Frida’s work did, however, receive a favorable review in La Flèche. The critic, L. P. Foucaud, said that each of the seventeen paintings exhibited was a “door opened on the infinite and on the continuity of art.” He called Frida’s color “pure” and her drawing “perfect,” and praised the “authenticity” and “sincerity” of her work, saying that in a period when “guile and swindle are in style, the striking probity and exactitude of Frida Kahlo de Rivera spare us many strokes of genius.” And the Louvre saw fit to purchase The Frame, a charming portrait of Frida with her hair done up with a yellow-green ribbon and topped with a huge yellow flower, which is now in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Of all Frida’s admirers, Diego, naturally, had the most to say about her Paris triumph. Within weeks of her arrival, he wrote, his wife had won the hearts of the Paris art world: “The more rigorous the critics, the greater their enthusiasm. . . . Kandinsky was so moved by Frida’s paintings, that, right before everyone in the exhibition room, he lifted her in his arms, and kissed her cheeks and brow while tears of sheer emotion ran down his face. Even Picasso, the most difficult of difficults, sang the praises of Frida’s artistic and personal qualities. From the moment he met her until the day she left for home, Picasso was under her spell.”
As a token of his affection for her, Picasso gave Frida a pair of earrings in the form of tiny tortoise-shell hands with gold cuffs. He also taught her a Spanish song, "El Huérfano," which begins: "Yo no tengo ni madre ni padre que sufren mi pena,/Huérfano soy.” (I have neither mother nor father to suffer my pain,/I am an orphan.) It became one of her favorites and in later years she often sang it for Diego and for friends.
On March 17, Frida summarized her impressions for Ella and Bertram Wolfe:
Ella linda and Boitito my real cuates:
After two months I write to you. I already know that you are going to say the same thing as always—that “chicua” is a mule! but this time believe me that it was not so much mulishness but rather that bandit luck. Here go the powerful explanations: a) since I arrived I have been in a frightful mess. I have been cross as hell since my exhibition had not been arranged. My paintings were waiting for me very calmly at the customs house because Breton hadn’t even collected them. You do not have even the slightest idea of the kind of old cockroach Breton and almost all the surrealist group are. In a word, they are perfect sons of . . . their mother. I will tell you the whole story of said exhibition in detail when we see each other’s faces again since it is long and sad. But in a summarized synthesis the thing was delayed by a month and a half before the date etc. etc. of the famous exhibition was completely sure.
All of this happened with the accompaniment of quarrels, insults, arguing, gossip, much anger and annoyances of the worst kind. Finally, Marcel Duchamp (the only one amongst the painters and artists from here that has his feet on the ground and his brains in their place) was able to succeed in arranging the exhibition with Breton. It opened on the 10th of this month in the Pierre Colle gallery which according to what they tell me is one of the best here. There were a lot of people on the day of the opening, great congratulations to the “chicua,” amongst them a big hug from Juan Miró and great praises for my painting from Kandinsky, congratulations from Picasso and Tanguy, from Paalen and from other “big cacas” of Surrealism. In sum I can say that it was a success, and taking into account the quality of the taffy (that is to say the crowd of congratulators) I believe that the thing went well enough. . . .
Soon we will talk about everything at length. Meanwhile I want to tell you: that I have missed you very much—that I love you more and more—that I have behaved myself well—that I have not had adventures nor lovers, nor anything of the kind, that I miss Mexico more than ever—that I adore Diego more than my own life—that once in a while I also miss Nick [Muray] a lot, that I am becoming a serious person, and that to sum up, until I see you again I want to send you both lots of kisses. Divide some of them equitably among Jay, Mack, Sheila and all the cuates. And if you have a small moment see Nick and give him a little kiss also and another for Mary Sklar.
Your chicua who never forgets you
Frida
A week after writing to the Wolfes, Frida was finally able to leave that “rottening” Europe. She sailed from Le Havre on March 25, bound for New York. Not all her memories of Paris were negative. She made good friends there, even among the “big cacas” of Surrealism, and she was entranced by the city’s beauty. Back in Mexico, she wrote this wistful letter (in Spanish) to a woman friend in Paris (probably Jacqueline Breton, because the name “Aube” appears in the margin of the copy she later inserted in her diary, where she speaks of the woman’s daughter).
Since you wrote to me, on that day so clear and so far away, I have wanted to explain to you, that I cannot escape the days, nor return in time to the other time. I have not forgotten you—the nights are long and difficult. The water. The boat and the pier and the departure, that was making you so small, to my eyes, imprisoned in that round window, that you looked at in order to keep me in your heart All this is intact. Later came the days, new days of you. Today I would like my sun to touch you. I tell you that your daughter is my daughter, the puppet people arranged in your large room full of glass, are both of ours.
The huipil with reddish-purple ribbons is yours. Mine, the old plazas of your Paris, above all the marvelous Place des Vosges, so forgotten and firm. The snails and the bride doll are yours too, that is to say you are you. Her dress is the same one that she did not want to take off on the day of the wedding with no one, when we found her almost asleep on the dirty floor of a street. My skirts with ruffles of lace, and the old blouse . . . make the absent portrait of only one person. But the color of your skin, of your eyes and your hair changes with the wind of Mexico. You also know that everything that my eyes see and everything that I touch with my own self, from all the distances, is Diego. The caress of cloth, the color of color, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, sheets of paper, dust, cells, war and the sun, all that lives in the minutes of the no-clocks and the no-calendars and the no-empty glances, is him—You felt it, for that reason you allowed the boat to carry me from Le Havre, where you never said goodbye to me.
I will always continue writing to you with my eyes. Kiss the little girl.
Chapter 16
What the Water Gave Me
FRIDA’S RESPONSE to being welcomed into the Surrealist pantheon by its founding spirit was a show of innocent dismay. “I never knew I was a Surrealist,” she had said, “till André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration.”
There may have been some cunning mixed with her naïveté. Frida Kahlo wanted to be perceived as an original, one whose personal fantasy was nourished in a general way by Mexican popular tradition rather than by any foreign “isms.” This is precisely how Breton and Rivera wanted to see her too, and it is true that her art is striking in its inventiveness and candor, its apparent freedom from the influences of European art movements. But Frida was much too sophisticated, much too well informed about the art of the past and the present, to have been a perfectly pure, self-generated artist, if such a thing exists. In fact, her emphatic disclaimer sounds suspiciously similar to Breton’s definition of Surrealism: “Pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any esthetic or moral preoccupation.”
Breton’s theories had surely preceded him to Mexico, and Frida certainly was not ignorant of them. Moreover, she knew that the Surrealist tag would help bring her critical acclaim, and she was happy to be accepted in Surrealist circles, first in New York, where Julien Levy’s gallery was a focal point for the movement, and then in Paris. Had she objected to the label, her fr
iend Miguel Covarrubias would not have categorized her as a Surrealist in the catalogue of the “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On the other hand, Frida made sure that it was not she who gave herself that label. Art historian Antonio Rodríguez quotes her as saying: “I adore surprise and the unexpected. I like to go beyond realism. For this reason, I would like to see lions come out of that bookshelf and not books. My painting naturally reflects these predilections and also my state of mind. And it is doubtless true that in many ways my painting is related to that of the Surrealists. But I never had the intention of creating a work that could be considered to fit in that classification.”
There was no doubt about what was the most fashionable movement in international art circles in 1940. When the “International Exhibition of Surrealism” opened on January 17 at Inès Amor’s Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, it was the season’s great cultural and social event. The exhibition had already traveled from Paris to London; it had been organized by André Breton together with the Peruvian poet César Moro and the Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, who had emigrated to Mexico in 1939 with his wife, Frida’s good friend Alice Rahon, also a Surrealist painter and poet. The guest list for the show’s opening, published in the newspaper, included “all Mexico.”
The catalogue promised “Clairvoyant Watches,” “Perfume of the Fifth Dimension,” “Radioactive Frames,” and “Burnt Invitations.” (If the show did not fulfill all these promises it at least made good on the last one—the invitations sent to a select few were elegantly singed along their edges.) Most of the men were in formal attire, and the women wore the latest modes from Paris. Lupe Marín’s sister Isabel fluttered about in a white tunic as the “Apparition of the Great Sphinx of the Night,” an enormous butterfly on her head all but hiding her pretty face. Undersecretary of the Treasury Eduardo Villaseñor gave a suitably inscrutable inaugural speech while Mexico’s social and cultural elite sipped fine whiskeys and cognacs and ate the gourmet supper offered by Inés Amor. When the party broke up, many of the guests went on to dance at El Patio, a popular cabaret.
Most of the reviews were positive. One critic, however, said the inaugural fiesta “had the character of a very correct visit to Surrealism, but not of a deep-felt or fiery encounter.” In fact, he said, Surrealism had lost its enemies, become fashionable, and was dead. Thoughtful reviewers noticed that with few exceptions, the Mexican participants in the show were really not Surrealists at all. Frida, for example, was disqualified from the movement because of her “spiritual ingenuousness.” She herself commented in a letter to Nickolas Muray that everyone in Mexico was becoming a Surrealist just to be in the show, but she sent two paintings anyway: The Two Fridas, 1939, and The Wounded Table, 1940, the only large-scale canvases she ever produced, and paintings upon which she had worked with special urgency, partly because she wanted them to be ready for the show.
Although the “International Exhibition of Surrealism” was important as Mexico’s first direct contact with European Surrealist art, its effect on Mexican art was less dramatic than the organizers had hoped. They had seen Mexico as fertile ground for Surrealism, yet Mexicans were not especially receptive. One obstacle was the dominance of the muralist movement, with its commitment to realism. Another impediment, this one harder to circumvent, lay in the fact that Mexico had its own magic and myths and thus did not need foreign notions of fantasy. The self-conscious search for subconscious truths that may have provided European Surrealists with some release from the confines of the rational world and ordinary bourgeois life offered little enchantment in a country where reality and dreams are perceived to merge and miracles are thought to be daily occurrences.
But if the “International Exhibition of Surrealism” and the presence of a number of European Surrealist refugees did not produce a Surrealist movement in Mexico, they did play an important role in stimulating the development of fantastic realism during the 1940s, a time when a number of Mexican artists rejected the hegemony of the muralist movement. Frida was surely one for whom contact with Surrealism served to reinforce both a personal and a cultural inclination toward fantasy. Though she was a Surrealist discovery rather than a Surrealist, there is a definite change in her work after her direct contact with Surrealism in 1938. Paintings from the early 1930s like Luther Burbank or Henry Ford Hospital display a naïve style and fantasy based on Mexican popular art. After 1938 her paintings became more complex, more penetrating, more disturbingly intense. As the lines that delineated Frida’s personality gained strength and the shadows filled with ambiguity, the mischievous impetuosity of her 1929 Self-Portrait and the devilish, feminine charm of the Self-Portrait she dedicated to Trotsky gave way to a new mystery and magnetism, a greater depth of self-awareness. And if this feeling has much to do with Frida’s cumulative years of suffering, the example of Surrealism’s stress on the subconscious as the source of artistic content cannot be overlooked, either. Certainly Breton’s theories affected the enigma and the psychological innuendo of her most Surrealist work, What the Water Gave Me (figure 50), a painting she said had special importance to her. It shows a bathtub reverie in which images of apprehension and recollection, sexuality, pain, and death float on the bathwater above the bather’s submerged legs. The mood is elusive and subdued. Memories are glimpsed, not grasped. This feeling of insubstantiality is sustained in the overall transparent gray-blue tonality and the unusually thin paint application. Daliesque in its plethora of minute and irrationally juxtaposed detail, but also recalling Frida’s admiration for Bosch and Brueghel, this canvas is the most complex and deliberately enigmatic of all Frida’s works.
Frida has painted her own legs from the bather’s viewpoint, partially obscured by bathwater. The tips of her feet, protruding from the water, are grotesquely doubled by reflection so that they look like fleshy crabs. The big toe of the deformed right foot is cracked open—a reference to her accident and to later operations. Like something in a horror movie, a twisted, severed vein creeps out of one of the holes in the drain next to her injured toe and drips blood into the water. (Frida’s fascination with blood revealed itself in her paintings beginning in 1932, but in the late 1930s it took on a more subtle sexual and sadomasochistic intensity as she observed the intricate dynamics of blood’s trickle and flow.) Also bringing to mind a scene from a horror film is the parade of insects, plus a snake and a tiny dancer, that moves across a tightrope held up by a rock/phallus, a mountain peak, and a masked seminude man. The rope lassos the neck and waist of a drowned Frida, who has blood spurting from her mouth and whose naked flesh has turned an ugly shade of gray. A final, blood-curdling detail is the daddy longlegs, several of whose legs reach down from the tightrope to touch Frida’s face.
Not surprisingly, What the Water Gave Me was the painting with which André Breton chose to illustrate his essay on Frida when it was reprinted in his book Surrealism and Painting. He said that when he was in Mexico, Frida was just finishing this work: “What the Water Yields Me illustrated, unbeknown to her, the phrase I had once heard from the lips of Nadja [the heroine of Breton’s Surrealist novel Nadja]: ’I am the thought of bathing in the mirrorless room.’ ” In a mirrorless room one perceives oneself only from the chest down. The mind can turn inward, and the body, uninhibited by reflections, can play any games it wants.
One can easily see why so many people have called Frida a Surrealist. Her self-mortifying portraits have a surrealistic emphasis on pain and a definite undercurrent of suppressed eroticism. Her use of hybrid figures (part animal, part plant, part human) is familiar from Surrealist iconography, where human limbs sprout branches, and a figure may have the head of a bird or a bull. Frida’s frequent opening up or severing of portions of the human body recalls the severed heads and hands or the hollow torsos seen so often in Surrealist painting. Her placement of scenes of dramatic inaction in immeasurably large, open spaces—spaces that are disconnected from everyday reality—can also be construed as a
Surrealist device to disassociate the spectator from the rational world. Even her closed-in, claustrophobic spaces might have a Surrealist source: Frida’s walls of omnivorous-looking tropical leaves crawling with camouflaged insects recall Max Ernst’s lush jungle landscapes.
But Frida’s outlook was vastly different from that of the Surrealists. Her art was not the product of a disillusioned European culture searching for an escape from the limits of logic by plumbing the subsconscious. Instead, her fantasy was a product of her temperament, life, and place; it was a way of coming to terms with reality, not of passing beyond reality into another realm. Her symbolism was almost always autobiographical and relatively simple. Although Frida’s paintings served a private function, they were meant, like murals, to be accessible in their meaning. The magic in Frida’s art is not the magic of melting watches. It is the magic of her longing for her images to have, like ex-votos, a certain efficacy: they were supposed to affect life. Frida explored the surprise and the enigma of immediate experience and real sensations.
The Surrealists invented images of threatened sexuality. Frida made images of her own ruined reproductive system. When in Roots, 1943, she joined her own body with a green vine (plate XXVII), she was communicating a specific personal feeling—a childless woman’s longing for fertility. Her emotion is utterly clear. Eroticism ran more in Frida’s veins than in her head—for her, sex was less Freudian mystification than a fact of life. Similarly, she did not need the tutoring of de Sade to depict with a frankness that verged on ferocity the drama of physical suffering. When Frida paints a stabbed naked woman, a stabbed Virgin of Sorrows or her own stabbed flesh, it is not an anonymous image of pain, nor a Freudian symbol like the punctured finger protruding from a window in Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex. When she splits open her torso to reveal a ruined classical column in place of her spinal column, it is not make-believe; she is reporting on her own physical condition. When she paints herself twice in Tree of Hope, 1946, once seated and once recumbent (plate XXX), this has nothing to do with irrational juxtaposition for the purpose of creating a “sur-reality.” It is not that paradigm of Surrealism described by the French poet Lautréamont, the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” It is a particular surgical patient anesthetized on a hospital trolley and watched over by the part of her being that was strengthened by hope and by will. This bluntness contrasts in the strongest fashion with Surrealist indirection and ellipses.
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