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"In 1953,
when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition
in Mexico (the only one held in her native country during her lifetime), a
local critic wrote: 'It is impossible to separate the life and work of
this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.' This
observation serves to explain both why her work is so different from that
of her contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists, and why she has since become
a feminist icon.
"Kahlo was
born in Mexico City in
1907, the third daughter of Guillermo and Matilda Kahlo. Her father was a
photographer of Hungarian Jewish descent, who had been born in Germany;
her mother was Spanish and Native American. Her life was to be a long
series of physical traumas, and the first of these came early. At the age
of six she was stricken with polio, which left her with a limp. In
childhood, she was nevertheless a fearless tomboy, and this made Frida her
father's favorite. He had advanced ideas about her education, and in 1922
she entered the Preparatoria (National Preparatory School), the most
prestigious educational institution in Mexico, which had only just begun
to admit girls. She was one of only thirty-five girls out of two thousand
students.
"It was there
that she met her
husband-to-be, Diego Rivera, who had
recently returned home from France, and who had been commissioned to paint
a mural there. Kahlo was attracted to him, and not knowing quite how to
deal with the emotions she felt, expressed them by teasing him, playing
practical jokes, and by trying to excite the jealousy of the painter's
wife, Lupe Marin.
"In 1925,
Kahlo suffered the
serious accident which was to set the pattern for much of the rest of her
life. She was traveling in a bus which collided with a tramcar, and
suffered serious injuries to her right leg and pelvis. The accident made
it impossible for her to have children, though it was to be many years
before she accepted this. It also meant that she faced a life-long battle
against pain. In 1926, during her convalescence, she painted her first
self-portrait, the beginning of a long series in which she charted the
events of her life and her emotional reactions to them.
"She met
Rivera again
in 1928, through her friendship with the photographer and revolutionary Tina
Modotti. Rivera's marriage had just disintegrated, and the two found
that they had much in common, not least from a political point of view,
since both were now communist militants. They married in August 1929.
Kahlo was later to say: 'I suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in
which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego.'
"The
political climate in Mexico was deteriorating
for those with left-wing sympathies, thanks to the reactionary Calles
government, and the mural-painting program initiated by the great Minister
of Education Jose Vasconcelos had ground to a halt. But Rivera's artistic
reputation was expanding rapidly in the United States. In 1930, the couple
left for San Francisco; then, after a brief return to Mexico, they went to
New York in 1931 for the Rivera retrospective organized by the Museum of
Modern Art. Kahlo, at this stage, was regarded chiefly as a charming
appendage to a famous husband, but the situation was soon to change. In
1932 Rivera was commissioned to paint a major series of murals for the
Detroit Museum, and here Kahlo suffered a miscarriage. While recovering,
she painted Miscarriage in Detroit, the first of her truly
penetrating self-portraits. The style she evolved was entirely unlike that
of her husband, being based on Mexican folk art and in particular on the
small votive pictures known as retablos, which the pious
dedicated in Mexican churches. Rivera's reaction to his wife's work was,
however, both perceptive and generous:
Frida began work on
a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art -
paintings which exalted the feminine quality of truth, reality, cruelty
and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas
as Frida did at this time in Detroit.
"Kahlo, however,
pretended not to consider her work important. As her
biographer Hayden Herrera notes, 'she preferred to be seen as a beguiling
personality rather than as a painter.' From Detroit they went once again
to New York, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint a mural in the
Rockefeller Center. The commission erupted into an enormous scandal, when
the patron ordered the half-completed work destroyed because of the
political imagery Rivera insisted on including. But Rivera lingered in the
United States, which he loved and Kahlo now loathed. When they finally
returned to Mexico in 1935, Rivera embarked on an affair with Kahlo's
younger sister Cristina. Though they finally made up their quarrel, this
incident marked a turning point in their relationship. Rivera had never
been faithful to any woman; Kahlo now embarked on a series of affairs with
both men and women which were to continue for the rest of her life. Rivera
tolerated her lesbian relationships better than he did the heterosexual
ones, which made him violently jealous. One of Kahlo's more serious early
love affairs was with the Russian revolutionary leader Leon
Trotsky, now being hounded by his triumphant rival Stalin, and who had
been offered refuge in Mexico in 1937 on Rivera's initiative. Another
visitor to Mexico at this time, one who would gladly have had a love
affair with Kahlo but for the fact that she was not attracted to him, was
the leading figure of the Surrealist
Group, André Breton. Breton arrived in 1938 and was enchanted with
Mexico, which he found to be a 'naturally surrealist' country, and with
Kahlo's painting. Partly through his initiative, she was offered a show at
the fashionable Julian Levy Gallery in New York later in 1938, and Breton
himself wrote a rhetorical catalogue preface. The show was a triumph, and
about half the paintings were sold. In 1939, Breton suggested a show in
Paris, and offered to arrange it. Kahlo, who spoke no French, arrived in
France to find that Breton had not even bothered to get her work out of
customs.
"The enterprise was
finally rescued by Marcel Duchamp, and the
show opened about six weeks late. It was not a financial success, but the
reviews were good, and the Louvre bought a picture for the Jeu de Paume.
Kahlo also won praise from Kandinsky and
Picasso. She had, however, conceived a
violent dislike for what she called 'this bunch of coo coo lunatic sons of
bitches of surrealists.' She did not renounce Surrealism immediately. in
January 1940, for example, she was a participant (with Rivera) in the
International Exhibition of Surrealism held in Mexico City. Later, she was
to be vehement in her denials that she had ever been a true Surrealist.
'They thought I was a Surrealist,' she said, 'but I wasn't. I never
painted dreams. I painted my own reality.'
"Early in 1940,for
motives which are still somewhat mysterious, Kahlo and Rivera divorced,
though they continued to make public appearances together. In May, after
the first attempt on Trotsky's life, led by the painter Siqueiros, Rivera
thought it prudent to leave for San Francisco. After the second, and
successful attempt, Kahlo, who had been a friend of Trotsky's assassin,
was questioned by the police. She decided to leave Mexico for a while, and
in September she joined her ex-husband. Less than two months later, while
they were still in the United States, they remarried. One reason seems to
have been Rivera's recognition that Kahlo's health would inexorably
deteriorate, and that she needed someone to look after her.
"Her health, never
at any time robust, grew visibly worse from about 1944 onwards, and Kahlo
underwent the first many operations on her spine and her crippled foot.
Authorities on her life and work have questioned whether all these
operations were really necessary, or whether they were in fact a way of
holding Rivera's attention in the face of his numerous affairs with other
women. In Kahlo's case, her physical and psychological sufferings were
always linked. in early 1950, her physical state reached a crisis, and she
had to go into hospital in Mexico City, where she remained for a year.
"During the period after
her remarriage, her artistic reputation continued to grow, though at first
more rapidly in the United States than in Mexico itself. she was included
in prestigious group shows in the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston
Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In
1946, however, she received a Mexican government fellowship, and in the
same year an official prize on the occasion of the Annual National
Exhibition. She also took up teaching at the new experimental art school
'La Esmeralda', and, despite her unconventional methods, proved an
inspiration to her students. After her return home from hospital, Kahlo
became an increasingly fervent and impassioned Communist. Rivera had been
expelled from the Party, which was reluctant to receive him back, both
because of his links with the Mexican government of the day, and because
of his association with Trotsky. Kahlo boasted: 'I was a member of the
Party before I met Diego and I think I am a better Communist than he is or
ever will be.'
"While the 1940s had
seen her produce some of her finest work, her paintings now became more
clumsy and chaotic, thanks to the joint effects of pain, drugs and drink.
Despite this, in 1954 she was offered her first solo show in Mexico itself
- which was to be the only such show held in her own lifetime. It took
place at the fashionable Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo in the Zona Rosa of
Mexico City. At first it seemed that Kahlo would be too ill to attend, but
she sent her richly decorated four-poster bed ahead of her, arrived by
ambulance, and was carried into the gallery on a stretcher. The private
view was a triumphal occasion.
"In the same year,
Kahlo, threatened by gangrene, had her right leg amputated below the knee.
It was a tremendous blow to someone who had invested so much in the
elaboration of her own self image. She learned to walk again with an
artificial limb, and even (briefly and with the help of pain-killing
drugs) danced at celebrations with friends. But the end was close. In July
1954, she made her last public appearance, when she participated in a
Communist demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan
president Jacobo Arbenz. Soon afterwards, she died in her sleep,
apparently as the result of an embolism, though there was a suspicion
among those close to her that she had found a way to commit suicide. Her
last diary entry read: 'I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to
come back - Frida.'"
- Text from
Edward Lucie-Smith, "Lives
of the Great 20th-Century Artists"
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