Gerry Souter

by Frida Kahlo

  Frida’s diary, also begun in 1944, became a constant companion as she lay in bed, later in a wheelchair, and finally housebound. It seems to be written in a world other than the one she was experiencing. The pages are filled with colourful drawings, doodles, cartoons and no small amount of bawdy humour, long rambling cadences of poetry, gentle insights, and raucous leperadas – scabrous stories. Accidental drools of ink are turned into profiles of heads and fantastic shapes. A reader can almost feel the numbing narcotic course through her veins as her pen moves across the page. Like her paintings, but with greater spontaneity, it maps her state of mind in a chaotic world that becomes less real as the end draws near.

  Anguish and pain, pleasure and death, Frida writes, are no more than a process.[41]

  114. Still Life, 1951. Oil on canvas, 28.5 x 36 cm.

  Augustin Cristóbal Collection, Galería Arvil, Mexico City.

  115. The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened, 1943.

  Oil on canvas, 63 x 81.5 cm. Jacques and

  Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City.

  Letter to Bertram and Ella Wolfe

  Coyoacán 1944, Mexico

  Very dear Boitito and Ella,

  You’ll think I have suddenly resuscitated in this traitor world when you receive this singular missive, or that I was just pretending that “the virgin was talking to me” and that’s why I hadn’t paid any attention to you guys since the last time we saw each other in New York three years ago. Think what you damn well please. Even though I don’t put out even a penny’s worth of writing, you’re always present in my thoughts.

  I want to wish for both of you that this current year of 1944 (even though I don’t like its numbering) might be the happiest and most pleasant of all that you have lived and will live. [...] OK children, here comes the interrogation: How is your health? What kind of lifestyle do you lead? Whom do you see and speak with once in a while? Do you still remember that in Coyoacán there is a well-born dame, by all appreciated, whose luck has not yet been jinxed, who always hopes to see your dear faces some day, in this dear land called Tenochtitlán?

  If this is the case, please write soon, telling me all the details so that my heart can rejoice. I’ll tell you without much detail, i.e., “briefly”, [...] how I am after my remarriage, the second episode in my life, which you already know about: Health: So, so. My spine can still take a few more blows.

  Love: Better than ever because there is a mutual understanding between the spouses without getting in the way of equal freedom for each spouse in similar cases. We have eliminated jealousy, violent arguments, and misunderstanding. There’s a great deal of dialectics based on past experience. So say I!

  Moola: Scarce amount, almost zero, but it’s getting to be enough for the most urgent needs, for food, clothes, contributions, cigarettes, and here and there a bottle of aged “Cuervo” tequila, which costs $3.50 (for a litre).

  Work: Too much for my energy, since I’m now a teacher at a painting school (increase in category, but decrease in strength). I start at 8 A.M. and get off at 11 A.M. I spend half an hour covering the distance between the school and my house – 12 noon. I organise things as necessary to live more or less “decently”, so there’s food, clean towels, soap, a set-up table, etc., etc. = 2 P.M. How much work!! I proceed to eat, then to the ablutions of the hands and hinges (meaning teeth and mouth). I have my afternoon free to spend on the beautiful art of painting. I’m always painting pictures, since as soon as I’m done with one, I have to sell it so I have moola for all of the month’s expenses. (Each spouse pitches in for the maintenance of this mansion.) In the nocturnal evening, I get the hell out to some movie or damn play and I come back and sleep like a rock. (Sometimes the insomnia hits me and then I am fuc-bulous!!!)

  Alcohol: I’ve succeeded in making my will of steel help me decrease the amount of drinking, bringing it down to two glasses by day. Only on rare occasions does the amount of consumption increase in volume, and is transformed by magic into a drunk state with its necessary morning “hangover”. But these cases are not very common or beneficial.

  As for the rest of things that happen to everyone... After 19 years, Don Diego’s paternal love has been reborn, and as a result, little Lupita, so-called Picos, has been living with us for the last two years. Her mother, big Lupe. The eternal bomb, exploded against little Lupe, and such events made me into an adoptive “mummy” with her adoptive child. I can’t complain, since the child is good to Meechelangelo and more or less adapts herself to her dad’s personality. Even so, my life is not ideal. From 1929 to the present, I don’t remember any time when the Rivera couple did not have at least one female companion in their home. Home, sweet home!

  What changed was the nature of the company; in the past, it was closer to worldly love; now it is more filial. You know what I mean. Well comrades, I’m leaving now. I told you a few things about my current life. I expect to get an answer right away to this unexpected, abrupt, heterogeneous, and almost surrealistic letter.

  Your faithful and sure friend, Doña Frida, the trickster.

  116. Fruits of the Earth, 1938. Oil on masonite,

  40.6 x 60 cm. Collection of the Banco Nacional de México,

  Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City.

  117. Tunas (Still Life with Prickly Pear Fruit), 1938.

  Oil on plate, 19.7 x 24.8 cm. Private collection.

  Conclusion

  In 1938, Sigmund Freud fled Vienna to live in London and returned to a previous study of the story of Moses. He also returned to themes that constantly resurfaced in his work, the impact of trauma on memory and a people’s identification with a leader who has both uplifted and disappointed them. Frida borrowed a copy of Moses and Monotheism from one of her patrons, Jose Domingo Lavín. He suggested she take some of Freud’s ideas and commit them to a painting. When she had finished the book, she took three months to create one of her more revealing masterpieces, titled simply, Moses. Of all her later work, Moses recalls her multi-subject story compositions painted in the mid-1930s, specifically My Dress Hangs There (1933) and What the Water Gave Me (1938). But in Moses, the frame barely contains the mural-like explosion of portraits, birth symbols and historic vignettes. It is a “mural” only in its stylistic tying together of diverse story elements à la Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. While she uses the birth of Moses, a heroic character, as the core raison for the painting, Frida manages to turn it into a personal pastiche of gods, demigods, philosophers, Judeo-Pharaonic symbolisation, sociopaths, and mythic heroes stirred together with her own iconic code. At an informal gathering at Lavín’s home, she explained some of her personal beliefs and how they are enmeshed in a portion of the work:

  …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 …[42]

  Whatever her mix of verbal and artistic gymnastics, Moses captured the attention of the Mexican art establishment. She received the Ministry of Education National Prize of Arts and Sciences and the sum of five thousand pesos. Frida Kahlo’s ingenuous use of language in her diary and here, explaining one of her more densely populated and philosophically impenetrable works, gives away the core of her personality and one reason for her legion of friends and admirers. Each life that touched hers came away with a reflection that matched an expectation. Each took away a piece of the Frida Kahlo puzzle as a revelation, a personal discovery and a gift.

  Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

  New York, June 30, 1946

  Alex darling,

  I’m not allowed to write much, but this is just to let you know that I’m
already over the big operation. It’s been three weeks since they cut and cut bones. The doctors are so marvellous and my body so full of vitality that today they had me stand on my poor feet for two little minutes. I don’t believe it myself. The first two weeks I was in great pain and tears. The pain is such that I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It’s very strong and bad. But this week the pain has decreased with the help of drugs and I’m doing relatively well. I have two big scars on my back in this shape.

  Later, they cut a piece of my pelvis to use as an implant in my spine. This is the scar that is the least ugly and most straight. Five vertebrae were damaged, but now they are going to be fine. The drag, though, is that the bone takes a long time to grow and settle, so I still have six weeks in bed until I’m discharged from the hospital and until I can flee this horrible city and return to my beloved Coyoacán.

  How are you? Please write me and send me one book. Please don’t forget me. How’s your mother; Alex, don’t leave me all alone in this sickening hospital; write to me. Cristi is really bored and we’re both dying of heat. It’s very hot and we don’t know what to do anymore. What’s new in Mexico, what’s going on with my people around there? Tell me things about everyone and especially about you.

  Your, F

  I send you lots of affection and many kisses. I received your letter. It made me very happy! Don’t forget me.

  Letter to Ella Wolfe

  Coyoacán, Oct. 23, 46

  Beautiful Ella of my heart,

  You may be surprised that this lazy and shameless girl wrote you, but you know anyway that I love you very much, with or without letters. Here there’s no important news. I’m getting better and I’m already painting again (a really shitty picture) but at least it’s something. Nothing would be worse. Diego is working as usual – twice as much. After the discussion with Boitito there haven’t been any heated arguments in this house. He is over his anger, and I think it was good for both of them to get some things off their chests. How is Boit? And Sylvia; (I wrote my I’s wrong). Give lots of kisses to Boit, Jimmy, Sylvia, Rosita, and to all the pals that remember Mee-chelangelo.

  I want to ask you a favour the size of the Teotihuacán pyramid. Can you do it? I’m going to send letters for Bartoli to your address for you to forward them to wherever he is, or to keep them and give them to him when he comes through New York. For all you hold dear in life, please don’t allow these to go [to other hands] but directly to his. You know what I mean, kid! I wouldn’t like anybody, even Boitito, to know it, if you can avoid it, since it’s better for just you to keep my secret, do you understand; Here nobody knows anything except for Cristi, Enrique, you, me, and the man in question. If you want to ask something about him in your letters, refer to him as sonja – is that clear! I beg you to tell me how you think he’s doing, what he’s doing, whether he’s happy, whether he takes care of himself, etc. about this matter, please. [...]

  118. Diego Rivera, The Temptations of St Anthony, 1947.

  Oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.

  But if Moses conveys her ability to control a multi-dimensional philosophical concept, the sheer brutality of her situation comes forward in brush strokes loaded with thick impasto as she is either expecting to be force fed, or has just spewed out a conglomeration of food that hangs draped in a gelatinous mass from her bed easel. This unsettling scene titled Without Hope plays out on a devastated landscape beneath a broiling sun. She peers at the viewer through tears from beneath a bedspread decorated with microscopic life, the persistent infections that dogged her.

  The following year, 1946, she created Tree of Hope, Keep Strong where she lives in a divided world. The “two Fridas” in this case represent an incised but as yet unstitched post-operative patient stretched out on a hospital cart behind the seated Tehuana-dressed beauty clutching one of her many corsets that has been painted bilious pink and in the other hand a flag that reads, “Tree of Hope, keep firm”. Despite this rallying cry and the ministrations of her doctors, the spiral continued downward. Hope, in this case was denied her as Wilson’s vertebrae fusing operation failed to ease the pain, possibly because Wilson fused the wrong vertebra. Of course, it didn’t help that Frida refused to obey his recommendation for bed rest and a more sedentary lifestyle.

  In 1950, a bone graft from a piece of her pelvis followed the failed fusion and was equally unsuccessful. And by now, a previous fungus growth appeared once again on her hand. An abscess was discovered beneath one of her corsets and another surgical wound that had not healed properly stank, “…like a dead dog”. She spent that year in bed. For much of her stay, Diego took a room next to hers and did what he could to keep her spirits up.

  Frida had symbolically reduced Diego to a benign and helpless infant in her maternal arms as they both face the fates in her 1949 painting, The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), Diego, I and Señor Xóloth. She also placed in the centre of his forehead her single eye of truth and wisdom. He had become the single constant in her life that she trusted – regardless of his infidelities. He began to age visibly as he watched her paint in shades and hues of pain.

  By now, Diego Rivera was part of an aging mythos, the Mexican mural movement that began in 1922. Though he remained popular, his legend appeared in the past tense as Frida Kahlo’s was in ascendancy. Her work had appeared in a number of group shows around the world and earned decent prices from a growing number of collectors. Diego took great pride in her success and took every opportunity to show her off and praise her talent. That didn’t stop him from having affairs, or stop her from abusing doctors’ orders as if to hurl more guilt in his face when her body rebelled. But as his trips to the hospital became more frequent with the illnesses of aging, she cheered him and sent him small presents as though he was her ailing child.

  119. Page from the diary of Frida Kahlo, 1953.

  Gouache on paper. Private collection.

  Invitation to a gallery showing of her work, 1953?

  With friendship and affection

  straight from the heart,

  I have the pleasure to invite you

  to my humble exhibition.

  At eight at night,

  since you have a watch, after all,

  I’ll wait for you at the Gallery

  of Lola Alvarez Bravo.

  It is in Amberes number twelve;

  with doors on the street

  so you won’t get lost

  because that wouldn’t be nice.

  I just want you to give me

  your sincere and good opinion;

  you are well-read and written

  you have a first-class knowledge.

  These painted squares

  I painted with my own hands

  are waiting on the walls

  to be liked by my brothers.

  Well, my dear buddy,

  with true friendship,

  I am deeply thankful to you,

  “Frida Kahlo de Rivera”.

  Poem by Diego Rivera to Teresa Proenza, (undated)

  in the saliva.

  in the paper.

  in the eclipse.

  In all the lines

  in all the colours

  in all the jugs

  in my chest

  outside, inside.

  in the inkwell – in the difficulties of writing

  in the wonder of my eyes, in the last

  lines of the sun (the sun doesn’t have any lines) in

  everything. Saying “in everything” is idiotic and magnificent

  DIEGO in my urine diego in my mouth – in my

  heart in my madness, in my sleep – in

  the blotting paper – in the tip of the pen

  in the pencils – in the landscapes – in the

  food – in the metal – in the imagination.

  In the sicknesses – in the display cases –

  in his lapels – in his eyes – in his mouth,

  in his lie.

 
Frida Kahlo

  120. Page from the diary of Frida Kahlo, 1953.

  Watercolour on paper. Private collection.

  121. Page from the diary of Frida Kahlo, 1953.

  Gouache on paper. Private collection.

  122. “Pinté de 1916”. The first illustration in the

  diary which Frida kept from 1946-1954.

  Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City.

  By 1951, she emerged from her year of hospitalisation to be confined to a wheel chair. But in her Self-Portrait with Portrait of Dr. Farill, her outward gaze remains steady while her engorged heart is affixed to her palette suggesting she is painting with her life’s blood. Another portrait marked this year, a picture that tied up loose ends and her coming to grips with the death of her father, ten years earlier. Portrait of My Father is a sympathetic treatment of the man who urged her to seek her own path in life. He is portrayed with the view camera of his trade and the text in red on retablo banner inscrolled beneath the likeness ends, “with adoration, your Frida”.

  By this time, she must have sensed that there was not much time left to her. As with many who face death, she sought a return to her only religion, the only cause that had sustained her interest and commitment. Frida rejoined the Communist Party. Even in her wheel chair, she could still offer up her rally voice singing the Internationale and raise her fist in solidarity with her comrades. Her loyalty to Mexico was finally honoured in April, 1953 when Frida’s friend, Dolores Alvarez Bravo, devoted her Galleria de Artes Contemporaneo to a one-woman show of Frida Kahlo’s work. This was the only such show accorded Frida in Mexico in her lifetime. At the time of the show’s opening, her body was hacking its way through a bronchitis attack and she was confined to her bed. She and the bed were delivered to the gallery behind an escort of police sirens and blowing horns. There, heavily sedated, she became part of her exhibit, smiling up from her four-poster resting place at well-wishing faces from her past and those silent familiar witnesses looking down from the walls.