by Frida Kahlo
Since performing an abortion is against the law, maybe he is scared or something, and later it would be impossible to undergo such an operation. If, on the contrary, you think that having the child could be beneficial to me, then I want you to tell me whether it would be better for me to return to Mexico in August and have it there with [the help of] my mother and sisters or whether I should have it here. […] I always feel nauseated because of this pregnancy and so I’m screwed! Everything makes me tired, since my spine hurts. My leg is also having problems because I cannot exercise and as a result my digestion is really bad! However, I always have the will to do many things and I never feel disappointed in life, as in Russian novels.
I understand my situation perfectly and I’m more or less happy, first of all because I have Diego, my mother, and my father; I love them so much. I think that is enough, and I’m not asking life for a miracle or anything like that. Of my friends, you’re the one I love the most and that’s why I dare bother you with so many stupidities.
Forgive me and when you answer this letter, tell me how you have been. Receive Diego’s and my affection and a hug from Frieda.
If you think that I need to have surgery right away, I would appreciate your sending a discreet telegram to me, so you don’t get into trouble. Thanks a million. My best regards F.
49. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Mrs Natasha Gelman, 1943.
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Even considering the gossipy nature of this “ladies’ feature”, Frida finally began emerging from “shy and retiring” to feel her wings as these few crumbs of recognition fell her way. While she shopped and had some good times with Lucienne, one by one exceptional paintings surfaced in her wake as reminders of deeper and darker feelings. One in particular, a retablo probably begun before she left for Mexico, is titled, My Birth. To more faithfully reproduce the retablos that hang in Mexican churches and on which her narrative paintings are based, Diego suggested she paint on metal. And like the metal it is painted upon, My Birth is a cold, soulless evocation depicting Frida Kahlo’s emergence into the world as her adult head is forced from her own womb, thrust out between splayed legs onto blood-soaked sheets. The mother’s face is covered as though wrapped in a burial shroud. There is no one in attendance. It is a joyless birth.
My Birth returns the religious context that had been removed from Portrait of Luther Burbank, hanging a picture of the Mater Dolorosa, a weeping virgin, above the bed in place of the shrouded face. But as one element is returned, another is taken away. Frida places the message banderole across the bottom of the painting that usually describes the event and offers a prayer to the virgin. This time, the scroll is blank. Who’s to thank when one is constantly mistreated by the fates?
In the work, Henry Ford Hospital, the city of Detroit clings to a distant horizon, an abstract industrial backdrop as a bed seems to levitate above a brown plain (the alternative name for this work is The Flying Bed). On the bed is a naked, weeping Frida with a sick, grey face, lying in a puddle of blood and tethered by red umbilical cords gathered in her hand at her swollen stomach to floating objects that circle her. A snail uncoils from its shell, her male foetus bobs above her like a grotesque balloon. Beneath the bed is a trodden flower and a misshapen pelvis. Around the edge of the bed is written the title, Henry Ford Hospital and the date, “July of 1932 F.K”.
Self-Portrait (Standing) along the Border between Mexico and the United States is a painting on metal plate, a visual joke that is both humorous and melancholy, depicting Frida dressed in a pink western confection with flounces and white gloves. She stands between depictions of the western industrial world and an ancient agrarian landscape steeped in ritual and tradition. Above the Mexican pyramids, the ancient Aztec sun and moon fight their never-ending cosmic battle.
In one hand she holds a small Mexican flag as though waiting for a parade to pass. Her right hand holds an “inappropriate” cigarette. Flowers and plants grow from roots that dig deep into the soil of Mexico while industrial dirt offers a crop consisting of an electrical generator, a light bulb and a radiant heater. An American flag rises from Ford’s smokestacks as a chorus line of cyclopean roof-top ventilators marches past. Her conflicts are obvious in this work that owes much to Diego’s crowded muralist style, but she speaks with her own unique voice.
50. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Mrs Natasha Gelman, 1943.
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
51. Diego Rivera, Calla Lily Vendor, 1943.
Oil on canvas. Private collection.
A store window on a Detroit street, discovered by Frida and Lucienne on a shopping trip for sheet metal, becomes a curious slice of life as Window Display in a Street in Detroit. This funky collection of unrelated objects captured her interest as an assemblage more “real” than much of the artfully manipulated work she had seen in galleries. When she described it to him with such excitement, Diego suggested she paint it. The result is a blend of painterly technique and naïve folk art. George Washington peers at us from his picture frame festooned in red, white and blue and resting on a red, white and blue bit of carpet. He’s joined by a ceramic eagle plaque and a fuzzy lion growling at the window pane. Behind them a plaster horse is frozen en passant in mid stride. In the rear, we see the store is abandoned, ready for redecoration with paint pots, a stepladder and the painter’s gloves. The work is a captured moment of juxtaposed objects in the fashion of Edward Weston’s photographic images, a complex composition that would be damaged if one element was removed. Frida’s eye for found compositions was as keen as her wanderings through the halls of her own fertile imagination. Her bags were packed by the time Diego finished the Detroit mural commission. To his delight, no sooner had the murals been unveiled than the good burghers of the Motor City let fly their outrage in the local press.
“Communistic!”
“A heartless hoax!”
“A travesty on the spirit of Detroit!”
“Hose it off the walls!”
While the protectors of American morality and “right thinking” formed up committees, groups of workers from the auto plants detailed shifts of volunteer guards to protect the murals. Debate caromed back and forth in the press. Exhausted but happy, Diego Rivera, his “dabbler” wife, and their assistants were gone within a week. The final payment check warmed Panzón’s pocket as the Pullman cars rattled behind their locomotive speeding east toward New York City.
52. Magnolias, 1945. Oil on masonite, 41 x 57 cm.
Collection Balbina Azcarrago, Mexico.
53. Self-Portrait (standing) along the Border between
Mexico and the United States, 1932. Oil on metal, 31 x 35 cm.
Collection Manuel and Maria Reyero, New York.
Affair of the Art
New York was in the freezing grip of winter when the Riveras finally unpacked their bags in a suite high above downtown Manhattan in the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel. There was no time to waste setting up scaffolding in the RCA Building lobby and getting his assistants started with preparation of the wall for Nelson Rockefeller’s paean to Man at the Crossroads. Chicago was waiting for the start of their World’s Fair mural all about “man and machinery” titled Forge and Foundry. Frida set up camp in a section of the lobby cordoned off for workers and assistants while the public paid money for tickets to come and watch Diego at work. She began bringing lunches as usual, but Diego had no appetite while he laboured. An annoying aspect of his work was the constant harping of the Communist Party that he was selling out himself and the Communist cause to these rich capitalists. And yet, Karl Marx and his demagogue inheritors had no more ardent spokesman than Diego Rivera – except maybe his equally impassioned wife, Frida Kahlo.
However much she shook her fist, or sang verses of The Internationale, Frida did like the fruits of capitalism and while Diego dragged himself back to the hotel at the end of each session, Frida shopped and hung out with friends from their last visit. She rarely painted, but did dab away at one work that r
emained unfinished when they left New York for Mexico in December, 1933. The oil and collage is titled, My Dress Hangs There.
Like her Self-Portrait (Standing) along the Border between Mexico and the United States, this tightly packed composition is an example of her dark humour, only this time, it is sans Frida. She appears in absentia, represented by one of her Tehuana dresses suspended on a hanger that dangles from a blue ribbon tied between a gilded loving cup and a flush toilet with the seat up balancing atop a Greek column. From gasoline pumps to Wall Street to a church spire complete with dollar-sign stained glass window, this work chides everything American. A photo of marching military men heads toward a line of unemployed, shuffling toward a soup kitchen somewhere in the concrete canyons that stare back with their rows and rows of dead-eye windows. Manhattan curves away in the distance, Lady Liberty waves her torch at a departing cruise liner and a giant telephone sits atop a skyscraper. It is a masterful hodge-podge that sums up Frida’s deep set prejudices against her “Gringolandia” host. Only her dress remains as if it was left in the hotel room closet when the Riveras checked out.
54. Window Display in a Street in Detroit, 1931.
Oil on metal plate, 30.3 x 38.2 cm. Private collection.
As the RCA Building mural proceeded along and Frida amused herself enjoying Tarzan movies, dozing at classical concerts and receiving the press peering from under a bed sheet sucking lasciviously on a long piece of peppermint candy, word began to leak out that Diego’s version of Men at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future had a Red in it. Though the sketches had been approved, somehow the sponsors and young Nelson Rockefeller had missed a portrait among the pantheon of faces that gradually took on the likeness of every capitalist’s nightmare, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
As if gazing on that bearded and balding Medusa could cause brain fever, ticket sales were cut off, the mural was screened from public view and Rockefeller insisted that Rivera alter the portrait. Not only did Diego refuse, he declared he wanted to finish the work by May Day, the celebration of the Russian Revolution. In a conciliatory move, however, Diego did offer to balance the head of Lenin with a head of Abraham Lincoln of the same size. Shortly thereafter a squad of security guards and the building’s rental manager clattered across the lobby’s travertine floor, stopped all work on the mural, handed over the balance of money due for the completed mural and bundled Rivera and his band of revolutionaries from the sanctity of Rockefeller Center. A hew and cry went up to save the mural. Picketing and counter-picketing stopped traffic outside the RCA Building. Artists, intellectuals, political gadflies, pundits, powerful panjandrums, and newspaper editorialists jumped into the war of words. Diego, with the check in his pocket, enjoyed the flap right up until he received a phone call from Chicago cancelling the Forge and Foundry mural. The Windy City’s merchant princes and hog butchers wanted nothing to do with any hint of rabble-rousing or mutterings among the Depression-pinched working class. Diego’s grand design for establishing the muralist movement in the U.S. as a force for social change began crumbling. Very soon after work stopped on the RCA mural, the wall on which it was painted began crumbling under the bite of jackhammers and chisels, crashing to the lobby floor in jagged chunks and swirls of plaster dust.
Defiant, Rivera determined to spend every cent of Rockefeller’s money slapping up free murals on the walls of the Free Worker’s School and smaller panels to decorate the Union Square offices of the New York Trotskyites. He managed to blow through the capitalist cash by the end of the year.
In public, Frida spoke to the press:
The Rockefellers knew quite well the murals were to depict the revolutionary point of view – that they were going to be revolutionary paintings… They seemed very nice and understanding about it and always very interested, especially Mrs. Rockefeller…[21]
55. My Dress Hangs There or New York, 1933.
Oil and collage on board, 46 x 50 cm.
Bequest of Dr. Leo Eloesser. Hoover Gallery, San Francisco.
56. Diego Rivera, Assets, 1931. Fresco, 239 x 188 cm.
Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City.
During the summer of 1933, Frida created Self-Portrait with Necklace. This oil on metal head-and-shoulders painting is an assertive self presentation. We are looking at Frida the artist, confident and open to whatever might be in her future. Seventy years later, this picture would grace a United States thirty-seven cent commemorative stamp.
In her private letters and among close friends, she condemned the “sullen” American cabrones (bastards) and their hypocritical posturing. But despite the fist-shaking over his work, Diego liked America and the American bohemians and intellectuals who championed his painting and iconoclastic spirit. He also liked what his idolatry purchased in a society that could afford him despite the crushing Depression. He didn’t want to go back to Mexico. Frida thought of nothing else. He had gone through their money and they were broke. After many rows and lack of any gainful employment in the U.S., the Riveras accepted boat tickets from their friends and departed with empty pockets on December 20, 1933 on the Oriente via Cuba to Veracruz.
On returning, they moved into the dual house Diego had commissioned at the corner of Palmas and Altavista in the Mexico City suburb of San Angel. The two houses, joined by a footbridge across their second story, became an ironic portrayal of their relationship. The houses were a pair of Bauhaus cubes, his pink and larger, hers smaller and blue. While he saw the design as a bestowed recognition of her independence, she saw it as his backing away from her assertiveness. In either case, considering their relationship was in tatters, they both appreciated having their own spaces. She plunged into a spate of decorating. The ground floor was a garage while the first floor was the living space with a dining room, living room, and kitchen. A spiral staircase led up to her bedroom, bathroom and studio – a curious design choice considering her continued infirmities, often requiring her to employ crutches or a cane to get around. Through 1934, the studio went virtually unused except to finish her painting, My Dress Hangs There, begun in New York.
In the big pink house, Diego must still have been feeling the disappointment of losing his American mural commissions. Prior to returning to his murals at the National Palace in Mexico City, he began making sketches of Cristina Kahlo, Frida’s younger sister by 11 months. The two sisters had always been close, especially during Frida’s confinements for months on end. Cristina was as soft, pliable, feminine and delicate as Frida was assertive and aggressive around men and her pals. Cristina had wed, but her husband had abandoned her and their two children. The two women complemented each other, but Cristina became Diego’s favourite model, her Rubenesque nude body appearing in the hall of honour in the Secretariat of Health as the figures “Knowledge” and “Life”. Not too long after arriving back in Mexico, Rivera began – or possibly intensified – a destructive affair with Cristina.
Letter to Ella Wolfe
July II, 1934
Beautiful Ella,
[…] Just think, Diego has been very sick these last two weeks. He had a nervous fever that lasted more than ten days without going away at all. His temperature kept going up and down and I did not know what to do. Nacho Millán treated him, and since Diego really respects him as a doctor, he did everything Nacho advised and he got much better in less than two weeks. Nacho says that Diego’s problem is a very high level of stress; so now he is giving him shots and a new diet to make him better. However, Diego looks very tired and thin, his skin colour is yellowish, and above all (and this is what worries me the most), I notice that he does not feel like working, and he is always sad as if nothing interests him. At times he is desperate and he still hasn’t started painting anywhere. He already has prepared the walls of the [National] Palace and of the medical school but since he still does not feel well he has not begun to paint. This makes me sadder than I have ever been, because I can never be at ease if he is not happy. His health worries me
more than my own. If it were not that I don’t want to make him feel worse, I wouldn’t keep quiet about the great pain I feel seeing him like this. However, if I said something to him he would worry even more, since right now he is so sensitive that any minor thing demoralises and worries him. I do not really know what I will do to encourage him to work happily as before, since …he thinks I am to blame for all that is happening because I made him come to Mexico. But I know that it is not just me who prompted him to come here and this thought consoles me. You cannot imagine how I suffer knowing that he thinks he came here because of me and that that is the reason for his being in this condition. Sometimes I would like to tell you so many things, but it is difficult in a letter and I get frustrated at being so far away from you guys. There is no other choice but to wait for him to understand that I never had the least intention of causing him such harm; I knew exactly what it meant for him to come to Mexico. I tried to make him aware of this several times in New York. (I do not know what is going on with this machine; it is not typing decently).
You guys witnessed the fact that I was not happy at all to leave, and even though there is nothing to be done at this point, it is a consolation to me that you know at least that what I am saying is true. I do not know if Diego’s problem is a consequence of the rapid loss of weight he had in Detroit or if it is a malfunction of his glands. The thing is that he is emotionally tired to a horrible degree, and I suffer more than he does, if that is possible, from realising that there is no way to make him change his mind. Even if I gave my life to help him recover his health, that would not help either. I must say that what I am telling you is little compared to how much I have suffered here these months. Even though I don’t say anything to Diego because I don’t want to worry him, sometimes I feel truly desperate. All this, naturally, has an impact on Diego’s financial situation, too, because he is not working and the enormous expenses he has are still the same. I don’t know where he is going to end up if this situation keeps up. I do everything possible to animate him and arrange things in the easiest way for him, but I have not accomplished anything yet, since you cannot even imagine how differently he acts compared to how you saw him in New York. He doesn’t feel like doing anything; he doesn’t want to paint here. I think he is right because I know the reasons why he feels this way. You cannot imagine what jerks and how inconsiderate these people are. I don’t know how we can change these people without changing what needs to be changed all over the world, which is full of pricks. So the problem is not Mexico or China, or the United States, but it is what you and I and everyone know.