Gerry Souter

by Frida Kahlo

  As for my English, I don’t even want to talk to you about it, since I’m stuck. I bark what’s most essential, but it is very difficult to speak it well. However, I make myself understood, at least with the damn shopkeepers. 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.

  Since you are in touch with my mother and Kitti [Cristina Kahlo], tell me about them. I would really appreciate it. You still have time to send me a letter if you want. I ask you to do it since it would make me very happy. Is it too much to ask? Say hi to everyone when you see Dr. Coronadito, Landa, and Mr. Guillen; to all those who remember me.

  And you, my dear little friend, receive the usual affection from your buddy who loves you very much.

  Frieducha

  Kisses for your little mother, dad, and siblings. My address: 716 Montgomery St.

  Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser

  Coyoacán, June 14, 1931

  Dear Doctor,

  You can’t imagine how sorry we were for not seeing you before coming back here, but it was impossible. I called your office three times, but couldn’t find you, since nobody answered, so I asked for Clifford to please explain this to you. Besides, imagine, Diego worked until midnight the day before we left San Francisco. That’s why we didn’t have time to do anything, so I am writing this letter in the first place to apologise a thousand times and to tell you also that we’ve arrived safely in the country of enchiladas and refried beans. Diego is already working in the [National] Palace. He’s been having problems with his mouth and he is very tired besides. If you write to him, I would like you to tell him that it is necessary for his health that he rest a little, because if he keeps working like this, he is going to die. Don’t tell him that I told you how much he is working, but tell him that you found out and that it is absolutely necessary that he rest a little. I would really appreciate it. Diego is not happy here because he misses the kindness of the people of San Francisco and the city itself. He wants nothing else but to go back to the United States to paint. I came back well, skinny as always and fed up with everything, but I feel much better. I don’t know how to pay you back for my healing and all your kindness toward Diego and me. I know that with money would be the worst way, but the biggest gratitude I could have would never compensate for your kindness. I implore and beg you to be kind enough to let me know how much I owe you, because you can’t imagine how shameful I feel for having left without giving you something worth your kindness. When you answer me, please tell me how you are, what you are doing, everything. Also, please say hello to all our friends, especially to Ralph and Ginette.

  Mexico is, as always, disorganised and messed up. The only thing it has left is the great beauty of the land and of the Indians. Everyday, the ugly part of the United States steals a piece; it is a shame, but people have to eat and it is inevitable that the big fish eat the small one. Diego sends his best wishes and I send all the affection you know I feel for you.

  Frieda

  40. Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser, 1931.

  Oil on masonite, 85.1 x 59.7 cm.

  University of California,

  School of Medicine, San Francisco.

  The petite 24-year-old Mexican girl on Diego Rivera’s arm was referred to in the outpouring of prose as “shy” and “retiring” and who, the commentators mentioned in passing, “did a bit of painting herself”.

  Frida was paraded from one welcoming gala to another, smiled at, toasted and had questions shouted at her slowly as if high volume and low speed made English much more understandable. Back at their hotel, she wrote Doctor Eloesser:

  This upper class is disgusting and I’m furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor.[14]

  Her quaint rejection of American urban conditions at the start of the Great Depression underscores her own naïve political rhetoric about uplifting the masses when she never really came into contact with her own poverty-stricken Mexican “masses”. But in New York, the vast gap between the chauffeured limousines sailing up and down concrete canyons and bread lines shuffling into store-front soup kitchens must have graphically reinforced Frida’s socialist sensibilities. Putting down her American hosts might also have been a side effect of being ignored as an artist in her own right yet again. Though Diego praised her painting, no show offers were forthcoming. She continued to be “Mrs. Rivera”.

  One good outcome to the New York exposure was Frida’s opportunity to view original modern works from a variety of contemporary masters. It’s not difficult to imagine her wandering from gallery to gallery within the Museum of Modern Art, coming to grips with Surrealists, Expressionists, Picasso, Braque, the dreamscapes of de Chirico and other deeply personal and abstract constructions.

  Diego had accepted a commission from Detroit, Michigan in America’s industrial heartland to paint a mural in the lobby of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He relished the idea of painting machines and assembly lines that, in his Marxist philosophy, relieved the masses of workers from the drudgery of repetitive toil, leaving them more time to begin the workers’ revolution. Detroit represented the quintessential example of American capitalism, where the machine age met the proletariat, the perfect ground zero for the overthrow of the Imperialists who were buying his work. The Rivera entourage arrived by train on April 21, 1932. Frida was far less sanguine about the smoke-shrouded factory town on the Rouge River. She wrote to Doctor Eloesser that Detroit,

  …seems like a shabby old village. I don’t like it at all, but I am happy because Diego is working very happily here, and he has found a lot of material for his frescoes that he will do in the museum. He is enchanted by the factories, the machines, etc. like a child with a new toy.[15]

  41. A Few Small Nips, 1935. Oil on metal,

  38 x 48.5 cm with frame, 29.5 x 39.5 cm

  without frame. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  Children were on Frida’s mind. She had scarcely unpacked when she discovered she was pregnant. The idea both pleased and terrified her. She had always loved children and had a deep maternal instinct that she had lavished on Diego. But she feared her heredity and her ability to carry the pregnancy to term. Frida confided in Eloesser,

  Do you think it would be more dangerous to have an abortion than to have the child?... You know better than anyone else does what kind of shape I’m in. First, because of the inheritance I carry in my blood (Guillermo’s epilepsy), I don’t think the child could come out healthy. Second, I’m not strong and the pregnancy would weaken me even more... Here, I don’t have any relatives who could help me out during and after my pregnancy, and no matter how much poor Diego wants [to help me] he cannot, since he has all that work and a thousand more things…[16]

  Her conflicts were very real and if she had any idea that sharing a baby would put an end to Diego’s affairs, she was probably wrong. He had already abandoned two children from a previous marriage and rarely saw the daughter born by Lupe Marín.

  She also consulted a doctor in Detroit who advised her that the child could be delivered by caesarean section. She decided to have the child. The Detroit doctor ordered bed rest. As usual, Frida ignored him, began driving lessons and made trips to the mural work site. She continued to trail Diego to the homes and parties of the Motor City’s smokestack barons wearing her brightly-coloured Tehuana costumes with her arms, neck and fingers layered and looped with antique jewellery. Finding the gringos easily shocked, dull of wit and wrapped up in their pursuit of celebrity, she turned loose her more outrageous personality quirks. On her way into dinner on the arm of Henry Ford – a notorious anti-Semite – more than a few jaws dropped when Frida asked him, “Mr. Ford, are you Jewish?” The Wardell Hotel in which they were staying was restricted against J
ews and when Diego told the hotel’s management that he and Frida were Jewish, the restriction was immediately dropped.[17]

  In the fourth month of her pregnancy, July 4, 1932, Frida miscarried. Lucienne Bloch, one of Diego’s assistants and Frida’s friend, discovered her early in the morning sitting in a pool of blood and screaming. She continued to haemorrhage on the way to the Henry Ford Hospital and spent much of the day disgorging clots of blood and tissue that had been her child.

  “I wish I was dead!” she wailed in despair. “I don’t know why I have to go on living like this!”[18]

  Emotionally and physically drained, she fell back on her only consolation, her painting. She requested medical books for research pictures of embryos, and anatomy, but the doctors refused. Diego sneaked some books to her and she began to draw. As with the Portrait of Luther Burbank, she turned her loneliness and depression into creative activity. Only this time, the subjects were far more personal and she scoured her emotions to tell her sad narrative.

  42. The Deceased Dimas Rosas at the

  Age of Three, 1937. Oil on masonite, 48 x 31.5 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  43. My Birth, 1932. Oil on metal,

  30.5 x 35 cm. Private collection, USA.

  Paintings and some lithographs were accomplished during her time in Detroit. When she was well enough to leave the hospital, Diego asked the New Workers School where he was working on a mural to set up a small studio for her that included lithography stones and a press. Her monochrome lithographs, Frida and the Miscarriage, resemble medical illustrations describing the steps that led to the event from sperm and eggs to zygote to foetus tied by its umbilical cord that twines around Frida’s leg. Her eyes weep tears as does her vagina ending in a pile of clotted blood at her feet. The blood fertilises some plants, recalling the Burbank portrait and the cycle of life. It is an analytical collection of images in a flat plane that are antiseptic and sting with their clean incisions. She found lithography unsatisfactory and these prints are the only examples of her work in that medium. The paintings: Window Display in a Street in Detroit, Henry Ford Hospital, Self-Portrait (Standing) along the Border between Mexico and the United States, and My Birth are quite something else.

  As if the miscarriage was not sufficiently crushing, Frida received news from home that her mother was dying of cancer. Still healing from her trauma, Frida had to return to Coyoacán as soon as possible. There was no flight available and the phones to Mexico were temporarily down. She elected to make the trip by train and bus, an arduous journey for someone in good health. Diego insisted Lucienne Bloch accompany her. She arrived in Mexico on September 8 and her mother died on September 15, 1932. Frida remained with her father and her family and checked on the progress of the twin houses under construction until she became anxious to return to Diego. By October 21, she and Lucienne were back in Detroit and she learned that Diego had been offered another commission, this time to create a mural in the lobby of the RCA building in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Following that, the 1933 World’s Fair being held in Chicago wanted a mural on the theme of “machinery and industry”.[19] More months would be spent in “Gringolandia”. Diego worked himself to exhaustion to complete the Detroit project and had little time for her. Frida took up her brushes to restore her spirits.

  To combat the silence of the hotel room, Frida endured a local news hen, Florence Davies, whose column Girls of Yesteryear, featured “…visiting homes of Interesting people”. She showed up at Frida’s room at the Wardell for a chat. Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo’s definitive biographer, captured the scene where Frida holstered her acerbic wit and played the cheeky, but adoring wife for the newspaper’s scribe. The column is headed: Wife of Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.

  Davies wrote:

  Carmen Frida Kahlo Rivera… is a painter in her own right, though very few people know it. “No”, she explains, “I didn’t study with Diego. I didn’t study with anyone. I just started to paint”. Then her eyes begin to twinkle. “Of course”, she explains, “he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist”. Then the twinkles in both black eyes fairly explode into a rippling laugh… In Detroit she paints only because time hangs heavily on her hands during the long hours while her husband is at work in the court…[20]

  44. Frida and the Abortion or The Abortion, 1932.

  Lithography on paper, 29.3 x 23 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  45. Frida and the Caesarean Section, 1932.

  Oil on canvas, 73 x 62 cm. Private collection.

  46. Henry Ford Hospital or The Flying Bed, 1932.

  Oil on metal, 30.5 x 38 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  47. Untitled (drawing with subject inspired

  by Eastern philosophy), 1946. Sepia ink

  on paper, 18 x 26.7 cm. Private collection.

  48. Untitled (drawing with cataclysmic theme), 1946.

  Sepia ink on paper, 18 x 26.7 cm. Private collection.

  Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser

  May 26, 1932

  I have to tell you a lot about myself, even though what we have to discuss is not very pleasant. In the first place, health-wise, I’m not well at all. I would like to talk to you about anything but that, since I understand you must already be tired of listening to everyone’s complaints about sickness and especially with sick people; but I would like to think that my case is a little different since we are friends, and Diego as well as I love you very much. You know that well. […] The most important thing and what I mainly want to consult with you about is the fact that I am two months pregnant. For that reason I saw Dr. Pratt again, who told me he knew what my general state is since he talked to you about me in New Orleans. [He said] I didn’t have to explain to him again about the accident, heredity, etc., etc… Given my health, I thought it would be better to have an abortion. I told him that and he gave me quinine and very strong castor oil for a purge. The day after I took this I had a very slight [case] of bleeding, almost nothing. I’ve had some blood during five or six days, but very little. In any event, I thought I had aborted and I went to see Dr. Pratt again. He examined me and told me that he is completely sure that I did not abort and that it would be much better to keep the child instead of causing an abortion through surgery. [He said] that in spite of my body’s bad shape, I could have a child through a Caesarean section without great difficulties even considering the small fracture in the pelvis, spine, etc., etc… He says he will take it upon himself to look after me closely if we stay in Detroit during the next seven months of my pregnancy. I want you to tell me what you think in all honesty, since I don’t know what to do in this case. Naturally, I am willing to do whatever you think is most advisable for my health; that’s what Diego also thinks. Do you think it would be more dangerous to have an abortion than to have the child?

  Two years ago I had a surgical abortion in Mexico, more or less under the same circumstances as now, after a pregnancy of three months. This time it’s been only two [months] and I think it would be easier, but I don’t know why Dr. Pratt thinks it would be better to have the child. You know better than anyone else does what kind of shape I’m in. First, because of the inheritance I carry in my blood, I don’t think the child could come out healthy. Second, I’m not strong and the pregnancy would weaken me even more. Moreover, my situation is kind of difficult since I don’t know how much time Diego will need to finish the fresco. If it is in September, as I estimate, the child would be born in December and I would have to go back to Mexico three months before the birth. If Diego were to finish later, it would be better for me to wait to have the child here, and there would still be terrible problems travelling with a child a few days old. Here, I don’t have any relatives who could help me out during and after my pregnancy, and no matter how much poor Diego wants [to help me] he cannot, since he has all that work and a thousand more things. So I could not count on him at all. The onl
y thing I could do in that case would be to go back to Mexico in August or September and have it there. I don’t think Diego is very interested in having a child since what he’s most concerned with is his work and he is more than right. Children would come in third or fourth place. I don’t know if it would be good for me to have a child since Diego is constantly travelling and in no way would I want to leave him by himself and stay in Mexico. That would only bring problems and hassles for both of us, don’t you think? But if you really share Dr. Pratt’s opinion that it would be much better for my health not to have an abortion and to have the child, all those difficulties can be solved in one way or another. What I want to know is your opinion, more than anyone’s, since you know best about my situation. I would thank you with all my heart if you would tell me clearly what you think would be better. In case the abortion were more advisable, I beg you to write to Dr. Pratt, since maybe he is not well aware of all the circumstances.