Since I am not very tame, I don’t come down to drink water during the day.
At night, little by little, I come to your arms, my love.
And in her “Verses Expressing the Feelings of a Lover,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote:
If thou seest the wounded stag
that hastens down
the mountainside,
seeking, stricken, in icy stream
ease for its hurt,
and thirsting plunges in
the crystal waters,
not in ease, in pain it mirrors
me.
Although its drama is imaginary, Frida’s self-portrait as The Little Deer refers to her own life: the idea of a wounded victim being like a deer is expressed in a 1953 entry in her diary. Mourning the untimely death of a close friend, the painter Isabel (Chabela) Villaseñor (who played the beautiful young Indian wife in Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico!), she drew a portrait of herself holding a dove and with her body crisscrossed by long lines that look like lances. “Chabela Villaseñor,” she wrote. “Until I leave, Until I travel your path—Have a good trip Chabela! Crimson, Crimson, Crimson, Life death.” On the next page there is a memorial poem to her lost friend:
You left us, Chabela Villaseñor
But your voice
your electricity
your enormous talent
your poetry
your light
your mystery
your Olinka
all of you, you remain alive
Isabel Villaseñor painter poet singer.
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson
like the blood
that runs
when they kill
a deer.
Chapter 21
Portraits of a Marriage
YEARS AFTER Frida and Diego died, friends remembered them as “sacred monsters.” Their escapades and eccentricities were beyond the petty censurings of ordinary morality; not simply condoned, they were treasured and mythologized. As for being “monsters,” the Riveras could harbor Trotsky, paint paeans to Stalin, build pagan temples, wave pistols, boast of eating human flesh, and carry on in their marriage with the vast imperiousness of Olympian deities. By the 1940s, Diego, of course, was an ancient myth. Frida, on the other hand, was new to mythic stature, and during this decade their myths meshed.
After the remarriage, while the bond between Frida and Diego deepened, so did their mutual autonomy. Even when they lived together, Diego’s absences were frequent and long. Both had love affairs: his were open, hers (with men) she continued to keep secret because of his wild jealousy. Not surprisingly, their life was full of violent battles followed by bitter separations and tender reconciliations.
Starting with the “wedding portrait” of 1931, Frida recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage. The various paintings that show her and Diego together, or that include Diego only by implication—for example, in tears on Frida’s cheeks—reveal the extent to which the Riveras’ relationship changed with the years even while certain underlying realities remained constant. Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931; Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, 1943; Diego and Frida 1929-1944, 1944; Diego and I and The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Señor Xolotl, both 1949, all express Frida’s great love and need for Rivera. Tellingly, he connects with her in a different way in each painting. In the earliest, the wedding portrait, their relationship is a little stiff. Like figures in a double portrait by a folk limner, they face forward, rather than toward each other. This, together with the large sliver of space between them and the light clasp of their hands, makes the couple appear like new partners who have not yet learned the elaborate, interlocking steps of the marriage dance. By contrast, in the 1943 Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, Frida’s obsessive love for her unpossessable husband has made her trap his image in her forehead in the form of a “thought” (plate XXI). One year later, in Diego and Frida 1929-1944 (figure 62), she has intertwined herself so closely with Diego that their faces form a single head—a symbiotic state that is clearly not a comfortable, harmonious union. In Diego and I, Frida’s despair over Rivera’s philandering is almost hysterical; his portrait is lodged in her forehead, but he himself is elsewhere, and Frida seems to be strangling in the swirl of her own hair—a woman drowning in solitude (plate XXVI). When she painted The Love Embrace, she still wept, but the relationship appears to have found some resolution; Frida holds Diego in an embrace rather than a stranglehold (plate XXXIII). Whereas in the 1931 marriage portrait Frida played a daughterly role, and in 1944 the couple seem to have achieved, if not mutuality, at least a more or less matched battle, in The Love Embrace Frida finally possesses Diego in the way that presumably worked out best for them both—he is a big baby lying contentedly in her maternal lap.
The Riveras had much in common: humor, intelligence, Mexicanism, social conscience, a bohemian approach to life. But the greatest bond may have been their enormous respect for each other’s art. Rivera took pride in his wife’s professional successes and he admired her growing artistic mastery. He would tell people that before he or any of his colleagues had had a painting hung in the Louvre, Frida had had that honor, and he loved to show her off to friends. One visitor recalls that the first thing Rivera did when she met him was to say that she must meet Frida. “There is no artist in Mexico that can compare with her!” Rivera said, beaming. “He immediately told me that when he was in Paris, Picasso had taken a drawing by Frida, looked at it for a long time, and then said: ’Look at those eyes: neither you nor I are capable of anything like it.’ I noticed that in telling me this his own bulging eyes were shining with tears.”
Expounding on Frida’s genius, Rivera would say, “We are all clods next to Frida. Frida is the best painter of her epoch.” In his 1943 article “Frida Kahlo and Mexican Art,” he wrote: “In the panorama of Mexican painting of the last twenty years, the work of Frida Kahlo shines like a diamond in the midst of many inferior jewels; clear and hard, with precisely defined facets.” Frida was, he said, “the greatest proof of the renaissance of the art of Mexico.”
Frida reflected the compliment back to Diego. To her, Diego was the “architect of life.” She listened to his stories and theories with amused skepticism, sometimes interjecting, “Diego—it’s a lie,” or bursting out with her contagious belly laugh. When he talked she often made odd little movements with her hands. These were signals to let his listeners know what was true and what was false in his conversation. In her “Portrait of Diego,” she wrote:
His supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in fantastic situations and actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing of the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but rather because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface.
. . . Being the eternally curious one, he is at the same time the eternal conversationalist. He can paint hours and days without resting, chatting while he works. He talks and argues about everything, absolutely everything, like Walt Whitman, enjoying talking with everyone who wants to listen to him. His conversation is always interesting. It has sentences that astonish, that sometimes wound; others are moving, but never do they leave the listener with an impression of uselessness or emptiness. His words disturb terribly because they are alive and true.
Frida tolerated and even indulged Rivera’s egocentric
idiosyncrasies, and was extremely protective of him, coming to his defense, for example, when he was under attack for making art for millionaires, or when people accused him of being a millionaire himself. In “Portrait of Diego,” she challenged his critics with rhetoric that seems to flare at the nostrils.
Against the cowardly attacks that are made on him, Diego always reacts with firmness and with a great sense of humor. He never compromises or yields: he faces his enemies openly, the majority of them are sneaky, and a few are brave. He counts always on reality, never on elements of “illusion” or of “the ideal.” This intransigence and rebelliousness are fundamental in Diego, they complement his portrait.
Among the many things that are said of Diego, these are the most common: they call him mythmaker, publicity-seeker, and the most ridiculous, millionaire. . . . It is unbelievable, surely, that the lowest, most cowardly and stupidest insults to Diego have been vomited in his own house: Mexico. By means of the press, by means of barbaric and vandalous acts in which they have tried to destroy his work, using everything from the innocent umbrellas of “decent” señoras who scratch his paintings hypocritically, and as if they were doing it in passing, to acids and table knives, not forgetting common ordinary spit, worthy of the possessors of so much saliva and so little brains; by means of groups of “well-brought-up” youths who stone his house and his studio, destroying irreplaceable works of pre-Cortesian Mexican art—which form part of Diego’s collection—those who run away after having their laugh by means of anonymous letters (it is useless to speak of the valor of their senders) or by means of the neutral and Pilate-like silence of people in power, charged with guarding or importing culture for the good name of the country, not giving any importance to these attacks on the work of a man who, with all his genius, his unique creative effort, only tries to defend liberty of expression not only for himself, but also for all. . . .
But the insults and the attacks do not change Diego. They form part of the social phenomena of a world in decadence, and nothing more. The whole of life continues to interest, to amaze him, with its changeability, and everything surprises him with its beauty, but nothing disappoints or intimidates him because he knows the dialectical mechanism of phenomena and of events.
Frida was prepared to defend her husband physically as well as with words. Once, in a restaurant, a drunk at the next table picked a fight with him, calling him a damned Trotskyite. Diego knocked the man down, but one of his companions pulled a gun. Furious, Frida jumped in front of him, yelling insults. She was felled by a blow to her stomach. Fortunately, waiters intervened, but in any case, Frida had drawn so much attention that the assailants fled.
If Roots suggests a moment of matrimonial calm and contentment, the small painting entitled Diego and Frida 1929-1944 indicates that it came to an end in 1944. Indeed, the Riveras were separated for much of this year. As usual, they continued to see each other frequently, and in spite of the separation they celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary with a big fiesta and an exchange of gifts. Diego and Frida 1929-1944 was Frida’s anniversary gift to her husband. Encapsulating her urge to unite with—literally to be—Diego, she painted herself and her husband as a single head divided vertically into two halves. A necklace consisting of a tree trunk with spiky branches enlaces their common neck. Clearly, the fragility of the marital bond made Frida all the more anxious to possess Diego by merging her identity with his.
The spouses’ names and the dates of their married years are inscribed in the tiny clam shells that decorate the painting’s lily-shaped frame, the swelling sides and curved volutes of which recall the womb-like Flower of Life, also painted in 1944. Whether Frida intended this double portrait’s frame to suggest a flower or a womb—she was, she said, the embryo that “engendered him"—she surely intended the tiny pink and red shells and the pearly snail shells glued to its surface to have a sexual reference. To Frida, shells were symbols of birth, fecundity, and love: in the painting itself, a scallop and a conch intertwined by roots that extend from the necklace tree represent, Frida said (referring to similar shells in Moses), “the two sexes who are wrapped by roots, always new and alive.”
The male-female duality is seen as well in the simultaneous presence of the sun and the moon, and in the divided portrait head itself. Indeed, the notion of showing duality by dividing a head down the middle was probably taken from pre-Columbian art (Frida often wore a brooch with a Tlatilco head that is two faces joined in one with a single eyebrow) or from the Mexican depictions of the Trinity as three bearded heads merged in one.
As a token of love, Diego and Frida 1929-1944 is a little jarring. Oppressively convoluted shapes seem an outward manifestation of inner convolutions. The spouses’ faces are dissimilar in size and conformation, so that though they are joined, parts do not line up; the disjunction suggests the explosive instability of Frida’s marriage. To hold herself and Diego together, she has bound the single head with the necklace tree, whose branches are leafless, just as the Riveras’ union was childless. The intertwined branches look like Christ’s crown of thorns—the marriage bond is a martyrdom.
Three months later, they were still living apart when on Christmas Day Rivera wrote a note addressed “To the celebrated painter and distinguished lady Doña Frida Kahlo de Rivera with affection, devotion and profound respect from your unconditional milagro [miracle].” On the other side of the paper he said: “My dear niña fisita don’t let the fight make you angry. Know my affection and my desire that we should see the world once more together as we did last year and that I will see you smile again and know that you are happy. Give your Cupid back his foundation and let this friendship and this affection last forever.”
They did rejoin, and their love, in the deepest sense, did “last forever.” So did the pain. Most of the thorny moments in Frida’s marriage to Diego came from his erratic and self-indulgent behavior. He would be enthralled with someone or something, and after possessing and enjoying that person or object, would discard it the way a child discards an old toy. When his doctor pronounced him unfit for fidelity, Rivera happily followed the prescription.
Some people say that Frida enjoyed hearing Diego recount his amorous adventures, and it is true that she often joked about her husband’s incorrigible philandering. In public she scoffed: “Being the wife of Diego is the most marvelous thing in the world. . . . I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody’s husband and never will be, but he is a great camarada. ” In her “Portrait of Diego” she explained this attitude further:
I will not speak of Diego as “my husband” because it would be ridiculous, Diego never has been and never will be anyone’s “husband.” Nor will I speak of him as a lover, because to me he transcends the domain of sex, and if I speak of him as a son I will have done nothing but describe or paint my own emotions, almost my self-portrait, not the portrait of Diego. . . . Probably some people expect of me a very personal, “feminine,” anecdotal, diverting portrait, full of complaints and even a certain amount of gossip, the type of gossip that is “decent,” interpretable or usable, according to the morbidity of the reader. Perhaps they hope to hear from me laments about “how much one suffers,” living with a man like Diego. But I do not believe that the banks of a river suffer for letting the water run, or that the earth suffers because it rains, or the atom suffers discharging its energy . . . for me everything has a natural compensation. Within my difficult and obscure role of ally of an extraordinary being, I have the same reward as a green dot within a quantity of red: I have the reward of “equilibrium.” The pains or joys that regularize life in this society, rotten with lies, in which I live are not mine. If I have prejudices and if the actions of others, even the actions of Diego Rivera, wound me, I make myself responsible for my inability to see with clarity, and if I do not have such prejudices, I should admit that it is natural for the red corpuscles to fight against the white ones without the slightest prejudice, and that this phenomenon only signifies healt
h.
This broad-minded attitude may well have been true of Frida late in life and in cases where the affair was trivial. Yet to her most intimate friends, she bewailed the difficulties of her marriage.
“When I was alone with her,” Ella Wolfe remembers, “she would tell me how sad her life was with Diego. She never got used to his loves. Each time the wound was new, and she kept on suffering till the day she died. Diego never cared. He said having sex is like urinating. He couldn’t understand why people take it so seriously. But he was jealous of Frida—a double standard, ’el gran macho. ’ "
That she “kept on suffering” is evident in her self-portraits, and it is especially poignant in the two in which she wears the festive Tehuana headdress. In both Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, from 1943, and the 1948 Self-Portrait (plates XXI and XXV), Frida’s face, with its penetrating gaze beneath dark, connecting eyebrows, its carnal red lips and faint mustache, looks perverse, even demonic. In the 1948 work she is forty years old, and the contours of her face are fuller, coarser, less oval; the five years that elapsed between these two portraits took their toll. But Frida confronts the depredations of age without the comforting cosmetics of self-delusion.
There is something sinister about the way Frida expresses her longing to possess Diego in the earlier painting. She is as devouring as a carnivorous tropical flower. Intertwined with the white threads that radiate from the vegetable pattern of the lace ruffle are black roots that actually are continuations of the veins of leaves that adorn her hair. This live network of tentacles seems an extension of Frida, paths of energy and feeling for one who despaired at her solitude and confinement and who wished to extend her vitality beyond the limits of her body. Like a female spider peering out from the center of her web, Frida traps Diego’s image in her forehead; she seems to have consumed her prey and lodged the thought of him within her own being in the form of a miniature portrait within a portrait.
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