Frida Read online

  Diego felt differently. He had a voracious appetite for new experience and sensation, thriving as much on good conversation as on good wine and food. He introduced Frida to his friends: Ralph Stackpole, of course, and his wife, Ginette; Emily and Sidney Joseph; Timothy Pflueger, architect of the new San Francisco Stock Exchange Building; and William Gerstle. She also renewed her acquaintance with the elderly insurance broker and art patron Albert M. Bender, who had visited Mexico and acquired a number of Rivera’s paintings. Bender knew all the right people—it was he who had finally succeeded in obtaining permission for Rivera to enter the United States (as an avowed Communist, Rivera had been unable to get a visa)—and together with Stackpole he rounded up purchasers among them for Rivera’s work.

  In San Francisco, Frida met Edward Weston for the first time. She must have been curious to know him, for Tina Modotti surely would have spoken to her about him, and Rivera had great admiration for Weston’s photographs. Although he looked like a quiet professor, Weston was a Whitmanesque volcano erupting with a sensuous and enraptured passion for life. “I am the adventurer on a voyage of discovery,” he wrote of himself, “ready to receive fresh impressions, eager for fresh horizons . . . to identify myself in, and unify with whatever I am able to recognize as significantly part of me—the ’me’ of universal rhythms.” With Weston, as with Rivera, those “fresh horizons” were often women, and like Rivera, the photographer was irresistible. “Why this tide of women?” he asked, pleased but perplexed. “Why do they all come at once?”

  Weston encountered the Riveras on December 14, 1930, and noted in his diary: “I met Diego! I stood beside a stone block, stepped out as he lumbered downstairs into Ralph’s courtyard on Jessop Place—and he took me clear off my feet in an embrace. I photographed Diego again, his new wife—Frieda—too: she is in sharp contrast to Lupe, petite—a little doll alongside Diego, but a doll in size only, for she is strong and quite beautiful, shows very little of her father’s German blood. Dressed in native costume even to huaraches, she causes much excitement on the streets of San Francisco. People stop in their tracks to look in wonder. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where many of the artists gather, recalled the old days in Mexico, with promises of meeting soon again in Carmel.”

  In one of the photographs, probably taken in Stackpole’s studio, an elephantine Diego gazes lovingly at his bride dressed up in her Mexican costume and wearing three necklaces of heavy pre-Columbian beads. She does not look at her spouse. Instead, she looks out at the photographer with—and this is unusual for a woman who rarely smiled at the camera—flirtatious, quizzical amusement.

  While in San Francisco, Frida also became friends with Leo Eloesser, a famous thoracic surgeon who specialized as well in bone surgery and whom Rivera had met in Mexico in 1926. For the rest of her life, it was his medical advice she trusted above that of any other doctor, and her letters to him are full of questions about her various ills. In December 1930, when she consulted him for the first time, he diagnosed a congenital deformation of her spine (scoliosis) and a missing vertebral disk. Beyond that, soon after she arrived in San Francisco her right foot had begun to turn out more pronouncedly, and its tendons became so strained that walking was difficult.

  At the age of forty-nine, Dr. Eloesser was chief of service at the San Francisco General Hospital as well as clinical professor of surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. But the demands of his profession did not keep him from the company of people he loved, and the short, dark-haired man with intense, intelligent eyes that often twinkled was loved in turn by everyone who knew him, including Frida. In the years to come, he was to follow his strong social (but not especially political) conscience, undertaking humanitarian missions to Russia, South America, and China, and in 1938 serving as a doctor with the Spanish Republican Army. From his “retirement” in 1952 until his death in 1976 at the age of ninety-five, he concerned himself with community medicine in a remote ranchería near the village of Tacámbaro in Michoacán, Mexico.

  He was a complete nonconformist whose odd, endearing habits amused his friends. At midnight he used to leave his office, rig his thirty-two-foot sloop, and sail up the bay to Red Rock Island. At dawn, after breakfast on board, he would sail back to the city and to work. On occasion he would cut short his midnight cruise to appear around three in the morning at the bedside of patients on the critical list. He was also an excellent musician, and the weekly chamber music gatherings at his apartment on Leavenworth Street were famous, drawing such musician friends as Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, and Pierre Monteux. Once he boarded a train to go to a medical convention on the east coast carrying nothing but his viola and his toothbrush. En route, he spent his nights fiddling and writing the paper that he was to deliver at the convention. No one knew when the doctor slept.

  As a gesture of love and gratitude, perhaps also as a form of payment for his medical attentions, Frida painted Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser (figure 21) and inscribed it “For Dr. Leo Eloesser with all love, Frieda Kahlo. San Francisco Cal. 1931.” Dressed in a somber suit and a white shirt with an impeccably starched high collar, he stands stiffly, one hand resting on a table upon which his identifying object—a model sailboat inscribed Los Tres Amigos (The Three Friends)—is placed. Another identifying object is the drawing signed “D. Rivera” that hangs on the bare wall, for Eloesser was a patron of the arts. The pose is standard for full-length portraits of men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico, and the extreme primitivism of the style suggests that Frida had in mind a naïve portrait, like that of Secundino Gonzáles by the well-known nineteenth-century primitive painter José María Estrada, whom she admired. In Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser, she has substituted Mexico’s naïve provincial portraiture (which she and Diego collected) for Rivera’s murals and portraits as her chief source of inspiration.

  “A few notes on the painting may not be amiss,” Dr. Eloesser wrote on January 10, 1968, when the portrait was about to be donated to the Medical School of the University of California by the San Francisco Hospital: “Frida Kahlo de Rivera painted it at my home at 2152 Leavenworth St., during the Riveras’ first visit to San Francisco. . . . It is one of her early, early works. Mainly grey and black in tone, it represents me standing alongside a model for a sailing ship. Frida had never seen a sailing ship. She asked Diego about the rigging of the sails, but he would give her no satisfaction. He told her to paint the sails as she thought they should look. Which is what she did.”

  During her half year in San Francisco, especially when she was confined by her foot problem, Frida painted several other portraits. As always, her subjects were friends, and as always, the personal link between artist and patron or subject affected the look and meaning of her work: Frida’s portraits echo her style of sociability, which was direct, unpretentious, witty, and astute in its judgments of others. One careful pencil drawing captures much of the aristocratic hauteur and sophistication of Milan-born, Oxford-educated Lady Cristina Hastings, whose swings between states of boredom and explosive anger or humor Frida found congenial and amusing. Another friend, a black American whose identity is unknown, appears in Portrait of Eva Frederick (figure 19) and in a contemporaneous drawing of a nude. Whoever she is, Eva Frederick is clearly a woman of intelligence and heart, one for whom Frida had great sympathy. Equally clearly, Frida had little rapport with the sitter for Portrait of Mrs. Jean Wight, dated January 1931, which shows the wife of Rivera’s chief assistant seated before a window that gives out onto a view of San Francisco (figure 20). It is a bland, conventional portrait. Years later, when Jean Wight stayed with the Riveras in Mexico, Frida wrote of her exasperation with her guest: “She has the enormous defect of completely believing that she is very ill, she does nothing but talk of her sicknesses and of vitamins, but she makes no effort to study something or to work. . . . Jean has nothing in her head but idiocies, such as how to have new dresses made, how to paint her face, how to comb her hair so that she looks better, and she talks all
day of ’fashions’ and of stupidities that don’t amount to anything, and not only that, but in addition she does it with a pretentiousness that leaves one cold.”

  By mid-February, Diego had completed his allegory of California, less than a month after he began it. Not surprisingly, he had worked himself and his assistants to the point of exhaustion. To recuperate, he and Frida left San Francisco for the home of Mrs. Sigmund Stern, a friend of Albert Bender’s and a prominent art patron, who lived in the country at Atherton. What was to have been a restful ten-day vacation lasted six weeks, during three of which Diego painted a pastoral mural in Mrs. Stern’s dining room.

  Very likely it was here that Frida painted Luther Burbank, her portrait of the California horticulturist known for his work in creating hybrid vegetables and fruits (figure 22). (The creator not of new machines but of new plants also appealed to Diego, who had put him in his allegory of California.)

  Frida has turned Burbank into a hybrid himself—half tree, half man. He is dwarfed by the huge green leaves of an uprooted plant that he has “mated” or is about to “mate” with another plant, but instead of planting the hybrid, he himself is planted: he stands in a hole, and his brown-trousered legs become a tree trunk. A kind of X-ray vision allows Frida to show the continuation of the tree-man under the earth, where his roots are entangled with a human skeleton. Burbank, with his two feet (turned tree trunk) quite literally in the grave, is the first instance in Frida’s painting of what would become a favorite theme: life-death duality and the fertilization of life by death. She was still following Rivera’s vision: at Chapingo, he transformed the lower part of Tina Modotti’s nude body into a tree trunk to show the continuity between plant and human life, and death nurturing life.

  Luther Burbank is also the first indication that Frida Kahlo was to become a painter of fantasy rather than a painter of straightforward, relatively realistic portraits. What prompted the change we do not know. Possibly she saw some Surrealist art in San Francisco, or perhaps something in her own life made her recall the imaginative forays in Rivera’s Mexican murals (like those at Chapingo) or in Mexican popular art. In any case, with its mixture of invention, wit, and miniaturist detail, and with its blustering blue sky and bare green hills (plantless except for Burbank’s two fruit trees), the painting points forward to such works of mingled realism and imagination as My Grandparents, My Parents and I.

  When Frida and Diego returned to San Francisco on April 23, Rivera finally proceeded to fulfill his long-standing commission from William Gerstle for the fresco at the California School of Fine Arts. And Frida turned her hand to Frida and Diego Rivera, a sort of wedding portrait painted a year and a half after the wedding (plate III). Like the portraits of Jean Wight and Eva Frederick, it has an informative inscription written on a ribbon, a device used by both Riveras that derives from Mexican colonial painting. The message is as ingenuous in tone as the painting is naïve and folkloric in style: “Here you see us, Me Frieda Kahlo, with my beloved husband Diego Rivera. I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco California for our friend Mr. Albert Bender, and it was in the month of April in the year 1931.” If Frida did indeed paint Luther Burbank in Atherton, and if we are to believe that she painted the wedding portrait “in the beautiful city of San Francisco . . . in the month of April,” then she must have been working almost as hard as her husband, contradicting Lucile Blanch’s memory that “she did not paint much” and that “she did not set herself up as an artist” in San Francisco. Judging from the leap in quality between Portrait of Mrs. Jean Wight, painted in January, and the wedding portrait, Frida was secretly taking her métier quite seriously. In May she wrote to Isabel Campos: “I spend most of my time painting. I expect to have an exhibition in September (my first) in New York. I have not had enough time here, I could only sell a few paintings.”

  In the double portrait, she shows herself and Diego the way San Franciscans saw them, as newlyweds. Diego looks immense next to his bride. (He was over six feet tall and, in 1931, weighed three hundred pounds. Frida was five feet three and weighed about ninety-eight pounds.) Her depiction of him coincides with her description of his appearance in the long essay “Portrait of Diego” that she wrote years later for the catalogue of a Rivera retrospective: “His enormous stomach, drawn tight and smooth as a sphere, rests upon his strong legs, beautiful columns, that end in large feet pointing outward at an obtuse angle as if to embrace all the world and to support himself invincibly on the earth like an antediluvian being from which emerges, from the waist up, an example of future humanity, distant from us by two or three thousand years.”

  Rivera is portrayed as the great artist wielding his palette and brushes; Frida in the role she loved best, the genius’s adoring wife. Diego stands with his feet as solidly planted as the cornerstones of a triumphal arch; her dainty beslippered feet do not look substantial enough to support her, and they appear barely to brush the ground. She floats in the air like a china doll, sustained by the grip of her monumental mate. Yet Frida’s penetrating gaze has a note of demonic humor and gritty strength, and for all the solicitousness and “femininity” of her pose and dress, she is self-possessed. The portrait depicts a young woman presenting—perhaps with a certain becoming diffidence but also with pride in her “catch"—her new mate to the world. It evokes a type familiar in Mexico: the wife who willingly assumes the submissive role but who in fact runs the household and manages her husband with a deft and delicate dominance.

  The wedding portrait is revealing in another way as well. In it, Diego turns his head slightly away from his bride, and both his arms hug his sides. Her head inclines toward his shoulder, and her arms move in his direction; the couple’s clasped hands are placed in the center of the canvas, suggesting the importance, to Frida, of the marriage bond. From the beginning, the painting implies, Frida knew that Diego was unpossessable, that his first passion in life was his art, that though he might love her, his real devotion was to beauty, Mexico, Marxism, “the people,” women (many of them), plants, the earth. “Diego is beyond all limited and precise personal relations,” Frida wrote. “He does not have friends, he has allies: he is very affectionate, but he never surrenders himself.” She wanted, she said, to be his best ally.

  In San Francisco, Frida learned that one of the ways to be Rivera’s best ally, to hold him with even the light grip that she displays in the wedding portrait, was to be diverting. At a dinner attended by numerous art world people, for example, she noticed that a young woman seated next to Diego was eagerly vamping him; he was beaming. Frida sipped her wine and began her counterattack; quietly at first, she began singing and acting out humorous, off-color Mexican songs. As the wine took effect, she grew sassier until she had the whole table in the palm of her hand; with Diego’s amused, affectionate eyes resting upon her, she had triumphed. The sauciness and the determination to be “Rivera’s woman” are unmistakable in Frida’s wedding portrait; surely it was with a secret twinkle that she gave the general outline of herself and Diego the same shape as the initial carved on Diego’s, belt buckle—the letter D.

  While Frida presented her husband to the spectator as a standing figure facing politely forward, he was busy at the California School of Fine Arts, presenting himself seated with his back to his audience. His mural is a monumental trompe l’oeil joke: Diego and his assistants appear on an illusionistically depicted scaffold, engaged in painting a fresco of a worker on what appears to be the actual wall of the room. Like so many images of workers in that decade when there was little available work, Rivera’s helmeted hero looks like a cross between Goliath and G.I. Joe, as he clutches the control levers of a future into which his eyes gaze with that meaningful earnestness that typifies 1930s images of the representative man. Shown discussing the art school’s architectural plans beneath the scaffold are Timothy Pflueger, William Gerstle, and Arthur Brown, Jr., the school’s architect, all three dressed in suits and hats that distinguish them from the shirt-sleeved artist
s and the worker. Right in the center of The Making of a Fresco Rivera’s ample derriere droops over the edge of the scaffold as he contemplates his painting of the firmer and fitter man to whom the future belongs. Thus tongue in cheek does Rivera instruct art students on the relation between art and revolution! If his arrival in San Francisco to paint the Stock Exchange murals was heralded by some public indignation—“Rivera for Mexico City; San Francisco’s best for San Francisco” ran one headline—his exit was accompanied by a blast of controversy. Painter Kenneth Callahan’s complaint was typical. “Many San Franciscans,” he said, “choose to see in this gesture [Rivera’s rear view] a direct insult, premeditated as it appears to be. If it is a joke, it is a rather amusing one, but in bad taste.” Rivera’s social messages did not exactly foment social revolution in the U.S., but they did cause considerable commotion.

  On June 8, 1931, five days after he finished the fresco, Frida and Diego flew to Mexico, where he had been summoned by letters and telegrams from President Ortíz Rubio, who was anxious for Rivera to complete the mural he had begun on the stairway of the National Palace. They stayed in the blue house in Coyoacán while, with the money he had earned from American patrons, Rivera began to build their new home in the San Angel section of Mexico City, the home that was to be two houses linked by a bridge. (A 1931 photograph shows the Riveras together with the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who was in Mexico making his epic film Que Viva Mexico!, standing on the steps of the patio in Coyoacán.)