by Frida Kahlo
And then the party shifted to La Casa Azul. Matilde Kahlo still fumed, muttering that Rivera now looked like a “fat farmer” – an improvement over the “fat toad”. Lupe Marín had also been invited and after a liberal sampling of tequila thrust her hands under Frida’s dress and hauled it up.
“Do you see those two canes?” Marín screeched. “That’s what Diego’s going to have to put up with and he used to have my legs!” She hoisted her own skirt, showing off her shapely gams for comparison. Frida made a grab for her. Friends restrained the two women and Frida bolted from the room in a fury.
Diego, of course, was delighted to see two women he had bedded and wedded fighting over him and to celebrate the occasion headed for the bar. His gay mood continued into the wee hours whereupon he drew his trusty Colt revolver and, aiming through a boozy fog, began blazing away. Guests sought cover until the pistol’s hammer clicked empty on spent cartridges.
Frida was fuming and did not spend the night with him. In fact she didn’t move into his house at 104 Paseo de la Reforma for several days.[9]
Though not known at the time, this wedding and its aftermath would be a microcosm of the rest of their lives together.
Señora Rivera began setting up housekeeping in his house as Diego was appointed director of the San Carlos Academy, his youthful alma mater. Within a couple of weeks Diego’s reforms of the school’s curriculum met with a sour reception and he was summarily requested to leave the campus. At that time, he accepted a commission to create a series of murals in the National Palace which were to form a visual history of Mexico. The job was huge and he returned to it many times over the following years. It required five years just to complete the stairwell. The palace courtyard mural wasn’t begun until 1942.
Continuing in her role as the good wife, Frida reconciled with Lupe Marín who showed her how to prepare Diego’s favourite mole, rich puddings and other dishes that kept up his energy during ten to twelve hour work days. As Lupe had done, Frida brought Rivera his lunch at the scaffolding each day. With her duties as Rivera’s doting wife claiming more of her time, she virtually stopped painting. In 1929, however, she did manage to creatively put her psychological house in order. One canvas seems to mark a step in distancing herself from the cause of her physical turmoil. She painted The Bus.
There is nothing dramatic here, no re-enactment, or sentimental rehashing, or even any cursing of the fates. It is an interior view of a bus with six passengers sitting on the side bench in front of the windows: a shopping mother, a plumber in overalls, a barefoot Indita with a baby, a young boy, a fair-haired gringo in a western suit and porkpie hat, and a young Mexican girl in a western dress. They face us without seeing us, each with their own thoughts. It’s as if Frida can ride the bus again without fear; these anonymous sitters are portraits from life and Frida is getting on with her own life as well.
The other Painting, on masonite, is entitled Self-Portrait “Time Flies”. In this self-portrait, she gazes at us wearing a vulnerable white top trimmed in lace with a heavy Indian jade necklace around her neck. Exceptional antique earrings dangle from each lobe. Her expression is direct, but with a hint of a smile as though waiting for a photographer to click the shutter before dissolving into laughter. A cloud of words have been written interpreting the symbolism of the climbing airplane seen through the black-draped balcony window behind her head, or the significance of the alarm clock on the wooden stand behind her left shoulder. Knowing the place she was in during 1929, the upward turn in her fortunes, a new man in her life, a feeling of confidence in her improving technique and seasoned with her natural ebullience, Frida Kahlo could just as well be enjoying a visual joke, a lightening up: time flies.
In December 1930, Rivera received a commission from the United States Ambassador Dwight Morrow to execute a series of murals – The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos, Conquest and Revolution – at the Cortes Palace in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. Frida accompanied Diego and established their quarters in Morrow’s weekend house. This time, she spent considerable time at the project watching Diego work and offering the occasional question or critique. Instead of being annoyed by this kibitzing, Diego found many of her suggestions to be helpful. Gaining more respect for her artistic eye and intellectual grasp of his work, Diego came to be influenced by her ideas throughout the rest of their relationship.
29. Self-Portrait Sitting on the Bed or My Doll
and I, 1937. Oil on metal, 40 x 31 cm.
Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City.
30. Diego Rivera, Modesta, 1937.
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
By this time, the Communist Party had its fill of Diego Rivera. Though he had held office in the party and showed solidarity at their rallies, his casual acceptance of commissions from capitalists went against the grain of the conservative ideologues. In 1929, he was booted from the party and, demonstrating her loyalty to him, Frida quit too. Neither abandoned the goals of Communism and continued to espouse its anti-capitalist causes, but their support came from the sidelines.
In Cuernavaca, Frida experienced a miscarriage three months into her first pregnancy. This devastating event was topped shortly thereafter when she discovered Diego had been having an affair with one of his female assistants. At this point, she uttered her most quoted remark to the effect that she had experienced two catastrophes in her life: the first being hit by a tram. The second was Diego.
At the close of the 1920s, Mexico’s political climate shifted again and Diego found himself caught in the middle of an ideological battle. Not only was he persona non grata at Communist Party Headquarters, but the government had grown tired of seeing socialist themes peering back from “historic” murals popping up all over the country. Feeling the heat on the back of his neck, Rivera accepted some commissions in San Francisco, packed up his brushes and Frida and headed for the United States.
The U.S. had been washing its hands of the Communist backlash following World WarI in what came to be known as the “Red Scare”. Communists, anarchists and sympathisers had been rooted out all across the country and many deported back to Europe. Two Italians, Sacco and Vanzetti, had been charged with murder during a robbery. Throughout the six-year investigation, both had been linked to the “Reds”. The pair were electrocuted in August, 1927. Now one of the world’s most famous Communists, Diego Rivera came marching up to the California customs gates for a working visit.
Fortunately, Albert Bender, an internationally famous art collector, prevailed in their behalf and in the name of fine art, the gates swung open.
To express her thanks, Frida dedicated their wedding portrait, Frida and Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, to Bender and added a dove carrying a banderol telling the story of the dedication.[10] He was so pleased he went on to become one of her early patrons. The painting shows Diego, complete with his palette and brushes as the “official” painter in the family and Frida holding his hand, dressed as a submissive Mexican wife. If this was the role she had accepted, all that changed during the eight months Diego worked on his mural at the Luncheon Club of the Pacific Stock Exchange. Señora Rivera was undergoing a change of her own.
If the art crowd in San Francisco was ready to spread the red carpet for Diego, nothing had prepared them for Rivera’s petite bombshell of a wife. Edward Weston, the photographer, had struck up a friendship with Diego when Weston had spent time creating an extraordinary body of work in Mexico. Now, he photographed Rivera again in California and made Frida’s acquaintance. Weston kept scrupulous diaries and wrote of his encounter with Mrs. Rivera:
She is in sharp contrast with Lupe (Marín, Rivera’s ex-wife) – 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 (leather sandals), she causes much excitement in the streets of San Francisco. People stop in their tracks to look in wonder”.[11]
She arrived in the United States as the Great Depression began settling in, wiping out fortunes, closing banks and chasing farmers off their land with foreclosures nailed to farmhouse doors. The fun of the Roaring Twenties was a wistful memory. But still, there was money for murals and for welcoming parties among San Francisco’s society set where they lionised Diego and scrutinised Frida. She was, for all her philosophical reading and political rhetoric, a provincial girl of 23 on her first trip away from home and her friends. She avoided the people of San Francisco, finding them “boring” and with faces like “unbaked biscuits”. She did enjoy shopping trips where she found English a difficult tongue to master and relied on her friend, Lucille Blanch, the artist and wife of one of Diego’s American assistants.
Unlike her role as Diego’s close partner in Cuernavaca, Frida often found herself with time on her hands in the City by the Bay. Diego had selected Helen Wills Moody, the tennis star, as his model for an “earth mother” in the Pacific Stock Exchange mural, Allegory of California. As was his usual practice, he began an affair with Moody. Frida, in turn, took up an on-going sexual liaison with Christina Hastings, the wife of one of Rivera’s assistants. As Frida’s affair proceeded along, her health took another turn for the worse. The tendons in her right foot and ankle became irritated and she found walking difficult. She decided to consult a San Francisco physician and friend of Rivera’s, Doctor Leo Eloesser.[12]
The doctor and the artist immediately struck up a friendship. Besides determining that Frida had scoliosis, a congenital spinal deformation, he also discovered what he interpreted to be a connection between the return of her leg and foot problems and the stress of her chaotic emotional life. As small and large crises occurred, such as Diego’s latest public dalliance, her physical problems manifested themselves. Eloesser recommended a healthy living regimen to calm both her physical and mental agonies. She kept up their friendship, but, for the most part, ignored his advice.
31. Diego Rivera, Self-Portrait, 1949.
Oil on canvas, 31 x 26.5 cm.
Private collection, Houston (Texas).
32. Study for the Portrait of Luther Burbank, 1931.
Pencil on paper, 29 x 21 cm.
Collection of Juan Coronel Rivera, Mexico.
33. Portrait of Luther Burbank, 1931.
Oil on masonite, 86.5 x 61.7 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
34. Portrait of Virginia, 1929.
Oil on masonite, 77.3 x 60 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
Instead, she turned to her art and a series of portraits. Meanwhile, Rivera created his humorous mural in the San Francisco Art Institute, The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, depicting himself and his assistants on the scaffolding painting the mural in a trompe l’oeil masterpiece. Frida produced a masterpiece of her own. She painted a portrait of Luther Burbank, the famous horticulturist whose 53 years of cross-breeding plant species had made a huge contribution to California’s agriculture. He had recently died, but she memorialised him in a fantasy that wed his body to the soil and the abundance of riches his work had produced. This painting marked a diversion from her standard portrait style as well as a shift to a story-telling narrative that contained an ever-expanding body of symbolism. The Portrait of Luther Burbank began the rise of her reputation from competent, dilettante portraitist toiling in the shadow of her famous husband to an emerging talent who may have something important to say.
Her Luther Burbank seems to rise from an ancient hollow tree stump into a desert landscape beneath a vaulted blue sky of swirling cumulus clouds. California sun suffuses the above-ground scene as though coming from all directions. Heavily fruited trees, one rich in greenery and the other, an improbable graft, sink their roots into the soil that glows with a golden luster. The ground beneath the tree stump has been hacked away revealing rich loam, the weathered husk of the ancient tree and its root system greedily drawing sustenance from Burbank’s skeletal remains. Even in death he is reborn to fertilise California’s agriculture. This simple allegorical tribute marks the start of Frida’s fully developed story telling, or retablo paintings.
Retablos are small paintings, usually produced on pieces of tin that commemorate a traumatic event. Retablo means “behind the altar” and comes from the Christian-Mexican religion. Three components make up a retablo painting: a depiction of an event, the vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and text that describes the event. The paintings are commissioned from professional retablo painters, a 150 year-old tradition that almost died out in the first quarter of the 20th century.
Frida reached back into her own heritage, stripping away the religious context and using only the narrative elements. She also resurrected the Mexican traditional skeleton that represented the celebration of death from her “Day of the Dead” revelries. In Coyoacán, shops and homes were hung with grinning skulls and skeletons. Skulls made of sugar were gobbled up by Mexican children wearing fright masks as families remembered their dead and the continuity of life with gaiety, parades, exploding and fizzing fireworks and candles glowing hot in the night.
Her isolation was put to good use as she completed a pencil portrait of her lover, Lady Christina Hastings wearing a tam, painted the full length oil Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser with a schooner-rigged sailboat and an undistinguished portrait of Mrs. Jean Wright, the wife of Diego’s chief assistant Clifford Wright. The picture reveals Frida’s disinterest in her sitter whom she considered to be self-involved and pretentious. Other than her shopping trips to Chinatown where she loved to observe the Chinese children – and they gawked at her Mexican costume – Frida found San Francisco unremarkable. She did not take advantage of its urban sprawl nor its scenic bay for subject matter. Adapting to another culture, thrust into an alien milieu where she was an object of curiosity, separated from her friends and relatives and language, all these influences coloured her judgments and priorities.
35. Diego Rivera, Indian Spinning.
Oil on canvas, 59.7 x 81.3 cm.
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix.
As her loneliness forced her back to her work, she began to consider its value as public art rather than closely held keepsakes for friends. San Francisco’s cosmopolitan setting revealed new vistas and possibilities. In a letter to her friend, Isabel Campos, she wrote:
I don’t have girlfriends; one or two that cannot be called friends. That’s why I spend my days painting. In September I’ll have an exhibition (the first one) in New York. Here, I didn’t have enough time and I could only sell a few paintings. But it was very good for me to come here because it was eye-opening and I saw lots of new and cool things.[13]
With the completion of the mural commissions, the Riveras flew back to Mexico on June 8, 1931. With his accumulated wages Diego generously paid off Guillermo Kahlo’s mortgage on La Casa Azul in Coyoacán and planned to return to the unfinished fresco at the National Palace. He also had an idea for their mutual abode that he proposed to a painter and architect friend, Juan O’Gorman. Diego suggested two houses designed in the Bauhaus International style – minimalist and boxy – be erected in near-by San Angel. They would stand side by side, joined together by a footbridge between the two top stories. Each would have a separate entrance and serve as both living and studio spaces for the two artists, a recognition of Frida’s growing independence. Of course, the design also offered Diego privacy for his sexual peccadilloes.
They had been home only a few months when Diego received an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to help create a retrospective of his work. Though she faced being torn away from her Mexican roots, this news must have brightened Frida’s prospects for a show of her own work. For that, she would once again troop back to “Gringolandia”, and hob-nob with the rich boring art and society set that fluttered around Diego like so many mouths around a jalapeño. They sailed on the cruise ship Morro Castle in mid-November to arrive in Manhattan on December 13, 1931 in time for the December 23 sh
ow.
As with San Francisco, upon arrival Diego and Frida were adopted by the rich and famous, by both old and new money and as before, Diego was the centre of the maelstrom. The gallery walls held 150 of his works and showed eight mural panels that Diego had prepared for the exhibition. Art critics traveled to New York from around the country to add their two centavos to the pile of newsprint the show generated as 60,000 attendees marched from room to room. The show was a great success.
36. Diego Rivera, Landscape with Cactus, 1931.
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
37. Diego Rivera, The Day of the Dead, 1944.
Oil on hardboard, 73.5 x 91 cm.
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.
38. Beauty Parlour (I) or The Perm, 1932.
Watercolour and pencil on paper, 26 x 22 cm.
Augustín Cristóbal Collection, Galería Arvil, Mexico City.
39. Saint Nicholas, c. 1932, dated 1937.
Mixed Technique, (watercolour, pencil) on paper,
23 x 27 cm. Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico.
Letter to Isabel Campos
San Francisco, May 3, 1931
Dear buddy,
I received your little letter buten centuries ago, but I couldn’t respond because I wasn’t in San Francisco, but further south, and I had a lot of things to do. You can’t imagine how happy I was to receive it. You were the only friend who remembered me. I’ve been very happy, but I miss my mother very much. You can’t even imagine how wonderful this city is. I am writing little about it, so I’ll have a lot to talk to you about. I’m coming back soon to the powerful “town” – in the middle of this [month], I think – I will tell you buten things then. [We’ll have] lots of conversations — I want you to send my affectionate regards to Aunt Lolita, Uncle Panchito, and to all your brothers and sisters, especially Mary. The city and the bay are “cool”. I don’t like gringos that much; they are very dull people and they all have faces that look like uncooked bread (especially the broads). What is cool here is Chinatown; these herds of Chinese are very nice. I’ve never seen more beautiful children in all my life than Chinese children. Oh, God! They are marvelous. I would like to steal one so you could see him.