Gerry Souter Read online

  Frida became a casual student at the Preparatory School, enjoying the stimulation of her intellectual friends rather than the formal studies. At age 15, her intellect was sharp and she tested political and philosophical doctrines with her pals in innocent debate where telling points were not measured in death and destruction. During this period, she learned the minister of education had commissioned a large mural to be painted in the Preparatory School courtyard. It was titled Creation and covered 150 square metres of wall. The muralist was the Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, who had been working in Europe for the past 14 years. Assisted by his wife, Guadalupe (Lupe) Marín, and a team of artisans, he assembled scaffolding and the coloured wax that required blow torch heat to fuse to a resin base spread on the charcoal sketched wall grid. This slow encaustic process was eventually abandoned for plaster fresco, but to Frida the creation of the growing scene spreading its way across the blank wall was fascinating. She and some friends often sneaked into the auditorium to watch Rivera work.

  His image was far from that of a starving artist. The scaffolding creaked under his weight as he paced back and forth across the wall. Everything about him was oversized from his unruly mop of black hair to the wide belt that held up his pants which sagged in the seat and bagged at the knees. The students nicknamed him Panzón (fat belly).

  Eventually these intrusions ended when another group of students, representing the views of their elite ultra-conservative parents, began damaging other murals in progress by the artists David Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, claiming the murals promoted atheism and socialist ideology. Rivera’s assistants armed themselves and acted as guards when they were not mixing colours or transferring sketches to the wall. Rivera himself cultivated the image of a revolver-packing defender of creative freedom and often turned up at parties with a big Colt pistol stuffed in his belt or in his jacket pocket.

  From a very early age, Frida had been taught by her father to appreciate the art of painting. As part of her education he encouraged her to copy popular prints and drawings of other artists. To ease the financial situation at home, she apprenticed with the engraver, Fernando Fernandez, a friend of her father’s. Fernandez praised her work and gave her time to copy prints and drawings with pen and ink. But she painted with the same enthusiasm as she collected hand-made toys, dolls, and colourfully embroidered costumes – as a hobby, a means of personal expression, not as “art” because she had no thought of becoming a professional artist. She considered the skills of artists such as Diego Rivera far beyond her capabilities. Her earliest works were studies in colours and shapes of buildings such as Have Another One, painted in 1925. It is an aerial view of a town square and has a child’s naïve approach to its flat perspective and the donkey cart making its way across a foreground avenue. Another work, Paisaje Urbano (Urban Landscape), is a composition of architectural planes and linear smokestacks that indicates a more sophisticated structure and an appreciation of the work accomplished by subtle use of shadow and control of values. This application hints at the knowledge gained from her line art copies under Fernandez’ tutelage. It also reflects an eye for composition not unlike the photographs of Edward Weston, who had spent a year in Mexico and was in the process of creating a new way of seeing shapes, textures and their interrelationships. Though she did not consider her painting to be anything but a pleasant pastime, that didn’t stop her from conniving her way into a seat in the auditorium where she watched Rivera work – even under the jealous eye and insults of Lupe Marín. His wife regularly brought Diego his lunch in a basket. It was one way she managed to keep an eye on him, especially when he was painting from a particularly beautiful model. Lupe was his second wife and knew him very well.

  11. Portrait of Miguel N. Lira, 1927.

  Oil on canvas, 99.2 x 67.5 cm.

  Museo del Instituto Tlaxcala de Cultura, Tlaxcala.

  12. Portrait of Diego Rivera, 1937.

  Oil on canvas, 46 x 32 cm. Jacques and

  Natasha Gelman Collection, Mexico City.

  And then everything changed forever. In Kahlo’s words to author, Raquel Tibol:

  The buses in those days were absolutely flimsy; they had started to run and were very successful, but the streetcars were empty. I boarded the bus with Alejandro Gómez Arias and was sitting next to him on the end next to the handrail. Moments later the bus crashed into a streetcar of the Xochimilco Line and the streetcar crushed the bus against the street corner. It was a strange crash, not violent, but dull and slow, and it injured everyone, me much more seriously… I was eighteen then but looked much younger, even younger than (my sister) Cristi who was 11 months younger than I… I was an intelligent young girl but not very practical, in spite of the freedom I’d won. Maybe for that reason I didn’t size up the situation, nor did I have any inkling of the injuries I had… The collision had thrown us forward and the handrail went through me like a sword through a bull. A man saw I was having a tremendous hemorrhage and carried me to a nearby pool hall table until the Red Cross picked me up…

  As soon as I saw my mother I said to her: “I’m still alive and besides I have something to live for and that something is painting”. Because I had to be lying down with a plaster corset that went from the clavicle to the pelvis, my mother made a very funny contrivance that supported the easel I used to hold the sheets of paper. She was the one who thought of making a top to my bed in the Renaissance style, a canopy with a mirror I could look in to use my image as a model.[1]

  The scene of the accident was gruesome. Somehow, the collision tore off Frida’s clothes, dumping her nude onto the shattered floor of the bus. Seated near Frida had been a painter or artisan carrying a paper packet of gold gilt powder. It burst, showering her naked body. The iron handrail had stabbed through her hip and emerged through her vagina. A gout of blood haemorrhaged from her wound, mixing with the gold gilt. In the chaos, bystanders, seeing her bizarre pierced, gilded and blood splashed body began screaming, “La Balarina! La Balarina!” One bystander insisted the hand rail be removed from her. He reached down and tore it from the wound. She screamed so loud the approaching ambulance siren could not be heard.

  In 1946, a German physician, Henriette Begun, composed a clinical history of Frida Kahlo. Its entry for September 17, 1925 reads:

  Accident causes fractures of third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, three fractures of pelvis, eleven fractures of the right foot, dislocation of the left elbow, penetrating abdominal wound caused by an iron hand rail entering the left hip, exiting through the vagina and tearing left lip. Acute peritonitis. Cystitis with catheterisation for many days. Three months bed rest in hospital. Spinal fracture not recognised by doctors until Dr. Ortiz Tirado ordered immobilisation with plaster corset for nine months… From then on has had sensation of constant fatigue and at times pain in her backbone and right leg, which now never leaves her.[2]

  Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

  October 20, 1925

  According to Dr. Díaz Infante, who treated me at the Red Cross, I’m out of danger now and I’m going to get more or less well. [...] The right side of my pelvis is fractured and deviated, I had a foot dislocation, and a dislocation and small fracture of my left elbow and the wounds that I talked to you about in the other letter: the longest one went through my body from the hip to the crotch, so there were two of them. One has already healed and the other is about two centimetres long by one-and-a-half centimetres deep, but I think it’ll heal soon. My right foot is covered with very deep scratches and another thing is that [...] Dr. Díaz Infante (who is very nice) didn’t want to keep treating me because he says that Coyoacán is very faraway and that he couldn’t leave a wounded person and come when they called him, so he was replaced by Pedro Calderón of Coyoacán. Do you remember him?

  Well, since every physician says something different about the same illness, Pedro, of course, said that he thought everything was extremely well except for the arm, and that he doubted very much that I could extend it, because the join
t is fine, but the tendon is contracted and keeps me from extending my arm, and if I was able to do it, it would be very slowly and after lots of massages and hot water baths. You can’t imagine how it hurts; every time they pull me I cry a litre of tears, even though they say that you shouldn’t believe in a dog’s lameness or a woman’s tears. My leg hurts so very much, one must think that it is crushed. Besides, the whole leg throbs horribly and I feel very uncomfortable, as you might imagine, but with rest they say that the bone will soon heal and that I’ll be able to walk little by little.

  Letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias

  January 10, 1927

  I am, as always, sick. You see how boring this is. I don’t know what else to do, as I’ve been like this for more than a year and I’m fed up. I have so many complaints, like an old woman! I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I’m thirty years old. You’ll have to wrap me up in a cotton cloth and carry me around all day; I don’t think, as I told you one day, that you could carry me in a bag, because I just won’t fit in it. [...] I need you to tell me something new because truly I was born to be a flower pot and I never leave the dining room. I’m buten buten bored!!!!!! You’ll say that I should do something useful, etc., but I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like doing anything – you know that already, and that’s why I don’t explain it to you. I dream of this room every night, and no matter how I try, I don’t even know how to erase that image from my head (which, besides looks more like a bazaar everyday). Well! What can we do about it? Wait and wait... [...] I, who dreamed so many times of being a navigator or a traveller! Patiño would answer that it is one of the ironies of life. Ha ha ha ha! (Don’t laugh). But it’s only been seventeen years that I’ve been parked in this town. Later, I will surely be able to say, “I’m just passing through; I don’t have time to talk to you”. [Here she drew musical notes.] Well, after all, visiting China, India, and other countries comes second... Firstly, when are you coming? I don’t think I will need to send you a telegram telling you that I’m in agony, will I; [...] Hey, ask among your acquaintances whether someone knows a good way to lighten hair; don’t forget to do it.

  13. Girl in Diaper (Portrait of Isolda Pinedo Kahlo), 1929.

  Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 44 cm. Private collection.

  Death of Innocence

  The devastation to Frida Kahlo’s body can only be imagined, but its implications were far worse once she realised she would survive. This vital vivacious young girl on the brink of any number of career possibilities had been reduced to a bed-bound invalid. Only her youth and vitality saved her life, but what kind of life did she face? Her father’s ability to earn enough money to feed his family and pay Frida’s medical bills had diminished with the Mexican economy. This necessitated lengthening her stay in the overburdened, undermanned Red Cross hospital for a month.

  The Red Cross Hospital was very poor. We were kept in a kind of tremendous slave quarters, and the meals were so vile they could hardly be eaten. One lone nurse took care of 25 patients.[3]

  After being pinned to her bed, swathed in plaster and bandages, she was eventually allowed to go home to La Casa Azul. Being away from her friends in Mexico City, she penned a voluminous correspondence to them and especially to Alejandro Gómez Arias. Their sexual relationship ended prior to the accident and they had agreed each could see other people. When they met as “friends” however, Frida shrugged off Alejandro’s boasts of female conquests. But he became sullen when she ticked off the young men she had bedded. They were too much alike.

  While she was recuperating from the accident, Alejandro’s parents sent him to Europe and to study in Berlin. The long separation and worldly adventure considerably cooled what ardour remained in him for the small town Mexican girl he left behind. Frida, conversely, kept up a flurry of letters filled with pitiful longing to see him as she lay in her plaster prison.

  “When you come I won’t be able to offer you anything you’d want. Instead of having short hair and being a flirt, I’ll only have short hair and be useless, which is worse. All these things are a constant torment. All of life is in you, but I can’t have it… I’m very foolish and suffering much more than I should. I’m quite young and it is possible for me to be healed, only I can’t believe it; I shouldn’t believe it, should I? You’ll surely come in November”.[4]

  14. Portrait of Eva Frederick, 1931.

  Oil on canvas, 63 x 46 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  15. Diego Rivera, Delfina and Dimas.

  Oil on canvas, 31 x 24 cm. Private collection.

  16. The Bus, 1929. Oil on canvas, 25.8 x 55.5 cm.

  Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

  17. Diego Rivera, Artist’s Studio, 1954.

  Oil on canvas, 179 x 150 cm. Collection of

  the Acervo Patrimonial de la Secretaría de

  Hacienda y Crédito Público, Mexico.

  18. Ex voto, c. 1943. Oil on metal,

  19.1 x 24.1 cm. Private collection.

  Gradually, her indomitable will asserted itself and she began to make decisions within the narrow view she commanded. By December, 1925, she regained the use of her legs. One of her first painful journeys was to Mexico City and the home of Alejandro Gómez Arias just before Christmas. She waited outside his door, but he never came out to meet her. Shortly thereafter, she was felled by shooting pains in her back and more doctors trooped into her life. Her three undiagnosed spinal fractures were discovered and she was immediately encased in plaster once again.

  Trapped and immobilised after those brief days of freedom, she began realistically narrowing her options. At the Preparatory School she had begun studies that would lead to a career in medicine. That dream faded when she accepted her physical limitations. As days of soul searching continued, she passed the time painting scenes from Coyoacán, and portraits of relatives and her friends who came to visit. As an artist, she only visited the scene of her accident once in a pencil drawing that showed her bandaged body with the small bus and the trolley car crushed together against the corner of the market building. It was a cathartic drawing, pulled from her imagination and the testimony of others. How many times in her dreams and day dreams had she stood apart from that terrible scene before she drew it – and then left it unfinished?

  The praise her paintings elicited surprised her and she began deciding who would receive the painting before she started it – often writing the name of the recipient on the canvas. She gave them away as keepsakes, assigning them no value except as tokens of her feelings. Of these early efforts, her best portraits succeeded in reaching beneath the skin of the sitter and stood alone and original without technical tricks, or imposed sentiment. Her most successful work was a self-portrait, painted specifically for Alejandro Gómez Arias in yet another vain attempt to win him back. With this painting, she began a remarkable lifetime series of fully realised Frida Kahlo reflections, both introspective and revealing, that examined her world from behind her own eyes and from within that crumbling patchwork of a body. Officially titled Self-Portrait with Velvet Dress, her 1926 gift to Alejandro was named, “Your Botticeli” (sic).

  19. Tree of Hope, Keep Strong, 1946.

  Oil on masonite, 55.9 x 40.6 cm.

  Collection Isidore Ducasse, France.

  20. Portrait of Lucha Maria, a Girl from Tehuacán,

  (Sun and Moon), 1942. Oil on masonite,

  54.6 x 43.1 cm. Private collection.

  While on his tour of Europe, Arias had mentioned that Italian girls were “so exquisite, they look like they were painted by Botticelli”. Frida added some of the elegant mannerisms of the sixteenth century painter, Bronzino (1503-1572), a favourite of hers. In the portrait she holds her hand open to Arias, a possible desire for reconciliation. Her skin glows with an ivory cast and the blush of health in her cheeks, not the pasty face of a surrendering invalid. Her gaze is direct and challenging beneath her exaggerated single eyebrow. What she gives away with her open Bronzino hand, she takes back
with the defiance of a survivor. This stoic, examining and unsmiling gaze is the pose that she adopted in real life. As if to add a period to her message, across the bottom of the canvas she wrote:

  “For Alex, Frida Kahlo, at the age of 17, September 1926 – Coyoacán – Heute Ist immer noch (Today is like always)”.

  In other words, she is saying “If you ever did love me, then today is like always and that love is still there”. Frida Kahlo consistently maintained her own demanding reality that no one, not even Diego Rivera, ever succeeded in penetrating to its steel core.

  Through 1927 and 1928, Frida painted portraits of those close to her. She captured the glacial beauty of her friend, Alicia Galant. Frida’s younger sister, Cristina, is rendered in shimmering pastel tints that surround a sharply executed and resolute face. Frida painted her toddler niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo as cotton soft with the child’s favourite doll lying ignored at her feet, but with roaming eyes looking for escape from the boredom of sitting. With each painting, Frida’s confidence grew along with her technical facility. The diminished state of her relationship with Alejandro Gómez Arias is obvious in her 1928 portrait of him. He looks like a school boy in his first grown-up suit. His expression is haunted and unsure. The boy in the painting has either missed a great opportunity and is completely unaware – or, more likely, he has dodged a passionate, all-consuming bullet and is relieved. As with almost all the men in her life, he remained a close friend, held in her orbit by the mutual fascination that first drew them together.