Gerry Souter

by Frida Kahlo

  Diego is working lots on Paulette and Nieves’s painting. I met Paulette, who left me with a better impression than I had anticipated. When are you coming back? In Coyoacán everybody misses you a lot. Write to me from time to time. Give Donald and your parents millions of kisses for me.

  Give my many regards to the Homolkas and tell them that it would be better for them to move here. Don’t forget me, beautiful, and tell me if they don’t offer you something from here. How pretty did you look at the opening? Tell me a lot of gossip. Do not forget the thing with the Arensbergs – Diego sends kisses to you, and I send you my whole heart.

  Yours, Frida

  85. The Circle, 1951. Oil on aluminium

  mounted on panel, 15 cm in diameter.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  As preparations moved ahead, another force for change moved into her life. The self-styled “pope” of Surrealism, André Breton sailed into Mexico, sent by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a lecture tour. With his beautiful wife, Jaqueline, he hooked up with the Riveras and sought out Trotsky. With Natalia in tow to look after Leon, the three couples set out to view Mexico and hold a series of great discussions on Surrealism, Communism and Mexico’s ties with its ancient past as championed by Rivera. Frida and Jaqueline fled Trotsky’s windy socio-political rants and Andre’s determination to see Surrealism behind every bush. The two women struck up a friendship of convenience to entertain each other.

  Breton eventually saw Frida’s paintings and immediately proclaimed her a Surrealist. He became so enamoured with her and her work – and her value as a recruit to the Surrealist movement – he gave the imprimatur of his prestige to her paintings with a flowery, rambling essay to be attached to her New York show brochure. For example:

  This art even contains that drop of cruelty and humor uniquely capable of blending the rare effective powers that compound together to form the philtre which is Mexico’s secret. The power of inspiration here is nourished by the strange ecstasies of puberty and the mysteries of generation, and, far from considering these to be the mind’s private preserves, as in some colder climates, then displays them proudly with a mixture of candor and insolence…

  His summation of her work, her blending of feminism, exploration of her psyche, and the visceral realities of sensuality and physical pain were comparable to “…a ribbon about a bomb”. Along with his grandiloquent text went an offer of a show in Paris following her New York triumph.

  Besides Breton’s huffing and puffing, Diego had also been busy on her behalf. The film star, Edward G. Robinson, a well-known art connoisseur and collector visited Rivera’s studio. While Frida entertained Mrs. Robinson on the roof of the twin house, Diego hustled Mr. Robinson into Frida’s studio. On seeing a line-up of her work, Edward G. Robinson purchased four paintings for a total of $800. On hearing this, Frida’s vision of economic independence loomed large. Despite the fact that Diego was her biggest booster, she seemed excited about cutting all ties to him.

  Spurred on by the New York show’s promise, Frida’s output soared. In 1938, she painted What the Water Gave Me, Four Inhabitants of Mexico City, Girl with Death Mask and a series of still lifes. Self-portraits for that period included the wildly colourful Framed Self-Portrait “The Frame” and an almost monochromatic Self-Portrait with Itzcuintli Dog.

  This series of paintings demonstrates the wide range of her selected subject matter, palettes, and the storehouse of internal imagery she could call upon. What the Water Gave Me is a veritable and literal stew of symbolic images floating, or lying submerged in her bath water. Her feet appear reflected in the water’s surface, looking like two disembodied crab objects. From a New York skyscraper thrusting its way up from the caldera of an ancient Mexican volcano to portraits of her parents among the fertile plants and roots of her upbringing, she creates a panoply of life moments and impressions. Sex, love and death are all part of this composite like many exposures on a single piece of imaginary film.

  When Breton saw What the Water Gave Me and Four Inhabitants of Mexico City, in his mind Frida’s place in the pantheon of Surrealists was secure. In the latter work, the four characters standing before the buildings of Mexico City’s landscape have an odd Oz-like quality of whimsy: the Judas character, a little girl, the Pre-Colombian idol and a watchful skeleton. Observing them from behind is a woven straw piñata. They are a blend of old and new Mexico, of figments of the imagination and reality. Even the little girl seems puzzled by it all.

  A little girl figures more directly in Kahlo’s hand-size painting, Girl with Death Mask. Here, all dressed up in a pink party frock, a small and barefoot girl wears a skull mask as if waiting for a Day of the Dead celebration to begin. Next to her, against the roiled stormy sky and desert, rests a horrific ritual mask of a Pre-Columbian monster, its lips besmirched with blood and its tongue protruding between jagged teeth. The yellow flower in her hand is the zempazuchil, a traditional decoration for graves during Day of the Dead festivities. Dolores del Rio, the film actress and friend of Frida and Diego, received this painting as a gift. She said it represented the baby Frida never had.[29]

  86. What the Water Gave Me, 1938. Oil on canvas,

  91 x 70.5 cm. Collection Isidore Ducasse, France.

  87. Girl with Death Mask, 1938.

  Oil on metal, 20 x 14.9 cm. Private collection.

  88. Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, c. 1954.

  Oil on hard fibre, 76 x 61 cm. Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City.

  Speech 1945

  MOSES

  Since this is the first time in my life that I have tried to explain one of my paintings to a group of more than three people, please forgive me if I get a little confused and if I’m very nervous.

  About two years ago, Jose Domingo told me one day that he would like me to read Freud’s “Moses” and to paint, however I wanted, my interpretation of the book. This painting is the result of that conversation.

  I read the book only once and started to do the painting with the first impression it had left on me. Yesterday, after I wrote these words for you, I reread it and I must confess that I find the painting very incomplete and very different from what should be the interpretation of what Freud analyses so wonderfully in his “Moses”. But now, unfortunately, I can’t remove or add anything, so I will explain what I painted the way it is, as you can see here in the picture.

  Of course, the central theme is Moses, or the birth of the Hero, but I generalised, in my own way (a very confused way), the facts and images that made the strongest impressions on me while reading the book. As far as I am concerned, you can tell me whether I blew it or not.

  What I wanted to express more intensely and clearly was that the reason why people need to make up or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear... fear of life and fear of death.

  I started painting the image of the infant Moses – Moses means “he who was taken out of the waters” in Hebrew, and “boy” in Egyptian. I painted him the way the legends describe him: abandoned inside a basket and floating down a river. From the artistic point of view, I tried to make the animal skin-covered basket look as much as possible like a uterus because, according to Freud, the basket is the exposed uterus and the water is the mother’s water when she gives birth to a child. To emphasise that fact, I painted the human foetus in its last phase inside the placenta. The fallopian tubes, which resemble hands, spread out to the world. On the sides of the new born child, I placed the elements of his creation - the fertilised egg and the cellular division. Freud analyses in a very clear but – for my personality – complicated way, the important fact being that Moses wasn’t Jewish but Egyptian. But in the picture, I couldn’t find a way to paint him as either, so I only painted him as a boy who generally represents Moses and all those who, according to the legend, had the same beginning and became important leaders to their people – in other words, heroes (smarter than the rest; that’s why I drew the “warning eye” on him). In this case, we can find Sargon, Cyru
s, Romulus, Paris, etc. The other very interesting conclusion that Freud makes is that Moses – not being Jewish – gave the people he chose to guide and save a religion that was not Jewish either, but Egyptian. [This religion was] precisely the one that Amenhotep IV or Ikhnaton revived: the religion of Aton, the sun, which has its roots in the very ancient religion of On (Heliopolis). That’s why I painted the sun as the centre of all religions, as the first god, and as creator and reproducer of life.

  This is the relationship between the three main figures in the centre of this painting. Like Moses, there have always been lots of high-class“ reformers of religions and human societies. It could be said that they are a kind of messenger between the people they manipulate and the gods they invent to be able to do it. Many gods of this type still exist, as you know. Naturally, I didn’t have enough space for all of them, so I placed on both sides of the sun those who, like it or not, are directly related to the sun. On the right are the Western [gods] and on the left the Oriental ones.

  The Assyrian winged bull, Amon, Zeus, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Apollo, the Moon, the Virgin Mary, the Divine Providence, the Christian Trinity, Venus, and... the Devil. To the left, thunder, lightning, and the thunder’s print, that is, Huraka, Kukulkan, and Gukamatz, Tlaloc, the magnificent Coatlicue (mother of all the gods), Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Centeotl, the Chinese god (dragon), and the Hindu one, Brahma. An African god is missing; I couldn’t find one, but I could make some space for him.

  I can’t tell you something about each one of the gods because of my overwhelming ignorance about their origin, importance, etc.

  After painting the gods I had space for in their respective heavens, I wanted to divide the celestial world of imagination and poetry from the terrestrial world of fear of death. So I painted the human and animal skeletons that you can see here. The earth cups her hands to protect them. Between Death and the group where the heroes are there are no divisions, because heroes die too, and the generous earth picks them up without distinctions. On the same earth, but with bigger heads in order to distinguish them from the heads of the crowd, I painted the heroes (very few of them, but well chosen), the religion reformers, the religion inventors or creators, the conquerors, and the rebels... that is, the “bucktoothed” [powerful] ones. To the right – I should have made this figure look much more important than any other – you can see Amenhotep IV, who became Ikhnaton, a young pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty (1370—1350 B.C.). He imposed on his subjects a religion contrary to their tradition, rebellious toward polytheism, strictly monotheistic with distant roots in the On cult (Heliopolis): the religion of Aton and the Mosaic, both monotheistic. I didn’t know how to transfer this whole important section of the book to the plastic arts.

  Next, we have Christ, Zoroaster, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon, and the lost child, Hitler. To the left [we can see] the wonderful Nefertiti, Ikhnaton’s wife. I suppose that, in addition to being extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been a hacha perdida and a very intelligent collaborator with her husband. Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicurus, Genghis Khan, Gandhi, Lenin, and Stalin. The order is wrong, but I painted them according to my historic knowledge, which is also wrong.

  Between them and the run-of-the-mill crowd, I painted a sea of blood with which I represent war, inevitable and fecund.

  And lastly, the powerful and never-sufficiently praised human mass composed of all kinds of... bugs: the warriors, the pacifists, the scientists, and the ignorant ones; the monument-makers, the rebels, the flag-carriers, the medal-bearers, the speakers, the crazy and the sane, the happy and the sad, the healthy and the ill, the poets and the fools, and all the rest of the people you’d like to have here in this fuc-bulous pile. Only the ones in the front are clearly seen; the rest, in the confusion, who knows?

  On the left side, in the forefront, is man, the constructor of four colours (the four races). On the right side, the mother, the creator, with her child in her arms. Behind them, the monkey. [Here we have] the two trees that form a triumphal arch, with the new life that always sprouts from the trunk of old age. In the middle, at the bottom, the thing most important to Freud and many others: love, represented by the shell and the conch, the two sexes wrapped up by eternally new and living roots.

  This is all I can tell you about my painting, but I’ll accept all kinds of questions and comments. I won’t get mad.

  Thank you very much.

  Frida Kahlo

  89. Moses or Nucleus of Creation, 1945.

  Oil on hard fibre, 61 x 75.6 cm. Private collection.

  90. Framed Self-Portrait “The Frame”, c. 1938.

  Oil on aluminium and glass, 29 x 22 cm.

  Musée national d’art moderne,

  Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

  The two self-portraits: Framed Self-Portrait “The Frame” and Self-Portrait with Itzcuintli Dog, demonstrate two radically different views of the artist. In Elizabethan times, the multiple portraits painted of Queen Elizabeth I near the end of her reign used the same face template that was simply applied with different costumes in order to hide her aging. Frida’s apparently consistent stoic gaze changes in subtle ways according to her internal and external environment.

  In The Frame there is a watercolour-like transparency to the oils applied to metal, a liquidity on which floats her portrait against a sea-blue background. She is flanked by two tropical birds. On her head is a tiara of flowers that compliments her flushed cheeks and the jade green of her dress. The effect is that of a symmetrical postage stamp featuring a fresh, young Mexican girl. The dark portrait, Self-Portrait with Itzcuintli Dog, is a polar opposite. Here, she and one of her many lap dogs share a regal sitting on a bare stage. The texture of Frida’s Tehuana skirt matches the sheen of the dog’s coat while her costume is set off by gold brocade and a matching rope necklace. A blue ribbon at the back of her neck is the sole jarring note of colour in this rich harmony of earth tones while her omnipresent cigarette is gripped in a gold antique holder looped around her index finger. This is a command performance in her best clothes of the Señora de la Casa.

  Adding to this collection is the series of still life paintings. Frida frequently referred to the fruits of Mexico’s rich soil in her allegory paintings, but here she concentrates on these organic shapes. In her hands, the fruits of the soil take on a somewhat sinister appearance of reaching tendrils and prickly textures, of gashed and hacked surfaces showing blood-red pulp beneath. Mushrooms and plants become sexual organs and flower petals age and curl inward. There is an over-sweet corruption suggested, a return to the earth with the functions of life having been fulfilled.

  One charmingly erotic example of this 1938 collection is The Flower of Life featuring a male phallus plunging into a female vagina while the act is portrayed as a fuzzy red blossom ejaculated from a matured plant pod. This painting was submitted along with some other floral paintings to the annual Mexico City flower show, Salon de la Flor. Imagine show attendees discovering this gem among the petunias and sun flowers.

  Fortified with letters of introduction from Diego to the high and mighty of New York’s art world and an invitation list representing a powerful cross-section of the social set they had cultivated back in 1933, Frida plunged into the scene. She was an immediate sensation. Critics loaded and cocked their pens, but came away charmed and impressed. Even the Rockefellers and their kin had been included, apparently with the idea that the possibilities of commerce held sway over old grudges.

  Though she moved through the opening night crowd as the star of the show, it was obvious that the ghost of Diego Rivera was both a drawing card and a raison for New York to pay homage to his third wife. Regardless, she relished the attention. In particular, she enjoyed her distance from Diego and the unfettered freedom to flirt with men and women of her choice. Her exotic presence, her costumes, and even her bold, scrappy, almost mannish aggression drew companions to her. She reunited with her old flame, Isamu Noguchi and hooked up with h
andsome fashion photographer Nickolas Muray. In hot pursuit, however, was her sponsor, Julien Levy. He fluttered around her, ever the handsome attentive butterfly. At one point, she accompanied him for an overnight visit to one of his clients, millionaire Edgar Kaufmann, at Kaufmann’s famous Frank Lloyd Wright designed home, Fallingwater. On arrival, Levy was prepared for a night of incredible passion with his hot-blooded Mexican protégé. Instead, Frida’s charms had also ignited Kaufmann’s libido and the two men spent part of the night trying to outmanœuvre each other in a French farce of tip-toeing up and down staircases and slamming doors. In the end, Levy got his wish when Frida sneaked into his bedroom.

  91. Portrait of Doña Rosita Morillo, 1944.

  Oil on canvas, mounted on masonite, 76 x 60.5 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.