Frida Read online

  For Frida the elements of her dress were a kind of palette from which she selected each day the image of herself that she wished to present to the world. People who watched the ritual of her dressing recall the time and care she took, her perfectionism and precision. Frequently she tinkered with a needle before donning a blouse, adding lace here, a ribbon there. Deciding what belt would go with what skirt was a serious matter. “Does it work?” she would ask. “Is it good?” “Frida had an aesthetic attitude about her dress,” painter Lucile Blanch remembered. “She was making a whole picture with colors and shapes.”

  To go with the exotic costumes, Frida arranged her hair in various styles, some typical of certain regions of Mexico, some her own invention. She would sweep it upward, sometimes pulling it so tightly at the temples that it hurt, and then braid into it bright woolen ribbons and decorate it with bows, clips, combs, or fresh bougainvillea blossoms. One friend observed that when she placed a comb in her hair, she pressed its prongs into her scalp with a “coquettish masochism.” In later years, when she was weaker, she liked to have her sister, her niece, or close friends arrange it. “Comb my hair,” she would say. “Arrange my hair with combs.”

  She adored jewelry, and from the first days of their marriage, Rivera bestowed it upon her as if he were offering gifts to an Indian princess. She wore everything from cheap glass beads to heavy pre-Columbian jade necklaces, from ornate colonial pendant earrings to a pair made in the shape of hands given her by Picasso in 1939. Her fingers displayed a constantly changing exhibition of rings, all of different styles and origins. People gave them to Frida, and with impulsive generosity, she just as often gave them away.

  On one level, of course, Frida chose to dress as a Tehuana for the same reason that she adopted Mexicanism: to please Diego. Rivera liked the Tehuana costume; he traveled to the isthmus often in order to paint its people at work and play, and it is said that one of his various amours during his courtship of Frida had been a Tehuana beauty.

  Rivera, who was of Spanish-Indian and Portuguese-Jewish descent (he sometimes claimed to have Dutch, Italian, Russian, and Chinese blood as well), liked to stress the Indian aspect of Frida’s heritage, extolling her as authentic, unspoiled, and “primitive”: “She is a person whose thoughts and feelings are unrestricted by any limitations forced on them by false necessities of bourgeois social conformity. She senses all experience deeply, because the sensitivity of her organism has not yet been dulled by overexertion along lines which lead to the dissolution of those innate faculties. . . . Frida despises mechanisms, and therefore has the resilience with which a primitive organism meets the stronger and always varied experiences of the life about him.”

  In fact, of course, Frida was a city girl, formed in a bourgeois, and later an “upper-bohemian,” milieu that had nothing to do with the “simple” life of the Mexican Indian. And it is not improbable that for Frida, as for others in her set who dressed in Mexican costumes, donning peasant clothing had to do with the fashionable notion that the peasant or the Indian is more earthbound and thus more deeply sensual, more “real” than the urban sophisticate. By wearing native dress, women declared the primacy of their link with nature. The costume was a primitive mask, releasing them from the strictures of bourgeois mores. There was, of course, a political factor as well. Wearing indigenous dress was one more way of proclaiming allegiance to la raza. Certainly Rivera did not hestitate to make political mileage out of Frida’s clothes. “The classic Mexican dress,” he said, “has been created by people for people. The Mexican women who do not wear it do not belong to the people, but are mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wish to belong, i.e., the great American and French bureaucracy.”

  From the moment of their marriage, Frida and Diego began to play important roles in the theatrical scenario of each other’s life. Wearing Tehuana costumes was part of Frida’s self-creation as a legendary personality and the perfect companion and foil for Diego. Delicate, flamboyant, beautiful, she was the necessary ornament to her huge, ugly husband—the peacock feather in his Stetson hat. Yet while she happily played the role of Indian maiden for Diego, hers was an authentic artifice. She did not change her personality merely to suit Diego’s ideal. Rather she invented a highly individualistic personal style to dramatize the personality that was already there and that she knew-Diego admired. In the end, she was so extravagantly dashing that many people felt the peacock feather was more compelling (or more fetching) than the hat.

  Indeed, Frida’s Tehuana costume became so essential a part of her persona that several times she painted it devoid of its owner. The costume served as a stand-in for herself, a second skin never totally assimilated to the person hidden under it but so integral to her that even when it was taken off, it retained something of the wearer’s being. It is a primitive, animistic approach to clothes that recalls the way a child senses his mother’s presence in items of clothing that she might leave on a chair when dressing to go out. Clearly Frida knew this magic power of clothes to substitute for their owner; in her diary, she wrote that the Tehuana costume made “the absent portrait of only one person"—her absent self.

  Always a form of social communication, as the years passed, Frida’s costumes became an antidote to isolation; even at the end of her life, when she was very ill and received few visitors, she dressed every day as if she were preparing for a fiesta. As the self-portraits confirmed her existence, so did the costumes make the frail, often bedridden woman feel more magnetic and visible, more emphatically present as a physical object in space. Paradoxically, they were both a mask and a frame. Since they defined the wearer’s identity in terms of appearances, they distracted her—and the onlooker—from inner pain. Frida said she wore them out of “coquetry"; she wanted to hide her scars and her limp. The elaborate packaging was an attempt to compensate for her body’s deficiencies, for her sense of fragmentation, dissolution, and mortality. Ribbons, flowers, jewels, and sashes became more and more colorful and elaborate as her health declined. In a sense, Frida was like a Mexican piñata, a fragile vessel decorated with frills and ruffles, filled with sweets and surprises, but destined to be smashed. Just as blindfolded children swing at the piñata with a broomstick, life dealt Frida blow after blow. While the piñata dances and sways, the knowledge that it is about to be destroyed makes its bright beauty all the more poignant. In the same way, Frida’s decoration was touching: it was at once an affirmation of her love of life and a signal of her awareness—and defiance—of pain and death.

  Chapter 9

  Gringolandia

  EVEN BEFORE Plutarco Elías Calles took office in 1924, the euphoria of the first years of the Mexican mural renaissance had begun to sour. Conservative students at the Preparatoria had rioted, defacing their school’s new murals; on the very day when the commissioner of those murals, Vasconcelos, resigned from his post as minister of education, Orozco and Siqueiros were barred from their scaffolds. In August, a presidential decree suspended most mural production in Mexico. The muralists began to disperse. Siqueiros abandoned painting for a while to become a labor leader in the state of Jalisco. In 1927, Orozco went to the United States and during the next six years painted murals at Pomona College in Claremont, California, at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

  Rivera’s situation was different. Although his work, too, was vandalized and threatened in 1924—the incoming head of the Department of Fine Arts proclaimed that his first official act would be to “whitewash those horrible frescoes"—somehow he managed to ingratiate himself with José Manuel Puig Casauranc, Calles’s education minister, who called Rivera “the philosopher of the brush” and kept him on the government payroll for the next four years. (It was Diego’s 1929 acceptance of the commission to paint a mural in the National Palace that was the immediate cause of his expulsion from the Communist party.) But the period from 1929 to 1934 was one of political repression. The military budget
increased, and the attitude of tolerance toward leftists changed to virulent antagonism. Government support for labor unions ceased. Communists (Siqueiros, for example) were frequently jailed, deported, or murdered, or they simply “disappeared.” By 1930–1931, anti-Communist hysteria in Mexico had brought forth the Gold Shirts, a fascist organization. The student riots that had led to the attacks on the Preparatoria murals in 1924 must have seemed sophomoric compared with the current mood of menace. For all Rivera’s agility and stamina at keeping his fortunes afloat and his brush flowing, he could never be sure that a dark-suited government functionary might not appear one day as he perched on his scaffold at the National Palace and banish him from his work—after all, the vision of Mexico that he was painting was clearly that of a Marxist. If the Communists called him a “painter for millionaires” and a “government agent,” the rightists called him an agent of the revolution. It was a good time for him to leave, and he did, joining Orozco in the United States. (When Siqueiros was expelled from Mexico in 1932, he too went to the United States, to Los Angeles to teach fresco technique.)

  The situation was as full of ironies as the commission of Rivera by Ambassador Morrow to paint revolutionary murals in the Spanish conquistadores’ palace. The Mexican mural renaissance had become renowned in the United States by the mid-twenties, and Rivera in particular had become a legend. No one seemed to pay much attention to the fact that he was a Communist whose murals were full of hammers and sickles, red stars, and unflattering portraits of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and other robber barons. As critic Max Kozloff put it: “Nowhere else has avowedly proletarian art been so loftily sponsored by capitalist patronage.” Like the reactionary Mexican government, the great leaders of U.S. capitalism could publicize their broad-mindedness by employing an artist like Rivera: anyone who footed the bill for Rivera’s Marxist messages must have the public good rather than private gain in mind.

  As for Rivera, if the accepting of commissions from the Mexican government and from U.S. capitalists earned him the disfavor of the Communist party, it also gave him the chance to create public works for the glorification and edification of the industrial proletariat. After all, hadn’t Lenin counseled revolutionaries to bore from within? And where better to do it than in the country that was both in the vanguard of the machine age and, at the outset of the Great Depression, apparently ripe for revolution?

  Rivera made no secret of his revolutionary aims. Referring to his options after his expulsion from the Communist party, he told a New York reporter that there was only “one thing left for me, to prove that my theory [of revolutionary art] would be accepted in an industrial nation where capitalists rule. . . . I had to come [to the U.S.] as a spy, in disguise.” His painting, he said, was intended to be Communist propaganda: “Art is like ham,” he declared. “It nourishes people.”

  Perhaps even more important to Rivera was the fact that the capitalists of the United States were masters of the most marvelous technological achievements. The man who was nicknamed the “Lenin of Mexico” was as infatuated with the beauty of technology as he was with its revolutionary potential. With perhaps unintentional irony, he said of his fresco panel Frozen Assets (1931), in which a bank vault forms the substructure of a grim view of economic injustice in Manhattan in the Depression years: “There is so much beauty in the steel door of the safe vault. Perhaps future generations will recognize the machine as the art of our day.”

  Frida and Diego headed for San Francisco in the second week of November 1930, he armed with commissions to paint murals in the San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club and the California School of Fine Arts (now called the San Francisco Art Institute), secured for him through the efforts of the sculptor Ralph Stackpole, whom he had known in Paris, and William Gerstle, president of the San Francisco Art Commission. Diego remembered that on the night the invitation arrived, “Frida dreamed that she was waving goodbye to her family, on her way to this ’City of the World,’ as she called San Francisco.” En route she surprised Diego with a gift—a portrait of herself (now lost): “Its background was an unfamiliar city skyline. When we arrived in San Francisco, I was almost frightened to realize that her imagined city was the very one we were now seeing for the first time.”

  They arrived on November 10 and moved into Ralph Stackpole’s large studio at 716 Montgomery Street, in the old artists’ quarter. Lucile Blanch, who, with her husband, the painter Arnold Blanch, was visiting San Francisco while he taught at the California School of Fine Arts, lived two flights below them. “Since they didn’t have a phone, they used ours,” she remembered. Mrs. Blanch said that “Frida did not set herself up as an artist,” and was too shy about her paintings to ask her friend to look at them. “We were both painters, yet we did not talk about art,” she recalled. “Frida and I felt like a couple of giggling girls. She scintillated in her talk, made fun of everything and everybody, laughing at things sportively and perhaps snobbishly. She was very critical if she thought something was pretentious, and often laughed at San Franciscans.”

  Rivera did not start painting his allegory of California at the Stock Exchange until January 17, over two months after his arrival. First he had to absorb the atmosphere and the look of his subject. Together with Frida, he explored San Francisco, its dramatic hills and bridges, its picturesque waterfront, its industrial outskirts, and drove into the environs to see orchards, oil derricks, a gold mine, and the wonderful burnt-sienna and ocher-orange land. He sketched the bread lines of wan, bleak-eyed, defeated men, and took note of the posh houses on Russian Hill, in front of which men in well-tailored suits and women in stylish, slinky dresses and pert little hats stepped into or out of gleaming automobiles.

  Wanting to know the American people, he attended with Frida the annual Stanford-California football game. When asked by a newspaperman to comment on his impressions, he noted that the game was not tragic like a bullfight, but joyous: “Your game of football is splendid, thrilling, beautiful . . . a great living picture, spontaneous unconscious art. It is art in the mass, a new form of art.” What Frida thought is not recorded; no one bothered to ask. At twenty-three, she had not yet developed the flamboyant personality that would in later years make her a center of attraction comparable with Diego, and reporters hardly noticed her except to comment, occasionally, on her youth and comeliness.

  At one point in his preparations for the Stock Exchange mural, Rivera became obsessed with the figure of the tennis champion Helen Wills, and it was she, to the consternation of some, whom he chose to be “California’s representative woman” in his allegory of California (it is said that she was also the model for the nude female whom he painted floating or flying on the ceiling). Years later Frida told a friend that while Rivera was making studies of Wills, following her to tennis courts and sketching her in action, he sometimes disappeared for days. When he did, Frida explored on her own, riding the trolley up and down the steep hills of the city. She brushed up on her English, visited museums, and wandered through Chinatown looking for Oriental silks with which to make long skirts. “The city and bay are overwhelming,” she wrote to her childhood friend Isabel Campos. “What is especially fantastic is Chinatown. The Chinese are immensely sympathetic and never in my life have I seen such beautiful children as the Chinese ones. Yes, they are really extraordinary. I would love to steal one so that you could see for yourself. . . . it did make sense to come here, because it opened my eyes and I have seen an enormous number of new and beautiful things.”

  “We were feted at parties, dinners, receptions,” Rivera recalled. “I gave lectures.” Indeed, he not only lectured at such institutions as the San Francisco Society for Women Artists and the Pacific Art Association Convention, he was also offered (but did not accept) well-paid teaching jobs at the University of California and Mills College. Since his English was limited, he usually lectured in fluent French, with Emily Joseph, an art writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and wife of the painter Sidney Joseph, acting as t
ranslator at his side. Large audiences turned out to see and hear him discourse on art and social progress, passionate issues in the Depression years. In December the California Palace of the Legion of Honor gave Rivera a one-man show, and numerous California galleries exhibited his work; at one of his openings, the Call-Bulletin reported that the crowd consisted of “nearly everyone in San Francisco who has sung a song, represented his country as consul, crossed a desert on a camel, edited a magazine, or trod the boards.”

  When Rivera finally began painting he plunged in headlong, gathering about him a retinue of assistants, some salaried, others volunteer, who came from all over the world to apprentice with the legendary “maestro.” There was, for example, the loyal and trusted Andrés Sánchez Flores, a young Mexican whom Rivera employed for years as his chemist. Expert at testing, grinding, and mixing pigments, Sánchez Flores also served Frida and Diego as chauffeur, for neither of them could drive. Rivera’s chief assistant and plasterer in the United States was the artist Clifford Wight, a tall, powerfully built, and handsome man who had been a Canadian mounted policeman before traveling to Mexico to ask Rivera for work. Another helper, an eccentric one, was the painter Lord John Hastings, a radical Englishman who had been on his way from Tahiti to Mexico with the object of becoming Rivera’s unpaid disciple when he met him by chance in San Francisco. Matthew Barnes, an artist and an actor, added a note of conviviality to the crew, and there were many others who joined the team for a while and then disappeared. Rivera’s assistants and their wives befriended Frida, but though she was glad to have their company, she did not become close to any of them in San Francisco. Like many who feel shy and ill at ease in a new environment, she was a little disdainful of people she met, and that disdain sharpened into criticism. “I don’t particularly like the gringo people,” she wrote. “They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls (especially the old women).”