Frida Kahlo, a Woman with Conviction.
By: Michele Velez
By: Michele Velez
It is impossible to separate the life and work of this remarkable person. What made her so exceptional was that she never painted her dreams, but only her reality. Her paintings became her biography.
Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico City in 1907. Her father was a German Jew photographer, and her mother was Spanish and Native American. Her life was to be a long series of physical traumas, and the first of these came quite early. At the age of six she was stricken with polio, which left her with a limp. However, as a child, she was a fearless tomboy, and this way of being made Frida her father's favorite. He took her education seriously, and in 1922 she entered the National Preparatory School –the most prestigious educational institution in Mexico- which had only just begun to admit girls.
It was there that she met her husband-to-be, Diego Rivera, who had recently returned home from France, and who had been commissioned to paint a mural there. Kahlo was attracted to him, and she demonstrated her feelings by teasing him, playing practical jokes, and by trying to excite the jealousy of the painter's wife, Lupe Marin.
In 1925, Kahlo suffered a serious accident, which was to set the pattern for much of the rest of her life. She was traveling in a bus, which collided with a tramcar, and suffered serious injuries to her right leg and pelvis. The accident made it impossible for her to have children. This misadventure also meant that she would face a life-long battle against pain. In 1926, during her recovery, she painted her first self-portrait. This was the beginning of a long series of works that depicted the events of her life and her emotional reactions to them.
She met Rivera again in 1928, through her friendship with the photographer and revolutionary, Tina Modotti. Rivera had been recently divorced, and he and Frida found that they had much in common, especially because they were both communist militants. They later married in August 1929.
Rivera's artistic reputation was expanding rapidly in the United States. In 1930, the couple left for San Francisco and then to New York in 1931 for the Rivera retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art. Kahlo, at this time, was only considered to be the wife of a famous artist, but the situation soon changed. In 1932 Rivera was commissioned to paint a major series of murals for the Detroit Museum, and here Kahlo suffered a miscarriage. While recovering, she painted Miscarriage in Detroit, the first of her truly penetrating self-portraits. The style she evolved was entirely unlike that of her husband, being based on Mexican folk art.Kahlo pretended not to consider her work important. From Detroit they went once again to New York, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint a mural in the Rockefeller Center.
The commission erupted into an enormous scandal, when the patron ordered the half-completed work to be destroyed because of the political imagery Rivera insisted on including. But Rivera lingered in the United States, which he loved and Kahlo now hated. When they finally returned to Mexico in 1935, Rivera embarked on an affair with Kahlo's younger sister, Cristina. Though they finally made up their quarrel, this incident marked a turning point in their relationship. Rivera had never been faithful to any woman; and Kahlo now embarked on a series of affairs with both men and women, which were to continue for the rest of her life. One of Kahlo's more serious, early love affairs was with the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was being hounded by his triumphant rival Stalin, at the time, and was offered refuge in Mexico in 1937 on Rivera's initiative. Another visitor to Mexico at this time was the leading figure of the Surrealist Group, André Breton. Breton arrived in 1938, and was enchanted with Mexico and with Kahlo's paintings. Partly through his initiative, she was offered a show at the fashionable Julian Levy Gallery in New York later in 1938, and Breton himself wrote a rhetorical catalogue preface. The show was a triumph, and about half the paintings were sold. In 1939, Breton suggested a show in Paris, and offered to arrange it. Kahlo, who spoke no French, arrived in France to find that Breton had not even bothered to get her work out of customs.
Marcel Duchamp rescued the enterprise, and the show opened about six weeks late. It was not a financial success, but the reviews were good, and the Louvre bought a picture for the Jeu de Paume.
Early in 1940, Kahlo and Rivera divorced, though they continued to make public appearances together. In May, after the first attempt on taking Trotsky's life, led by the painter Siqueiros, Rivera left for San Francisco. After the second and this time successful attempt, the police questioned Kahlo, who had been a friend of Trotsky’s assassin. She decided to leave Mexico for a while, and in September she joined her ex-husband in San Francisco. Less than two months later, while they were still in the United States, they remarried.
Kahlo’s health grew visibly worse from 1944 onwards, and she underwent the first of many operations on her spine and her crippled foot. In early 1950, her physical state reached a crisis, and she had to be hospitalized in Mexico City, where she remained for a year. During the period after her remarriage, her artistic reputation continued to grow, though at first more rapidly in the United States than in her native Mexico. She was included in prestigious group shows in the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1946, however, she received a Mexican government fellowship, and in the same year an official prize on the occasion of the Annual National Exhibition. After her return home from the hospital, Kahlo became an increasingly fervent Communist. Rivera had been expelled from the Party, which was reluctant to receive him back, both because of his links with the Mexican government of the day, and because of his association with Trotsky.
While the 1940s had seen her produce some of her finest works, her paintings now became more clumsy and chaotic, thanks to the joint effects of pain, drugs and alcohol. Despite this, in 1954 she was offered her first solo show in Mexico- which was to be the only show of the kind held for her in her lifetime. It took place at the fashionable Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo in the Zona Rosa of Mexico City. At first it seemed that Kahlo would be too ill to attend, but she sent her richly decorated bed ahead of her; she arrived by ambulance, and was carried into the gallery on a stretcher.
In the same year, Kahlo, threatened by gangrene, had her right leg amputated below the knee. It was a tremendous blow to someone who had invested so much in the elaboration of her own self-image. She learned to walk again with an artificial limb. But the end was near for her. In July 1954, she made her last public appearance, when she participated in a Communist demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterwards, she died in her sleep, apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her last diary entry read, “ I hope the end is joyful and I hope never to come back.”
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