She says that on various occasions you told her some of the things that I told you, details that I never told Reyna because there is no reason for her to know them and I cannot understand for what purpose you told them to her. The fact is that now no one wants to be my friend because I have lost my reputation, something that I cannot remedy. I will have to be friends with those who like me just the way I am. . . .
Lira brought up the false statement that I had given him a kiss and if I keep on enumerating things it will take whole pages; all this naturally worried me in the beginning, but later it began not to matter to me at all (this was exactly the bad thing) you know?
From all of them, Alex I would have taken it without giving it any importance, because it’s what Everyone does do you understand? but I will never forget that you, whom I have loved as I love myself or more, saw me as a Nahui Olín [students considered the painter, Rivera’s model, to be “fast” or “loose"] or even worse than she, who is an example of all of those women. Every time you have told me that you don’t want to talk to me anymore you have done it as if to take a weight off yourself. And you had the gall Alex, to insult me, saying that I did certain things with someone else on the day that I did it for the first time in my life because I loved you as I love no one else.
And I am a liar because no one believes me, not even you, and thus little by little without feeling it, between all of you I am being driven crazy. Well, Alex, I would like to tell you everything, everything, because I do believe in you, but there is the misfortune that you do not believe in me, nor will you ever.
On Tuesday I am going, probably to Mexico if you want to see me I will be at the door of the Ministry of Education Library at 11. I will wait for you for an hour.
Yours Frieda
All her life Frida would use her intelligence, her magnetic charm, and her pain to firm her hold on those she loved, and in tear-spotted letters written during the long months of their quarrel, she tried to win her novio back. “For nothing in this life can I stop talking to you,” she wrote on December 27, 1925. “I will not be your novia, but I will always talk to you even if you do not answer me . . . because I love you more than ever, now that you are leaving me.” On February 19, 1926, she said that she was “prepared to make any sacrifice in order to do you good, since that way I will compensate a little for the bad that I did to you. . . . instead of everything that I could not or did not know how to give you, I will be yours, the day you want, so that at least this will serve as a proof to justify me a little.”
Frida tried to persuade him that she was reforming her character. She would “remake” her life in order to be more like the girl he had fallen in love with three years before. Sometimes she was angry: “You told me on Wednesday that it was time to end everything and that I should go my own way,” she wrote on March 13. “You think that that doesn’t hurt me at all, because many circumstances make you believe that I do not have a drop of shame and that in the first place I am worth nothing and have nothing to lose anymore, but it seems to me that I told you once before that even if to you I am worth nothing, to myself I am worth more than many other girls, something that you will interpret as the pretension of being an exceptional girl (a title that you once gave me) (now I don’t understand why) and for that reason I still take offense at what you so sincerely and with good intentions say to me.”
A few days later, on March 17, she pleaded: “I waited for you until 6½ at the Convent and I would have waited a lifetime, but I had to get home on time. . . . Because you have been so good to me, since you are the only one who has loved me well, I beg you with all my soul not to leave me ever, remember that I cannot say that I count on my parents because you know perfectly how I am [situated], so that the only one who can look out for me is you, and you are leaving me because you imagined the worst, just to think about it pains me—you say you don’t want to be my novio anymore. . . . What then do you want to do with me, where do you want me to go (it’s a pity that what I imagined as a girl, that you would carry me in your pocket, can’t come true) although you don’t say it you know that no matter how many stupidities I have done . . . it will be a long time before we can forget, before we can be good novios, good spouses, don’t tell me no for the love of God. . . . I will wait for you every day until 6 at Churubusco, maybe sometime you will pity and understand, as you understand yourself, your Frieda.” On April 12 she promised, “If someday we get married, you will see how I am going to be full of ’good’ almost made to order for you.”
Frida’s first Self-Portrait—indeed, her first serious painting (plate I)—was a gift for Alejandro. She began it sometime during the late summer of 1926, when she became ill again and was once more confined to the house in Coyoacán. By September 28, the portrait was almost finished; like so many of her self-portraits, it was a token by which she hoped to bind her loved one to her. “Within a few days the portrait will be in your house,” she wrote. “Forgive me for sending it without a frame. I implore you to put it in a low place where you can see it as if you were looking at me.”
The first Self-Portrait was thus a kind of visual entreaty, a love offering at a time when Frida felt that she had lost the person she most loved. It is a dark, melancholy work, in which she has succeeded in painting herself looking beautiful, fragile, and vibrant. She holds out her right hand as if she were asking for it to be held; no one, not even disaffected Alejandro, could resist taking that hand, one thinks. She is wearing a romantic wine-red velvet dress with what looks like a gold brocade collar and cuffs. Eschewing flapper styles, she stresses her femininity: a plunging neckline dramatically sets off her pale flesh, long neck, and breasts with prominent nipples. The tender depiction of her breasts seems a way of hinting at vulnerability without actually admitting it; by contrast, her facial expression remains cool and reserved. And instead of filling the width of her canvas with the portrait bust, Frida has left a strip of space on either side of the figure. Thus, as in Hans Memling’s Girl with a Pink, the delicate, spiritual qualities of the sitter are emphasized, and the slender, elongated girl looks all the more alone against the dark ocean and the sky.
Perhaps the gift did, indeed, touch Alejandro’s heart, for not long after he accepted it, he and Frida were reconciled. In subsequent letters to him, written while he was in Europe, she revealed how intensely she identified herself with her first Self-Portrait. She called it “Your Botticeli” [sic]. “Alex,” she wrote on March 29, 1927, “your ’Botticeli’ has also become very sad, but I told her that until you come back, she should be the ’sound asleep one,’ in spite of this she remembers you always.” On April 6: “Speaking of painters, your ’Botticeli’ is well, but underneath it all one sees in her a certain sadness that she naturally cannot disguise, in the triangle . . . that you know is in the garden . . . the plants have grown, surely it must be because it is spring, but they will not flower except when you arrive—and so many other things wait for you.” And on July 15, when she was expecting him to come home soon: “You cannot imagine how marvelous it is to wait for you, serenely as in the portrait.”
The painting was like an alternate self, one that shared and reflected the artist’s feelings, akin, in a way, to the little girl who befriended Frida in her childhood dreams. On the back of it are the words: “Frieda Kahlo at 17 years of age in September 1926. Coyoacán.” (She was in fact nineteen.) A few inches below this, almost in defiance of the painting’s tenebrous atmosphere, she wrote, in German, Heute ist Immer Noch—Today still goes on.
* * *
* Small votive paintings offering thanks to a holy being, usually the Virgin, for misfortunes escaped. These works, which are also called ex-voto paintings, depict both the event and the holy agent of miraculous salvation.
Chapter 5
The Broken Column
FRIDA’S LIFE from 1925 on was a grueling battle against slow decay. She had a continuous feeling of fatigue, and almost constant pain in her spine and right leg. There were periods when she felt
more or less well and her limp was almost unnoticeable, but gradually her frame disintegrated. A lifelong friend, Olga Campos, who has Frida’s medical records from childhood to 1951, says that Frida had at least thirty-two surgical operations, most of them on her spine and her right foot, before she succumbed twenty-nine years after the accident. “She lived dying,” said writer Andrés Henestrosa, another close friend for many years.
The first relapse, evident in Frida’s letters to Alejandro of September 1926, came about a year after the accident. A bone surgeon discovered that three vertebrae were out of place; she had to wear various plaster corsets that kept her immobilized for months as well as a special apparatus on her right foot. Apparently, at the time of the accident, the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital had neglected to check the condition of her spine before they presumed her to be mended and sent her home. Frida said, “no one paid any attention to me; what’s more, they did not take X-rays.” Her letters reveal that certain necessary medical treatments were not performed because her family could not afford to pay for them. When they could, the treatments were often ineffective. “The second plaster corset that they put on me doesn’t work anymore,” Frida wrote Alejandro during her relapse, “and for that they threw almost a hundred into the street, since they gave the pesos to a pair of thieves which is what most doctors are.”
To heal her body after polio, Frida had forced herself to move and to become an athlete. To salvage what she could after the accident, she had to learn to keep still. Almost by chance, then, she turned to the occupation that would remake her life. “Since I was young,” she said, “this misfortune did not at that time take on the character of a tragedy: I felt I had energies enough to do anything instead of studying to become a doctor. And without paying much attention, I began to paint.”
Although she had flair, until her apprenticeship with Fernández there is no evidence that as a schoolgirl Frida had artistic ambitions. She took the required, highly academic art courses given at the Preparatoria—one in drawing and another in clay modeling (taught by Fidencio L. Naba, who had studied in Paris and won the Prix de Rome). In addition, she briefly entertained the idea that she might earn a living by making scientific drawings for medical books, and after looking at glass slides of biological tissue through a microscope, she practiced making such drawings at home. But aside from this, her schoolmates recall only that she was “interested in art,” liked to watch the muralists at work, had an “artistic spirit,” and never stopped drawing capricious interlaces in her schoolbooks. “Her passion,” Manuel González Ramírez remembered, “was to make the lines meet among themselves and after two or three sinuous arcs, to make them meet again.”
Whenever Frida herself told the story of her initiation into painting—and characteristically she found various ways to tell it—she was careful not to promote the familiar artists’ myth of being born with a pencil in hand or to imply that “innate genius” had drawn her irresistibly to art from the age of three. To Julien Levy, at the time he was preparing her New York exhibition in 1938, she wrote (in English):
I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident. I was bored as hell in bed with a plaster cast (I had a fracture in the spine and several in other places), so I decided to do something. I stoled [sic] from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel because I couldn’t sit down [she means “sit up"], and I started to paint.
For her friend the art historian Antonio Rodríguez she embellished the story:
My father had had for many years a box of oil colors and some paintbrushes in an old vase and a palette in a corner of his little photography workshop. Purely for pleasure he would go to paint at the river in Coyoacán, landscapes and figures and sometimes he copied chromos. Ever since I was a little girl, as the saying goes, I had been casting an eye in the direction of the box of colors. I could not explain why. Being so long in bed, I took advantage of the occasion and I asked my father for it. Like a little boy whose toy is taken away from him and given to a sick brother, he “lent” it to me. My mother asked a carpenter to make an easel, if that’s what you would call a special apparatus that could be attached to my bed where I lay, because the plaster cast did not allow me to sit up. In this way I began to paint.
Her first subjects were those convenient to an invalid: she painted portraits of friends (two Cachuchas and two Coyoacán girl friends), of family (her sister Adriana), and of herself. Three of the paintings are known solely through photographs, and one, the 1927 portrait of Cachucha Jesús Ríos y Valles, was so bad, Frida thought, that she destroyed it. Though they are ambitious and promising, these paintings only begin to hint at the intricate, personal development that was to come. All are characterized by dark, gloomy tones, by stiff, rather amateurish drawing, and by an awkward handling of space that corresponds to no perceptual logic. Though the portrait of Adriana—she called it “la Boticelinda Adriana” (figure 12)—and those of Ruth Quintanilla and Alicia Galant have a certain stilted elegance, the painting of Miguel N. Lira, in which he appears surrounded by objects that must be symbolic of his efforts as a litterateur and poet, resembles, as she herself said, “a cardboard cutout.” But there are sophisticated touches which prove that Frida did, as legend has it, spend hours poring over books on the history of art. The primary influence is clearly that of Italian Renaissance painting, especially that of Botticelli. In a letter to Alejandro she mentioned her admiration for the Italian mannerist Bronzino’s portrait Eleonora di Toledo, and something of the poignant grace of that royal woman’s hands is seen in Frida’s delicate, aristocratic gesture in her Self-Portrait. There are traces as well of the linear elegance of the English Pre-Raphaelites, and of the sensuous elongated figures of Modigliani. Highly stylized motifs like spindly trees and scalloped clouds suggest such sources as medieval manuscript illumination or Art Nouveau illustrations; the spiral pattern that transforms the sea in the first Self-Portrait recalls Japanese screens and woodcuts.
Of the early paintings, however, only the first Self-Portrait hints at the intensely personal nature of Frida’s future work. Perhaps this is because it was, like so many of her later self-portraits, a token of love, a kind of magic talisman that was crucial to the artist’s wellbeing.
In reading Frida’s letters to Alejandro from the period of her relapse of 1926–1927, one is struck, page after page, by the intensity of her appetite for life—her will not simply to endure but to enjoy. One is also struck by her plaintive loneliness and the omnipresence of pain, and the way she uses these to bind her lover to herself. “How much I would like to explain my suffering to you minute by minute,” she wrote, knowing, as one friend put it, that “pity is stronger than love.”
January 10, 1927
Alex: I want you to come, you don’t know how I have needed you these days and how each day I love you more.
I am still sick, and you know how boring that is, I don’t know what to do anymore since it has been more than a year that I’ve been this way and I’m fed up with so much sickness, like an old woman, I don’t know how I’ll be when I’m 30, you’ll have to carry me all day wrapped in cotton. . . .
Listen tell me about your time in Oaxaca, and what kinds of terrific things you have seen, because I need to be told something new, because I was born to be a flowerpot and I never leave the dining room I am very very bored!!!!!! [Here she draws a weeping face] . . . I dream about my bedroom every night and no matter how many times I go around and around it in my head, I don’t know how to erase its image from my mind (what’s more, every day it seems more of a bazaar). Well! What can we do, hope and hope The only one who has remembered me is Carmen James [Jaime] and she only once, she wrote me a letter and that’s all—no one no one else______ I who so many times dreamed of being a navigator and traveler! Patiño will answer me that it is one irony of life—ha ha ha ha! (don’t laugh) But it is only 17 [actually nineteen] years that I have been stationed in my town—Surely later I w
ill be able to say—I’m going on a trip—I don’t have time to talk to you [Here she writes a bar with seven notes of music.] Well after all to know China, Italy and other countries is secondary. The first thing is, when are you coming? . . . I hope it will be very very soon, not to offer you anything new but so that the same old Frieda can kiss you—
Listen see if among your acquaintances someone knows a good recipe to bleach hair—(don’t forget).
And don’t forget that with you in Oaxaca is your
Frieda
Alejandro left for Europe in March. He planned to be gone for four months, traveling and studying German; it has been said as well that his family sent him abroad “in order to cool off his close relationship with Frida.” Perhaps Alejandro himself wanted to free himself from Frida’s possessive and increasingly needful grip. Though he was deeply tied to his novia, and continued to care for her all her life, Frida’s earlier promiscuity together with the horror of her present illness could have caused the young man to pull away.
Knowing how agonizing a farewell would be for both of them, Alejandro left Mexico without saying goodbye. Instead, he wrote that he had to be on hand when his aunt underwent surgery in Germany (recently he recalled that he invented this “operation” as a way of justifying his trip to Frida). He said that he would be back in July, but July came and went, and Frida kept writing to him overseas until he finally returned in November.
Sunday, March 27, 1927
My Alex: You cannot imagine with what pleasure I waited for you on Saturday, because I was sure that you would come, and that on Friday you had had something to do . . . at four in the afternoon I received your letter from Veracruz . . . imagine my sorrow, I don’t know how to explain it to you. I don’t want to torment you, and I want to be strong, above all to have as much faith as you, but I cannot console myself at all and now I am afraid that just as you did not tell me when you were leaving, you are deceiving me when you tell me that you are only going to be away for four months. . . . I cannot forget you even one minute, you are everywhere, in all my things, above all in my room, and in my books and my paintings. Not until today at 12 did I receive your first letter. Who knows when you will receive mine, but I am going to write to you twice a week and you will tell me if they get to you or to what address I can send them. . . .
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