Gerry Souter

by Frida Kahlo

  97. The Two Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas, 173.5 x 173 cm.

  Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

  Letter to Nickolas Muray (written in English)

  June 13, 1939

  Dear Nick,

  I received the wonderful photo you sent. I like it even more than in New York. Diego says it’s as good as a Piero della Francesca. To meet means more than that: it is a treasure. Moreover, it will always make me remember that day when we had breakfast at the drugstore at Barbizon Plaza and then went to your studio to take pictures. This was one of them and right now I have it close to me. You will always find yourself inside that magenta shawl (on the left side). Thanks a million for sending it.

  When I received your letter a few days ago, I didn’t know what to do. I must admit that I couldn’t help my tears. I felt like something got stuck in my throat – as if I had swallowed the whole world. I still don’t know if I felt sad, jealous, or angry, but the first thing I experienced was a feeling of great hopelessness. I have read your letter many times – too many times, I think – and I am realising things I didn’t perceive at the beginning. Now I understand everything; it is all clear. The only thing I want to tell you, in the most sincere way, is that you deserve the best, the absolute best in life, because you are one of the few people in this ditty world who is honest with himself. Actually, that is the only thing that counts. I don’t know how your happiness could offend me even for one minute. Mexican girls (like me) sometimes have such a dumb view of life! However, you know this and I’m sure that you’ll forgive me for having behaved in such a stupid way. Nevertheless, to me you’ll always be the Nick that I met one morning at number 18 of East 48th Street, in New York. I told Diego that you’ll get married soon, and he communicated it to Rose and Miguel (Covarrubias) the next day when they came to visit. I had to admit it was true. I regret very much having mentioned it before asking for your permission, but now it is done and I beg you to forgive me for my indiscretion.

  I want to ask you a big favour: send me the little pillow by mail. I don’t want anyone else to use it. I promise I will make you another one but I want the one that is now on the sofa downstairs, close to the window. Another favour: don’t allow “her” to touch the fire signs on the stairs (you know which). If you can avoid it, and if it’s not too much of a bother to you, try to avoid taking her to Coney Island, especially to Half Moon. Take my picture down from the chimney and put it in the room that Mam has in the studio. I’m sure that she likes me as much as before. Plus, it’s not convenient for the other woman to see my picture in your house. I would like to tell you a lot of things, but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I hope you can understand all my wishes without words...

  As for the letters I sent you, if they’re getting in your way, please give them to Mam and she can send them to me. In any case, I don’t want to be a burden for you.

  Please forgive me for behaving like an old-fashioned bride. Asking you for my letters is ridiculous on my part, but I’m doing it for you and not for me. I would think that those papers don’t interest you anymore.

  While I was writing this letter, Rose called and told me that you had already gotten married. I don’t have anything to say about what I felt. I hope you’re happy, very happy.

  If you have the time from time to time, please send me a few words just to let me know how you are. Will you do it...?

  Thanks again and again for the magnificent photo. Thank you for your last letter and for all the treasures you gave to me.

  A hug, Frida

  Please forgive me for calling you on the phone that night. I’ll never do it again.

  98. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940.

  Oil on canvas, 40 x 28 cm.

  Donation from Edgar Kaufman Jr.,

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  In The Two Fridas, the mirror duality becomes a schizophrenic visualisation of Frida’s personal dilemma, the European woman (Frida) in white with lace and appliqués befitting a chaste Catholic girl and the Tehuana woman of darker skin and colourful costume, the earthy peasant persona encouraged by Diego Rivera. Both hearts are exposed and a vine-like blood vessel connects a small amulet that is a miniature portrait of Diego as a child and the two hearts of the “Fridas”. The European “Frida’s” heart is ripped and savaged while she grips the end of the shared artery with a surgical clamp. But blood still drips from its end onto her snow white dress.

  At this point in her life, she had found a path to her independence, but at a cost she seemed unwilling to pay. The assassination of Leon Trotsky with an Alpine piolet (ice axe) on August 20, 1940 by Ramón Mercader – an acquaintance of Frida’s who pursued her while she was in Paris – brought everything to a head. Frida and her sister Cristina were hauled away by the police and vigorously interrogated for 12 hours as possible suspects in the assassination conspiracy. Diego fled to San Francisco, leaving her behind. Compared to the humiliations she suffered because of his sexual betrayals, this failure was only a pin-prick, but it capped her resolve that she had done the right thing in divorcing him.

  99. Frida and Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo

  and Diego Rivera, 1931. Oil on canvas, 100 x 79 cm.

  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

  “Long live joy, life, Diego...”

  The 1940s came at Frida Kahlo in a rush of contradictions. Legally, she had shed her ties with Diego Rivera, but financially her life was bound to him through a complex banking arrangement where her expenses were paid from sales of his work. She was in complete denial when she wrote to Nickolas Muray:

  …I don’t accept a damned cent from Diego, the reasons you must understand. I will never accept money from any man till I die…[34]

  Her freedom to begin her life anew had been secured – an apparently happy result – and yet her 1940 painting, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, is clearly a regression to her previous “cropped hair” period following Diego’s affair with her sister Cristina. Frida sits on a yellow cane chair, her hair cropped like a convict. Scattered on the floor are the cut remnants of her usually abundant coiffure. The hair cuttings don’t lie on the ground in realistic perspective, but float dreamlike in suspension like seaweed or the roots of long-dead plants. She wears an outsized man’s suit of the kind favoured by Diego, giving her the appearance of being undernourished, a refugee or aging petitioner seeking redress. The scissors rest in her lap. Might the pruning process continue?

  And, finally, her new reality of independence brought with it the nagging need to back up her financial “revolt” with actual sales. She wrote:

  I organise things as necessary to live more or less “decently”… I’m always painting pictures, since as soon as I’m done with one, I have to sell it so I have the moola for all the month’s expenses.[35]

  As Europe plunged into World War II on the tracks of Hitler’s Panzers, the world of art seemed oddly remote. Artists’ canvasses remained aloof to the calls of patriotism and self-sacrifice. Many artists fled before the insanity of armed conflict engulfed their native countries, or they turned inward and reclusive, doing nothing to earn the wrath of occupying armies. There were few Goyas who documented Napoleon’s Peninsular War in Spain, or painters such as John Singer Sargent, Fernand Léger, Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz, or Marc Chagall who once added their visions to the horrors of World War I, and fewer Picasso’s turning out condemnations such as Guernica, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government in 1937.

  Frida and Diego were both committed to the Communist Party and the anti-fascist cause – even if the Communists had ideological reservations about Diego’s commitment to anti-capitalist dogma due to his willingness to accept commissions from anyone who could write a check – and the capitalists had all the money. This Communist thread always seemed to join the two artists regardless of their current conjugal state. They constantly appeared at rallies and fund-raisers, especially after June, 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia.

&nbs
p; With her life in this turmoil of contradictions, she doggedly pressed forward with her art. Frida imagined her self esteem could only survive through the success of her paintings in what remained of the art world outside the distraction of world war.

  The Wounded Table, painted in 1940, was an explosion of her favourite lexicon of symbolism across a huge horizontal canvas. The old partnership from Four Inhabitants of Mexico City returned again: the Judas, the Aztec idol, and the skeleton. Only now, they are the worse for wear, leaking blood into the plank stage behind drawn-back curtains. The little girl from Four Inhabitants of Mexico City has been replaced by the innocents: Isolde and Antonio, her sister Cristina’s children, and her pet deer, El Granizo complete with camouflage spots. Frida has joined the group as well, but her body is almost lost in the awkward gropings and strokings of her grim companions. The idol’s legs are a pair of canes (“See those canes?” Lupe Marín had ridiculed at the wedding party when she exposed Frida’s withered leg beneath the long skirt. “That’s what Diego must put up with!”). The forlorn assembly sits at a table, turning a triage of wounded misfits into a Punch and Judy show. Who will speak the first line? The table’s legs are flayed human legs. It seems unable to support these broken things that sit awaiting either their cue, or the audience judgment.

  Her broken marriage and fragmented life become the focus of her early 1940s work. In The Dream, the Judas makes an encore appearance, its paper puppet limbs wired as a bomb. He accompanies her four poster bed on its journey floating through a bilious sky. Judas the passenger rests above her on the canopy just where an actual Judas figure reclined in her bedroom in La Casa Azul. Her flowered bedspread lives as vines radiate with leaves that reach for and embrace her. The Dream is an agitating and uneasy painting to view, complimenting her fragility that is threatened in The Wounded Table.

  Frida had worked hard on the large painting The Wounded Table for the International Surrealism Convention scheduled to be held in Mexico City. Ultimately, the convention was cancelled due to the war. German travel restrictions virtually shut down France and the occupied countries as Hitler’s henchmen began spreading their nets to induct labour conscripts and capture Jews.

  100. Still Life: Viva la Vida (Long Live Life), c. 1951-1954.

  Oil and earth on masonite, 52 x 72 cm. Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City.

  101. Coconuts (Glances), 1951. Oil on masonite,

  25.4 x 34.6 cm. Private collection.

  Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser

  Coyoacán, March 15, 1941

  Very dear Doctor,

  You are right to think that I am a jerk since I didn’t even write to you when we returned to Mexicalpán de las Tunas [Mexico], but you must know that it wasn’t laziness on my part but that when I came back I had a lot of things to take care of at Diego’s house – it was very dirty and disorganised. As soon as Diego arrived, you can imagine how much attention I had to give him and how absorbing that is. Every time he comes back to Mexico he’s in the worst of moods, until he gets used to the rhythm of this “cuckoo” country again.

  This time his bad mood lasted more than two weeks. It wasn’t until he was brought some marvellous idols from Nayarit that, just from looking at them, he started liking Mexico again. Besides, the other day he ate a very good duck in mole; this helped him care about life even more. He pigged out on the duck in mole so badly that I thought he was going to get sick, but he is very resilient, as you know.

  After these two events, the idols from Nayarit and the mole, he decided to go out and paint watercolours in Xochimilco, and he has been gradually recovering his good mood. Generally, I understand well why he is so frustrated in Mexico and I agree with him, since to live in Mexico you have to always go around with barbed wire on so the others don’t screw you over. The stress needed here to defend oneself from all those assholes is greater than in Gringolandia, for the simple reason that over there people are more stupid and malleable, and here people are always tearing at each other’s hair wishing to trick and fuck their neighbour. Moreover, in Diego’s field, people always react with tricks and fuck-ups, and that’s what’s most frustrating, since as soon as he returns, the newspapers start to bother him. They’re so envious that they would like to make him disappear by magic. By contrast, in Gringolandia, things have been different. Even in the case of the Rockefellers, we could fight against them without stabs in the back. In California everyone has treated him very well. They actually respect everybody’s work.

  Here, he finishes a fresco, and a week later it’s all scratched or spat upon. This, as you can imagine, makes anyone feel discouraged, especially when one works like Diego, putting in all the effort and energy that he is capable of, without considering that art is “sacred” and all that bunch of stupidities; on the contrary, working hard like a mason. On the other hand, and this is my personal opinion, even though I understand the advantages that any job or activity may have in the United States, I am more for Mexico. I don’t like gringos, for all their good qualities and bad defects. I very much dislike the way they are, their hypocrisy and disgusting puritanism, their Protestant sermons, their limitless pretentiousness, and the fact that one always has to be “very decent” and “very proper...”

  I know that people down here are sons of bitches, jerks, etc., etc., but I don’t know why, they do even the biggest dirty tricks with a little bit of a sense of humour.

  Gringos, on the other hand, are arrogant by birth, even if they are very respectful and decent (?). Also, their lifestyle seems most dreadful to me: those fucking parties, where everything is solved after imbibing a bunch of aperitifs (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a happy way), from a window in a painting, to a declaration of war, always keeping in mind that the seller of the painting or the declarer of war must be an “important” person. Otherwise, they don’t pay attention to you at all. Up there, only the “important people” can make it, even if they are scoundrels. I can tell you some more little comments concerning those types. You will reply that you can also live there without aperitifs or parties, but in that case, you can never do anything and it seems to me that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and to become “somebody” and, frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to be anybody. I don’t care for people’s pretentiousness, and I am in no way interested in becoming a “big shit”.

  102. Moving Still Life, 1952. Oil on canvas.

  Collection María Félix, Mexico City.

  103. Congress of People For Peace, 1952.

  Oil and tempera on masonite,

  19.1 x 25.1 cm. Private collection.

  104. Diego Rivera, Night Landscape, 1947.

  Oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm. INBA Collection,

  Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

  While she flushed her bad feelings into her paintings, Frida put on a game face and continued her socialising. To break the ice at parties, she had a pair of pink diamond-studded incisors made that she could slip on like caps over her teeth. Her alcohol input increased exponentially and her mood swings from happiness to depression became more frequent. Soon, there was never enough alcohol to escape the depression and uncertainty. Knowing there was a good market for her self-portraits with animals, she poured her state of mind and body into them. Her Self-Portrait with Thorny Necklace mirrors this period. A dead hummingbird – when portrayed alive it is a symbol worn to bring luck – dangles from a thorny necklace that spreads down across her shoulders as naked vines cover a trellis. The necklace pierces her neck with thorns, drawing blood in a Christ-like martyr’s pose. She wears blameless white before a tangle of exquisitely veined jungle leaves. One of her monkeys, Caimito de Guayabal, thoughtfully examines the necklace while a black cat crouching behind her left shoulder takes the measure of the viewer. Frida herself seems exhausted in her self-mortification. Her exaggerated eyebrows above drooping eyelids match the arc of the hummingbird’s dead wings.

  Once again, Diego intervened in her self-destructive lif
estyle and consulted their mutual friend, Dr. Eloesser, in San Francisco. The doctor suggested she come to the States. She had spent three months in a traction device connected to her chin and welcomed the invitation from her old friend. Frida arrived in San Francisco in September, 1940. Eloesser immediately committed her to a rest cure and assorted therapies in St. Luke’s Hospital for her exhaustion and alcoholism. He also contacted Diego and explained the Mexican doctors’ grim diagnoses such as tuberculosis of the bones and a need for spinal surgery were false and what she needed was her Panzón at her side during her recovery. While he had her under his cure, the doctor was determined to affect reconciliation between the two artists who were miserable in their self-imposed separation.

  During their time together, Diego introduced her to the public relations officer of the Golden Gate Exhibition, a young refugee from Nazi Germany, Heinz Berggruen. She and the young man were immediately attracted to each other and when Frida finished her hospital stay, she made a trip to New York with Berggruen and they spent a tempestuous time together, staying at the familiar Barbizon-Plaza Hotel and touring the Manhattan party circuit. Eventually, Berggruen came to his senses as he accepted Frida’s need for someone with the fortitude to support her high maintenance life style and complex emotional needs. Heinz was no Diego Rivera. Even so, their parting was emotional and difficult.

  “No sex” and “no cash” were two of Frida’s stipulations to make the remarriage work. She had no intention of sharing Diego sexually with any other women and she insisted on making her own way financially and paying half of the household expenses. Diego was pleased with the former and maintained the mutually accepted fiction of the latter. The agony of their separation played itself out on Diego’s 54th birthday, December 8, 1940 when they were remarried in a civil ceremony.