Kahlo, Frida 1907–1954

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Kahlo, Frida
1907–1954

Frida Kahlo is without doubt the most famous and powerful Mexican artist of the twentieth century, eclipsing in popularity and fame her talented and prominent husband, the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). In fact, Kahlo has transcended her role of artist to become a virtual icon. A walk through the museum of the Casa Azul (the Blue House where Kahlo and Rivera lived) in Coyoacán (originally a nearby village, now part of Mexico City) bears witness to the packaging of Kahlo: bracelets made of Kahlo's paintings of her face; T-shirts bearing copies of Kahlo's paintings; tourist items, including keychains, bearing Kahlo's art. Unusual in the museum are the photographs in postcard size of Kahlo throughout her life, including her last hospital days. Kahlo remains to this day an artistic, cultural, and feminist celebrity. After all, how many artists merit an operatic play (Frida, opening the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1992 New Wave Festival) or even a highly successful cinematic production (Frida, starring Salma Hayek, 2002)?

Kahlo was born the daughter of a German-Hungarian Jewish father and a mother who herself was the product of a Spanish mother and a Mexican native father. Kahlo's life of physical pain was foreshadowed in her own family. Her father, Guillermo, suffered from epilepsy, a condition that brought in its footsteps what Kahlo called "vertigos." In 1913, the young Kahlo contracted polio, a disease that left its mark on her right leg. The leg shriveled and ended up shorter than the other one. The event turned her into the object of derision by her schoolmates, who took to calling her "Peg-Leg Frida."

Fate remained unkind to Kahlo. In 1925, she and her boyfriend were riding a bus that crashed into a tram. While many other passengers died, Kahlo barely survived. Not only did a metal rod penetrate her body, but her spine broke in three places; her collarbone and two ribs also broke. In addition, her right leg shattered, broken in eleven places; her right foot was crushed, her left shoulder dislocated, and her pelvis suffered three breaks. The young woman took months to recuperate. Back pain led physicians to later discover that some vertebrae in Kahlo's back had also been displaced. She was confined to wearing corsets, which she decorated with paint. In this way, the corset became at once a work of art and a medical necessity. Visitors to the Casa Azul see a painted corset on Kahlo's bed.

It was while in this state that Kahlo (abandoning her earlier desire to become a physician) began to paint, using materials belonging to her father, a professional photographer and amateur painter. In 1926, Kahlo painted an ex-voto (votive offering) of her accident. The bus and the tram are on the top of the picture, with human bodies strewn around. Below, the viewer sees a head with Kahlo's characteristic eyebrows looking at her body lying on a gurney of the Red Cross (the handles are labeled Cruz Roja) lying on the ground (Herrera 1991, p. 35). While many critics have attempted to underplay the psychological element in Kahlo's paintings, the ex-voto remains an eloquent artistic rendition of her trauma. Dissociation, characteristic of intense trauma, is a psychological state of mind in which the subject is isolated from the events taking place, instead most often floating over them, watching them taking place below. That is what the viewer is treated to in this painting as Kahlo's head gazes at her body laid out on the stretcher below.

Physical problems never stopped plaguing Kahlo. Yet she maintained her painting and accompanied Rivera to America. Kahlo took San Francisco by storm. As Malka Drucker puts it, "Frida herself had become a work of art" (1991, p. 53), with her exoticism and her Mexican skirts replete with petticoats. In her many self-portraits, Kahlo surrounded her face with ornaments and objects. Sometimes, her long hair was braided and pulled above her head, frequently further decorated with ribbons and flowers, and in some paintings even monkeys. Kahlo emanated beauty, exoticism, and a great deal of passion, especially in her dark eyes, accentuated by her two thick eyebrows that met at the top of her nose. Kahlo's face is a composite work of art, whose two sides are united by the joined thick eyebrows.

Kahlo's relationship with Rivera was certainly the most important in her life. They seemed a most unlikely couple. As Kahlo's father put it, it was "like an elephant marrying a dove" (Cruz 1996, p. 27). Despite Guillermo Kahlo's assessment, Rivera's girth did not detract from his masculine appeal to women. Kahlo is quoted as having said that Rivera is: "[M]y child, my son, my mother, my father, my lover, my husband, my everything" (Herrera 1983, p. 403). In a powerful 1943 painting bearing three possible titles: Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, or Diego in My Thoughts, or Thinking of Diego, Kahlo embeds a portrait of Rivera on her forehead with his head and shoulders resting on her joined eyebrows. In a rather eerie painting, Diego and I, dated 1949, tears are falling from Kahlo's eyes as her dark hair is loose and partly wrapped around her neck. Again, Rivera is resting on her eyebrows. This time, however, he himself has a third eye placed on his forehead.

Kahlo's affairs with other men—and women—can be understood as the expression of a free spirit or as limited reactions aimed at Rivera, whose constant philandering was open and notorious. The life she led with Rivera was not only artistic. The marriage was a turning point for Kahlo. She turned more to her Mexican culture and history. She adopted the dress of the women of Tehuantepec, which combined both practical and symbolic value. The women of this Pacific coast city were known for their independent ways, and their full-length skirts ideally covered Kahlo's paralytic leg.

She and Diego were both politically committed Marxists. Unlike most communists, they were willing to break with orthodox Stalinism and befriended Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) when he went into exile in Mexico (Kahlo even having an affair with him). A 1954 painting, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, shows Kahlo casting aside her crutches while an enormous hand appears ready to loosen the chest corset that normally imprisoned Kahlo's torso.

One of the artistic treasures Kahlo left behind was her Diary, a magnificent tribute to the artistic talents of a major painter of the twentieth century. Some pages contain just writing; others, illustrations. On many pages images are interlaced with words, redefining each other: body parts surrounded by writing in different colored ink; Mexican temples, called "Ruins," covered by a flamboyant sunset as they soar into the sky; circles of faces that touch one another as they float on the page. Kahlo's work combined both psychological realism, as in her many self-portraits, with a feminist surrealism of her own invention, which contrasts sharply with the frequently masculine-centered, scopic, and Freudian sexual politics of the European surrealists.

Kahlo cross-dressed and had affairs with both men and women, breaking many of the taboos of her age. Nevertheless, her art expresses the agonies of a body afflicted with illness. Not even the cinematic version of her life can surpass the power of Kahlo's own imagination.