by Frida Kahlo
As 1953 drew to a close, her painting continued though its brushwork had reverted to a more primitive style from her learning years in the 1920s. She seemed to collapse into herself following the amputation of her right leg that had become septic with gangrene. She had kept that leg since her brush with polio at age thirteen when it was turned into a withered “cane”. The bus accident had broken it in eleven places. She had dragged it with her for more than 30 years and in all her paintings of that treacherous limb, she had used a mirror reflection and rendered it as her left leg. Now, it had been hacked off below the knee. Frida grudgingly accepted a wooden leg, but she was too frail to get much use from the prosthetic. Her addiction to pain killers and reliance on alcohol also made its convenience more hazardous than useful.
Despite daily injections that left her back and arms covered with scabs, she managed long periods of lucidity, keeping notes in her diary, and working on an autobiography through 1953. Her final painting, entitled Still Life: Viva la Vida (Long Live Life), depicts a collection of chopped watermelons with those words inscribed into a melon’s pulp. She attended a Communist rally on July 2, 1954 shaking her fist and chanting wit the crowd. Ten days later as Diego sat with her holding her hand she gave him a silver ring celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary 17 days distant. When he questioned the timing of her gift, she said, “…because I sense that I’ll be leaving you very soon”.
123. Page from Frida’s diary demonstrating
her continued belief in Communism.
124. Page from Frida’s diary (1946-1954) showing the
artist’s personal conflict in Moon, Sun, I?
Gouache on paper. Private collection.
Letter to the President of Mexico, Miguel Alemán
Coyoacán, October 20, 1948
Miguel Alemán: This letter is a protest of just indignation that I want to communicate to you, against a cowardly and humiliating crime that is being perpetrated in this country. I am referring to an intolerable act without precedent that the owners of the Hotel del Prado are committing by covering up with wooden boards the mural painting by Diego Rivera in the Dining Hall of this hotel. A few months ago this painting caused the most shameful and unjust attack in the history of Mexico against a Mexican artist for reproducing the controversial but historical phrase of Ramirez, “El Nigromante”. After that dirty and concealed attack on the part of the media, the hotel owners closed the scene with a bang by covering up the mural with wooden boards and... nothing happened! Nobody in Mexico protests! As it is commonly said, “they just dumped dirt on the issue”.
I do protest, and I want to communicate to you the tremendous historical responsibility that your government is assuming by letting a Mexican painter’s work, renowned worldwide as one of the highest examples of the Mexican Culture, be covered up, hidden from the eyes of this country’s people and from the international public because of sectarian, demagogic, and mercenary reasons.
That type of crime against the culture of a country, against the right that every man has to express his ideas – those criminal attacks against freedom have only been committed in regimes like Hitler’s and are still being committed under Francisco Franco, and in the past, during the dark and negative age of the “Holy” Inquisition.
It is not possible that you – who represent at this moment the will of the Mexican people, with democratic liberties gained through the incomparable effort of a Morelos or of a Juarez, and through the blood shed of the people themselves – can allow a few investors, in complicity with a few ill-willed Mexicans, to cover up the words that tell the History of Mexico and the work of art of a Mexican citizen whom the civilised world recognises as one of the most illustrious painters of our times.
[…] As a Mexican citizen and, above all, as President of your people, will you permit History to be silenced — the word, the cultural action and the message of the genius of a Mexican artist to be silenced?
Will you permit public freedom of expression and opinion, the means of progress of every free people, to be destroyed?
All this in the name of stupidity, narrow-mindedness, chicanery, and the betrayal of democracy?
I beg you to give yourself an honest answer about the historical role you have as the leader of Mexico in an issue of such significance.
I am laying forth this problem before your conscience as a citizen of a democratic country. You must join this cause, which is shared by all those who do not live under regimes of shameful and destructive oppression. By defending our culture, you will demonstrate to the peoples of the world that Mexico is a free country; that Mexico is not the ignorant and savage nation of the Pancho Villas; that, in democratic Mexico, we respect the blessings of Archbishop Martinez as well as the historic words of Nigromante. We paint saints and Virgins of Guadalupe, as well as paintings with a revolutionary content, on the monumental staircase of the Palacio Nacional. Let people from all over the world come to Mexico to learn how in Mexico we respect freedom of expression!
It is your obligation to demonstrate to civilised nations that you will not sell out, that in Mexico we have fought with our blood and we are still fighting to free our country from colonisers, even if they have lots of dollars. This is the moment to stop beating around the bush and to exercise your character as a Mexican, as the President of your people, and as a free man.
A word from you to those hotel owners will be a strong example in the history of freedom gained on behalf of Mexico.
You must not permit them to use gangster like demagogy against the dignity of your own decree and the cultural heritage of our whole country.
If you do not act as an authentic Mexican at this critical moment, by defending your own decrees and rights, then let the science and history book burning start; let the works of art be destroyed with rocks or fire; let free men get kicked out of the country; let torture in, as well as prisons and concentration camps. I can assure you that very soon and with very little effort, we will have a flaming “ made-in-Mexico“ fascist regime.
Once you called me on the phone, from the very studio of Diego Rivera, to greet me and to remind me that we were school mates at the Preparatoria. Now, I am writing to you to greet you and to remind you that, above all, we are Mexicans and that we will not permit anybody, especially some Yankee-type hotel owners, to ride on the neck of the Culture of Mexico, the essential root of the life of our country, thus denigrating and underestimating our national values of worldwide significance, turning a mural painting of universal transcendence into a dressed-up flea.
Frida Kahlo
125. Diego Rivera, The Dove, 1957. Watercolour on paper,
9.7 x 14.8 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
126. Page from the diary of Frida Kahlo, 1953.
Watercolour on paper. Private collection.
127. Self-Portrait with the Image of Diego on
My Breast and Maria on My Brow, 1953-1954.
Oil on hard fibre, 61 x 41 cm. Private collection.
On July 13, 1954, Frida Kahlo died at age 47. In a drawer near her bed was a large cache of Demerol vials, but some of her friends claimed she would never have taken her own life. Others disagreed. The official death certificate cites “pulmonary embolism”. She had chosen cremation because after spending so many years of her short life stretched out on a bed, she had no wish to spend eternity lying on her back. Meticulously dressed in a Tehuana costume and bedecked with her jewellery, Frida’s body was driven to the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City where more than 600 visitors paid their respects beneath the lobby’s towering neoclassical ceiling. A distraught and shaken Diego Rivera sat at her side throughout the visitation. Earlier, in his state of weeping denial, he had her veins cut to make sure she was truly dead. The funeral became a politically charged (a red hammer-and-sickle Communist flag had been draped on her coffin), overwrought, emotional event totally in keeping with her chaotic lifestyle.
A light rain fell on the cortege as the mourners walked down the Avenida J
uarez behind the hearse to the Panteón Civil de Dolores, the civil cemetery. At the centre of the front line of walkers was Frida’s poor old Panzón. Gone was the jaunty Stetson hat, the baggy suit with its pocket sagging from the weight of his Colt pistol. He wore a raincoat and looked like an aging banker. With his last kiss still lingering on her cold forehead, what remained of Frida left him behind at the crematory doors to cope with the final three years of his life.
In his autobiography, he admitted, “…Too late now, I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida”.[43] Diego Rivera died in Mexico City in 1957. In her 1953 autobiography, Frida wrote:
My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It’s not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can’t. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.[44]
Written in 1949 for the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition presented as an homage to Diego Rivera, organised by the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City.
PORTRAIT OF DIEGO
I warn you that I will paint this portrait of Diego with colours that I am not familiar with: words […]
HIS SHAPE: Diego is a big, immense child with a kind face and a somewhat sad gaze, with an Asian head on which grows dark hair, so thin and fine that it seems to float in the air. His bulging, dark, very intelligent, and big eyes are held almost outside their sockets with difficulty by swollen and protuberant eyelids. They are like batrachian eyes, separated from each other more than others. They are like this so his gaze can encompass a much broader visual field, as if they were built especially for a painter of big spaces and crowds. Between his eyes, so far away from each other, one can guess the invisible Oriental wisdom and very seldom does an ironic and sweet smile, blossom of his image, disappear from his Buddha-like mouth of thick lips. Seeing him naked, one thinks immediately of a child-frog standing on his hind legs […] His enormous, soft, and tender abdomen is like a sphere resting on his strong, beautiful, column-like legs. These end in big feet that open outward in an obtuse angle as if to cover the whole earth and stand on it matchless, like an antediluvian being, from which would emerge, from the waist up, an example of future humanity, two or three thousand years distant from us […]
HIS CONTENT: Diego is on the periphery of all limited and defined personal relationships. He is contradictory like all the things that ignite life; he is an immense caress and a violent discharge of powerful and unique forces at the same time. One can experience him on the inside like the seed possessed by the earth, and on the outside, like a landscape […]
As for his painting, his painting itself speaks prodigiously. The men of science will describe his function as a human organism, and all those who know how to value his incalculable transcendence in time will tell of his valuable social revolutionary cooperation and of his personal and objective work […]
There are three directions or lines that 1 consider basic in his portrait: First, he is a steadfast revolutionary fighter, dynamic, extraordinarily sensitive, and vital; an indefatigable worker in his trade with a knowledge like few painters in the world [possess]; a fantastic enthusiast of life and, at the same time, he is always unhappy for not having been able to learn more, build more, and paint more.
Second, he is always curious; a tireless researcher of everything. And third, he has an absolute lack of prejudice and therefore of any faith, because Diego accepts – like Montaigne – that “where doubt ends, stupidity begins”, and the person who has faith in something admits unconditional submission without the freedom to analyse or change the course of events.
Because of this marvellously dialectic, materialistic knowledge of life, Diego is a revolutionary… He is attacked constantly because of his profound desire to help transform the society in which he lives into one more beautiful, healthier, less painful, and more intelligent, and because he puts all his creative powers, his building genius, his penetrating sensitivity, and his constant work into this inevitable and positive Social Revolution […]
They say he is looking for publicity. I have rather observed that others want to be on good terms with him for personal gain, except that they use poorly applied Jesuit methods, so that, generally, it backfires on them. Diego does not need any publicity, much less the kind that is offered to him in his own country. His work speaks of him, not only what, he has done in the land of Mexico, where he is shamelessly insulted more than anywhere else, but also in all the civilised countries of the world, where he is recognised as one of the most important and talented men in the field of culture [… ]
All these hidden and overt acts are done in the name of democracy, morality, and Viva Mexico!
Sometimes they also use, Long Live Christ, the King! All this publicity that Diego does not seek or need proves two things: that Diego’s works and his irrefutable great personality are so important that they have to be considered by those whom he accuses of being hypocritical and shameless opportunists; that this country’s deplorable and weak pseudo-colonial condition allows things to happen in 1949 that could only take place at the height of the Middle Ages, during the times of the Holy Inquisition, or while Hitler was in power. They are waiting for his death to acknowledge [that he is] a marvelous painter, a valiant fighter, an honest revolutionary.
[…] But insults and attacks do not make Diego change. They are part of the social phenomena of a world in decadence and that is all. Everything in life still interests and amazes him, because it all changes. Everything beautiful gets his attention, but nothing disappoints him or scares him because he knows the dialectic mechanism of phenomena and facts […]
That is why Diego is not a defeatist or a sad person. Essentially, he is a researcher, builder, and above all, an architect. He is an architect in his painting, in his thinking process, and in his passion-ate desire to build a harmonic, functional, and solid society. He always builds with precise elements, [using] mathematics. It does not matter whether his composition is a painting, a house, or an argument. His foundation is always reality.
[…] He is extremely intelligent by nature and he does not admit ghosts. He is inflexible in his opinions, he never gives in, and he disappoints all those who hide in belief or fake goodness. That is why they call him immoral, but he really does not have anything to do with those who accept moral laws or rules […]
Covered by thorns, he protects his tenderness inside. He lives with his strong sap in a ferocious environment. He shines alone like a sun avenging the gray colour of rocks. His roots go beyond the anguish of solitude and sadness and of all frailties that do dominate other beings. He stands up with amazing power, then blossoms and bears fruit like no other plant.
Index
FRIDA KAHLO
Basket of Flowers, 1941
Beauty Parlour (I) or The Perm, 1932
The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened, 1943
The Broken Column, 1944
The Bus, 1929
The Chick, 1945
The Circle, 1951
Coconut Tears (Crying Coconut), 1951
Coconuts (Glances), 1951
Congress of People For Peace, 1952
The Deceased Dimas Rosas at the Age of Three, 1937
Diego and I, 1949
The Dream or The Bed, 1940
Ex voto, c. 1943
A Few Small Nips, 1935
The Flower of Life, 1943
Framed Self-Portrait “The Frame”, c. 1938
Frida and Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, 1931
Frida and the Abortion or The Abortion, 1932
Frida and the Caesarean Section, 1932
Fruits of Life, 1953
Fruits of the Earth, 1938
Fulang Chang and I, 1937
Girl in Diaper (Portrait of Isol
da Pinedo Kahlo), 1929
Girl with Death Mask, 1938
Henry Ford Hospital or The Flying Bed, 1932
The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), I, Diego and Señor Xólotl, 1949
Magnolias, 1945
Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, c. 1954
The Mask, 1945
Me and My Parrots, 1941
Memory or The Heart, 1937
Moses or Nucleus of Creation, 1945
Moving Still Life, 1952
My Birth, 1932
My Dress Hangs There or New York, 1933
My Grandparents, My Parents and I, 1936
My Nanny and I, 1937
Page from Frida’s diary demonstrating her continued belief in Communism
Page from Frida’s diary (1946-1954) showing the artist’s personal conflict in Moon, Sun, I?
Page from the diary of Frida Kahlo, 1953 1, 2, 3, 4
Pancho Villa and Adelita, c. 1927
“Pinté de 1916”