with new confidence and application. Diego was, she thought, the world’s greatest painter, and the pleasure he took in her work made working worthwhile. Frida once said that when she first showed her paintings to Diego, “I was terribly anxious to paint frescoes.” But when he saw them, he told her, “Your will must bring you to your own expression.” For a brief period, however, Frida’s will brought her to express herself in a Riveraesque manner. “I began to paint things that he liked. From that time on he admired me and loved me.”

  Wisely, though he did advise, Rivera refrained from teaching Frida: he did not want to spoil her inborn talent. She, nevertheless, took him as a mentor; watching him, listening, she learned. As she developed, the Riveraesque style was to disappear, but other lessons remained with her. “Diego showed me the revolutionary sense of life and the true sense of color,” she said to a journalist in 1950.

  Rivera’s influence can be seen in both the style and the substance of Frida’s paintings from 1928 and 1929. Portrait of Cristina Kahlo (figure 13), painted early in 1928, follows the format of her first portraits: hard, slightly wooden outlines delineate forms, and a small stylized tree in the background contrasts with a larger branch in the foreground to define space in a naïve and rudimentary manner. Later in the same year, when she painted Portrait of Agustín M. Olmedo, Frida set her old school friend against an expanse of blue that, like many of Rivera’s portrait backgrounds, is unbroken by motifs of any kind. She has borrowed as well Diego’s way of painting the figure with broad, simplified areas of high-keyed color, a style that he had come to by overlaying his knowledge of European modernism with a thorough absorption of the values of Mexican popular and pre-Columbian art. Though Frida’s paintings from this period are relatively large compared with most of her later work, they have very little detail of line or texture or modeling. It is as if she had extracted a figure from one of Diego’s murals and placed it in the center of her canvas.

  In the 1929 portraits Niña (figure 15) and Portrait of a Girl, the backgrounds are divided into two bright color zones: lavender and yellow in the case of Niña, blue-green and terra-cotta in the case of Portrait of a Girl. Niña wears an olive-green dress with red polka dots, the Girl wears pink. These are the festive yet astringent colors characteristic of Mexican popular art and indeed of Mexican life; they can be seen in kaleidoscopic movement on any market day.

  Frida’s color in these paintings departs from European tradition (which she had tried to adopt in her earliest works) even more than did that of Rivera, who had made a conscious decision to “Mexicanize” his color after he returned from Paris. It is as if, never having really mastered “classical” painting, she was freer to abandon its conventions. Similarly, in all her work, her drawing is more primitive than Diego’s, and while in early paintings the adoption of the naïve folkloric manner served to camouflage the awkwardness that came from inexperience, later this primitivism, like the Mexican palette, became her stylistic choice.

  Although Frida’s early paintings of children cannot be called great paintings, they are touching and alive, especially because the childlike qualities of style, subject, and artist are perfectly meshed. Frida the inexperienced painter could adopt a naïve manner without affectation. Because of her own youthful spirit, she was able to gain children’s confidence and thus to capture in her work their wistful freshness—that look in a child’s eye that seems to combine the muteness of animals with the burden of wisdom. And whereas many of Rivera’s paintings of children have a stereotypical cuteness—round cheeks and even rounder eyes, calculated to appeal to the tourist trade—Frida’s are always particularized and authentic, filled, as most of his are not, with sharply observed details—big ears, skinny arms, bony elbows, strands of hair that won’t stay put, underdrawers showing below the hem of a skirt. The large safety pin that holds together Niña’s best dress speaks volumes about the pride and poverty of children in Mexico.

  Frida’s intelligence worked in a different way from Diego’s. Shunning theories and overviews, she penetrated into the particular, focusing on details of clothing, faces, trying to capture an individual life. Later, she would probe the insides of fruits and flowers, the organs hidden beneath wounded flesh, and the feelings hidden beneath stoic features. From his more distanced and abstract vantage point, Rivera encompassed the breadth of the visible world; he populated his murals with all of society and the pageant of history. Frida’s subjects, by contrast, came from a world close at hand—friends, animals, still lifes, most of all from herself. Her true subjects were embodied states of mind, her own joys and sorrows. Always intimately connected with the events of her life, her images convey the immediacy of lived experience.

  Immediacy and intimacy find their way even into The Bus, a 1929 painting in which Frida attempted to do, in her own way and on a tiny canvas, what Rivera did so often in his huge murals (figure 16). Stereotypes of Mexican society are all lined up on the bench of a rickety Mexican bus: a plump, lower-middle-class matron with a straw shopping basket; a worker holding a monkey wrench and dressed in blue denim overalls and a blue cap; in the center the heroine of the group, a barefoot, Madonna-like Indian mother suckling her infant, whom she swaddles in her yellow rebozo; next to her a small boy watching the world go by outside the window; an old man readily identified by his blue eyes and bulging money bag as a gringo (he recalls the fat capitalist in Rivera’s Ministry of Education mural); a prissy young woman of the upper bourgeoisie (a fashionable scarf and a neat little pocketbook are her emblems). As a pair, the bourgeoise and the capitalist are contrasted with the housewife and the worker, for the two couples flank the central Indian mother in neat social symmetry. All in all, The Bus is a tongue-in-cheek Mexican version of Daumier’s Third-Class Carriage, with the difference that in Frida’s mildly Marxist message the figures range in social class, whereas in Daumier’s realistic scene of third-class public transportation, everyone from top-hatted man to small boy, from woman with market basket to suckling mother is poor.

  If the notion of painting a scene of social hierarchy is Riveraesque, the humor with which the social strata are portrayed in The Bus is pure Frida. She surely had a political conscience, but she also had a sharp sense of the ridiculous, even when the ridiculous came in the form of a baroque barrage of political theorizing from Diego. That she might have been gently pulling our (or Rivera’s) leg when she painted The Bus is reinforced by certain details. The pulquería (bar) in
the background is called La Risa (laughter), and the proletarian wears a necktie, plus a blue shirt with a white collar, a wry comment, perhaps, on the workers who are to inherit the earth in the best of all Marxist worlds.

  In Frida’s second Self-Portrait (plate II), the first she did after she became attached to Diego, the pale and melancholy Renaissance princess of the 1926 gift to Alejandro has vanished. Gone also are the spiraling Art Nouveau waves and other romantic accouterments with which the lovelorn teenager surrounded herself in her first Self-Portrait. Instead, we see a pink-cheeked contemporary girl framed by curtains—a prop adopted by folk artists from colonial portraiture and a device that served naïve painters (including Frida) well by eliminating the problem of setting the figure convincingly into surrounding space. Frida looks fresh in both senses of the word. She stares straight out at us with the unblinking intensity that caused one person who met her at this time to describe her as “bright as an eagle.” Fierce enough to have commanded Rivera to come down from his scaffold, she is also fetching enough for him to have done so with alacrity.

  When Frida went to Jesús Ríos y Valles and told him the news of her engagement to Diego, he replied, “Marry him, because you will be the wife of Diego Rivera, who is a genius.” Other friends were astonished that Frida would leave Alejandro for an ugly old man like Rivera, but her school friend Baltasar Dromundo (who later wrote about Frida and Alejandro in his book on the Preparatory School) understood precisely why she did. “By the time she became involved with Rivera,” he says, “her relationship with Alejandro was diluted. She was attracted to Diego’s fame. Where Alejandro would cover Frida in flowers, Diego would have grabbed her and kissed her.”

  Whatever Guillermo Kahlo thought of the prospect of Diego Rivera as a son-in-law, his inability to provide his family with financial security, or even to pay Frida’s medical expenses, which he knew would continue over the years, must have encouraged him to approve the proposal. Although Frida was by now the only unmarried daughter (Cristina was living with her husband by 1928; her daughter Isolda was born in 1929), the Kahlos’ household expenses were still hard to meet. Neither of Frida’s parents enjoyed good health, and Frida’s accident had dashed their hopes that she would have a professional career. Whatever other drawbacks there might be to the union, if Frida married Diego Rivera, she would be marrying a man known to be both rich and generous, one who could be relied upon to support not only Frida but her family as well. (Indeed, soon after Diego married Frida, he paid off the mortgage on the Kahlos’ Coyoacán house, which Frida’s parents could no longer afford to keep, and allowed them to go on living there.)

  It was Matilde Calderón de Kahlo, whom Frida once accused of stinginess, who could not accept her daughter’s engagement to an ugly, fat, forty-two-year-old Communist and nonbeliever, even a rich one. She begged Alejandro Gómez Arias to do everything in his power to prevent the marriage. But everything in his power was very little, if anything. The wedding took place on August 21, 1929. Frida said:

  At seventeen [twenty] I fell in love with Diego, and my [parents] did not like this because Diego was a Communist and because they said that he looked like a fat, fat, fat Brueghel. They said that it was like marriage between an elephant and a dove.

  Nevertheless, I arranged everything in the court of Coyoacán so that we could be married the 21st of August, 1929. I asked the maid for skirts, the blouse and rebozo were also borrowed from the maid. I arranged my foot with the apparatus so that it couldn’t be noticed and we got married.

  No one went to the wedding, only my father, who said to Diego, “Notice that my daughter is a sick person and all her life she will be sick; she is intelligent, but not pretty. Think it over if you want, and if you wish to get married, I give you my permission.”

  The couple were married in a civil ceremony in Coyoacán’s ancient city hall by the town’s mayor, who was, according to Diego, “a prominent pulque dealer.” There were three witnesses: a hairdresser, a homeopathic doctor, and Judge Mondragón of Coyoacán. Rivera recalled that Frida’s father was highly amused by his favorite daughter’s wedding: “In the middle of the service, Don Guillermo Kahlo got up and declared, ’Gentlemen, is it not true that we are play-acting?’ ”

  La Prensa (August 23, 1929), of Mexico City, reported:

  Diego Rivera got married—last Wednesday in the neighboring town of Coyoacán the discutido pintor [“much-discussed painter” was the almost inevitable prefix for Rivera’s name when it appeared in the Mexican press] contracted marriage with Miss Frieda Kahlo, one of his disciples. The bride dressed, as you can see, in very simple street clothes, and the painter Rivera dressed de Americana [in a suit] and without a vest. The marriage service was unpretentious; it was celebrated in a very cordial atmosphere and with all modesty, without ostentation, and without pompous ceremonies. The novios were warmly congratulated after the marriage by a few intimate friends.

  A charming and funny photograph of the bride and groom accompanied this newspaper announcement. Looking tiny beside her huge husband, Frida stares at the photographer with her characteristic intensity. She makes no concessions to the solemnity of the occasion: in her right hand she holds a cigarette! It is easy to imagine her, just as Lupe Marín described her, drinking tequila “like a real mariachi.”

  Lupe Marín came to the wedding party, and by some accounts (she herself denied it) made a scene. Bertram Wolfe told the story:

  Pretending to be indifferent about Diego’s love affairs, she hinted that she would be “broadminded” enough to attend his wedding. . . . Frida guilelessly invited Lupe to a party they gave afterwards for a few friends and relatives. She came, pretended to be very gay, then in the midst of the festivities, strode suddenly up to Frida, lifted high the new bride’s skirt, and shouted to the assembled company: “You see these two sticks? These are the legs Diego has now instead of mine!” Then she marched out of the house in triumph.

  Frida’s account of the post-wedding festivities does not mention Lupe’s affront: “That day they gave us a party in Roberto Montenegro’s house. Diego went on such a terrifying drunken binge with tequila that he took out his pistol, he broke a man’s little finger, and broke other things. Then we had a fight, and I left crying and went home. A few days passed and Diego came to fetch me and took me to the house at Reforma 104.” As Andrés Henestrosa remembers the party, it took place on the roof of Tina Modotti’s house. “There were items of lingerie hung on the roof to dry,” Henestrosa recalls. “They made a good atmosphere for a wedding.”

  Chapter 8

  Newlywed: The Tehuana Frida

  FRIDA AND DIEGO’S first home was a grand house built during the Díaz dictatorship, No. 104 on the elegant Paseo de la Reforma; demonstrating both his passion for nativism and his love of contradiction, Rivera had placed pre-Columbian figures in the entranceway of the French-gothic-style façade. Frida recalled that “as furniture we had a narrow bed, dining room furniture that Frances Toor had given us, a long black table, and a yellow kitchen table that my mother gave us and that we pushed into a corner for the collection of archaeological pieces.” There was a live-in maid named Margarita Dupuy, and in addition, “they sent Siqueiros, his wife, Blanca Luz Bloom, and two other Communists to live in my house. There we all were, crowded together, under the table, in corners, in the bedrooms.”

  The Marxist ménage did not last long, for Diego—the general secretary of the Mexican Communist party—was under attack by Stalinist stalwarts. Many were the charges against him: his friendship with a certain government official, for instance, and the fact that he accepted commissions from a reactionary government. The Party felt these commissions were a kind of bribe: letting Rivera paint hammers and sickles in public buildings made the government look liberal and tolerant in the public eye. He was also rebuked for disagreeing with other Party leaders on issues such as the creation of specifically Communist trade unions and the likelihood that capitalist countries would attack Russia. His official connections
with other leftist groups or individuals outside the Communist orthodoxy—Rivera befriended whom he befriended—were seen as a right-leaning deviation. Besides that, the muralist had always been unreliable as a Party functionary, never getting to meetings on time and when he got there trying to dominate them with his charismatic personality.

  When the time came, he presided over his own expulsion from the Party, on October 3, 1929. Baltasar Dromundo describes the scene: “Diego arrived, sat down, and took out a large pistol and put it on a table. He then put a handkerchief over the pistol, and said: ’I, Diego Rivera, general secretary of the Mexican Communist party, accuse the painter Diego Rivera of collaborating with the petit-bourgeois government of Mexico and of having accepted a commission to paint the stairway of the National Palace of Mexico. This contradicts the politics of the Comintern and therefore the painter Diego Rivera should be expelled from the Communist party by the general secretary of the Communist party, Diego Rivera.’ Diego declared himself expelled, and he stood up, removed the handkerchief, picked up the pistol, and broke it. It was made of clay.”

  Rivera remained a Communist; Marxist ideals continued to be the core of his subject matter in the very murals for which he was being chastised. But political activism had been almost as important to him as food, sleep, and painting, and now he was a political outsider. The Communist party press excoriated him; several of his old comrades broke with him. Tina Modotti, for example, whom only a few months before he had defended in court when she was wrongly accused of complicity in the murder of Julio Antonio Mella, found party loyalty a more powerful tie than friendship. She wrote to Edward Weston: “I think his going out of the party will do more harm to him than to the party. He will be considered a traitor. I need not add that I shall look upon him as one too, and from now on all my contacts with him will be limited to our photographic transactions.” As Diego himself put it, years later: “I did not have a home—the Party having always been my home.”