Frida Kahlo Miguel de Cervantes Cesar Chavez Frida Kahlo Juan Ponce de León Diego Rivera Pancho Villa THE GREAT HISPANIC HERITAGE Frida Kahlo John Morrison CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse Staff for FRIDA KAHLO ASSISTANT EDITOR Kate Sullivan PRODUCTION EDITOR Jaimie Winkler PHOTO EDITOR Sarah Bloom SERIES & COVER DESIGNER Terry Mallon LAYOUT 21st Century Publishing and Communications, Inc. ©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America. http://www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morrison, John F., 1929– Frida Kahlo / John Morrison. p. cm.—(The Great Hispanic heritage) Summary: A biography of the Mexican painter who survived a near-fatal bus accident at the age of eighteen, learned to paint as a form of therapy, had a stormy marriage with Diego Rivera, and became a world-famous artist. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-7254-1 1. Kahlo, Frida—Juvenile literature. 2. Painters—Mexico—Biography—Juvenile literature. [1. Kahlo, Frida. 2. Artists. 3. Women—Biography.] I. Title. II. Series. ND259.K33 M67 2002 759.972—dc21 2002152670 Table of Contents 1 The Unconquerable Spirit 6 2 Diego Rivera, Frida’s Destiny 20 3 Sundays with the “Little Devil” 28 4 The Elephant and the Dove 36 5 The Perils of “Gringolandia” 50 6 “A Few Little Pricks” 62 7 Artist of the Casa Azul 76 8 Long Live Life! 90 Chronology 100 Bibliography 103 Websites 104 Further Reading 105 Index 106 6 The Unconquerable Spirit 1 THE ACCIDENT It was one of those flukes of fate that change a life forever. The bus was a new model, made of wood and brightly painted, with rows of seats facing each other. The 18-year-old schoolgirl and her boyfriend shouldn’t have been on that bus that September day in 1925. They intended to take another bus for the ride to their home in Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. But Frida Kahlo discovered that a toy parasol that her friend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, had bought her during the day’s shopping trip was missing. Frida Kahlo nearly died that day, and the world would have been denied the pleasure and stimulation of viewing the dramatic and haunting paintings of one of Mexico’s most heralded artists. In fact, it could be argued that the accident, as horrific as it was, made Frida the artist that she became. But at that moment on September 17, 1925, there was only pain and terror. 7 The two retraced their steps, searching for the parasol. When they couldn’t find it, they bought a balero, a cup and ball toy. Then they spotted the other bus and decided to take it home. In fact, they felt lucky that the vehicle came along when it did. The bus driver made a critical mistake when he crossed at an intersection in the path of an electric streetcar. The In Kahlo’s retablo, a small oil painting that commonly features saints to evoke protection, she depicts the horrifying streetcar accident that pierced her abdomen and left her permanently disfigured. The accident inflicted emotional wounds that lingered long after her physical wounds healed; Kahlo harnessed that pain to create some of the world’s most haunting and emotional paintings. 8 FRIDA KAHLO trolley rammed the side of the bus and, for some reason, kept pushing the other vehicle until it was wedged against a wall. The heavier trolley continued to apply pressure on the bus until the wooden vehicle virtually exploded into splinters. Frida’s friend Alejandro was knocked unconscious and thrown out. When he came to, he was under the streetcar and his clothing had been shredded. The trolley was still moving, and he was sure he would be crushed. But the car finally stopped, and Alejandro was able to crawl out from under it. He hurried to the smashed bus to find Frida. He managed to work his way inside and was greeted by a horrifying sight. A metal handrail had rammed through Frida’s body. Her cloth- ing had been ripped away. She lay there naked, bleeding, and, strangely, covered with a fine coating of gold dust that a fellow passenger, a housepainter, had been carrying in a bag.A woman passenger thought she looked like a dancer and exclaimed, “Help for the little ballerina!” Frida was so stunned that she didn’t realize what had happened to her. She later wrote that her first thought was to look for the balero.“I did not assess the situation nor did I guess the kind of wounds I had,” she wrote. Alejandro started to pick Frida up to get her out of the wreckage, but she shrieked in pain. A man nearby said, “We have to take it out,” speaking of the metal rod. He put a knee on her body and pulled the rod out of her. Alejandro said later that her screams were louder than the sirens of the ambulances that arrived. She was taken to the Red Cross Hospital and at first was placed among the more severely injured, whom the doctors thought could not be saved. But Alejandro pleaded with them to work on her, and she underwent the first of many operations she would endure for most of her painful life as medical science tried with little success to put her shattered body back together again. Frida’s spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone and her third and fourth ribs were broken. Her right leg had 11 fractures, and her right 9 The Unconquerable Spirit foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. Frida always maintained that the metal rod that entered through her left hip exited through her vagina, damaging her uterus and rendering her incapable of bearing children.“I lost my virginity,” she said. Alejandro said the wound was higher in the abdomen and maintained that Frida had invented the site of the exit, not uncharacteristic of her. She had a lifelong habit of embellishing experiences for dramatic effect. Regardless, the accident had turned a high-spirited, happy schoolgirl, who loved to run and dance, to tease and joke, into a rigid, grim creature immobilized and enclosed in plaster casts and other devices and suffering constant pain. “In this hospital,”she told Alejandro,“death dances around my bed.” FRIDA BEGINS TO PAINT As horrible as the accident was, it induced Frida to start paint- ing as a form of therapy. Her mother rigged up a mirror on Frida’s four-poster bed so she could paint while lying down. Although she had been drawing and sketching since childhood and had studied art and composition in school, it was during her convalescence (recovery) from the accident that she began seriously to try to put to canvas not only her personal visions, but the powerful feelings she had for the people and vistas of her native land. Today, the work of Frida Kahlo is known around the world. In her short life—she died at 47—she produced some 200 paintings. Most were self-portraits, strong, vibrant pictures with colors as hot as the Mexican sun that she saw all around her in the people and the flora (plant life) and landscapes of Mexico, full of the passionate intensity of life that still surged throughout her broken body. Actually, it took a long time for Frida to be recognized as an artist in her own right because for years she lived in the shadow of her husband, the great muralist, Diego Rivera. 10 FRIDA KAHLO During her lifetime, she deferred to him as the “master”— master not only of their home, but also of the art they each created. Diego and Frida were certainly the odd couple of the art world. His paintings were immense, typically covering entire walls; hers were small, often no more that two feet square. He was huge, over six feet tall, at times, weighing as much as 300 pounds; she was petite, five feet three inches and rarely weighing as much as 100 pounds. And, at 43, he was 19 years older than she when they were married. Frida was darkly attractive, given to colorful costumes and flamboyant jewelry that drew all eyes to her on the street. Diego was drab and homely, with a huge head, big, blubbery face, and bulging eyes atop a bloated body. Despite their differences, the couple shared a kind of magnetism that drew others into their sphere. Both had numerous romances, before and during their two marriages, which caused raging battles and long separations. When the fights and betrayals went beyond endurance, they divorced, only to remarry a year later. It seemed they could neither live with nor without each other. During their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera met and mixed with some of the most prominent people of their day: fellow artists, politicians, movie stars, and the world’s rich and famous. Their doings were duly reported in the press of the day, and they were seen as glamorous figures. Both Kahlo and Rivera were dedicated to the principles of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and both celebrated the revolutionary spirit in their art. Frida even tried to change the date of her birth from 1907 to 1910, when leaders like Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Francisco Madero began the struggle that would end the repressive 35-year regime of Porfirio Díaz and transform the nation. In a way, her afflictions paralleled those of her native land, torn and troubled for centuries by foreign invaders, corrupt 11 The Unconquerable Spirit officials, and brutal wars. But, like the spirit of Mexico, Kahlo’s spirit was never seriously squelched. She might have been puzzled at how, years after her death, she has become something of a feminist icon. Women are inspired by the life of one of their sex who, though married to a strong, domineering man, still managed to do her own remarkable work and keep her independent spirit. The pop singer Madonna, strongly individualistic and independent herself, owns two of Kahlo’s paintings. Madonna said she identifies with Kahlo’s “pain and her sadness.”Exhibits of her work have been held around the world to great critical acclaim. In 2001, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 34-cent stamp of her 1933 Self-portrait with a Necklace. One of her paint- ings was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s surrealism exhibit, although she probably would have objected to being classified as a surrealist. A movie has been made of Frida Kahlo’s life, starring Salma Hayek. Several books, including a novel, have been written about her. There has even been a traveling exhibit just of photographs of her. She was on the cover of Time magazine; SURREALISM Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that began in the 1920s. The French poet André Breton is credited as its founder, but a number of French writers, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, also were involved in the movement’s beginning. Those who practiced surrealism relied on dreams and the imagination to create their own reality. The movement was strongly influenced by the writings of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who wrote extensively about dreams and the mysteries of the unconscious mind. Although even André Breton himself attempted to classify Kahlo as a surrealist, Kahlo disagreed, saying, “I never painted my dreams. I painted my own reality.” 12 FRIDA KAHLO The U.S. Postal Service commemorated Kahlo’s contribution to art with a stamp bearing her image in 2001. The first stamp honoring a Hispanic woman, it sealed Kahlo’s status as a major presence for Mexicans and people of Hispanic descent everywhere. 13 The Unconquerable Spirit Volvo used her image to sell cars to Hispanics. Her typically unsmiling, dark-browed visage can be found on posters, T-shirts, calendars, and many other objects in both the United States and Mexico. There have been Frida look-alike contests, Frida operas, plays, documentaries, even a cookbook. Frida Kahlo’s former home in Coyoacán is now a museum and one of Mexico’s hottest tourist attractions. Her paintings sell in the $10 million range. What was there about this woman, crippled from the age of six by polio, smashed and broken in a horrendous street accident, not conventionally pretty, a heavy smoker and drinker, a dedicated Communist, abused and betrayed by both life and lovers, that has made her a heroine for many yearning souls, and a figure of almost mythic proportions? It was not only her remarkable talent as a painter, her skill at producing art that resonates deeply in many people. There was also her indomitable spirit and love of life, characteris- tics that all the pain and disappointments she endured could not diminish. That spirit she carried to the end. In 1953, after her right leg had been amputated below the knee because of gangrene, she wrote in her diary: “Pies para que los quiero, si tengo alas pa’volar?” (Feet, why do I want them if I have wings to fly?) One of her last paintings is a still life of ripe watermelons, inscribed with the words, “Viva la vida”—Long live life. THE SERIOUS ONE There she is in family photographs, the dark one, unsmil- ing, scowling at the camera. In some pictures, she is dressed in a man’s suit, looking severe. Even photographed as a child, with a sister and a girlfriend in a formal studio setting, she is the serious one, while the other two radiate innocence. And yet, by all accounts, Frida Kahlo had a good childhood. Even after she was afflicted with polio at the age of six and left with a deformed right leg, she exhibited a spirit that was at times ungovernable. 14 FRIDA KAHLO Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a German Jew of Hungarian descent, had a total of six daughters, including two by a previous marriage. But he was most fond of Frida, whom he called his Liebe Frida (Darling Frida). He pampered her greatly, especially after her bout with polio. “Frida is my most intelligent daughter,” he said. “She’s most like me.” He was a photographer and, for a time, worked for the administration of President Porfirio Díaz, making good money. After Díaz was ousted by revolutionary forces in 1911,Guillermo had trouble making ends meet. Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderón, Guillermo’s second wife, was part Indian. Her maternal grandfather was a Spanish general of Indian descent. She was a devout Catholic—to the point of bigotry—and this was a major factor in turning Frida against organized religion at an early age. Frida was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón in the Casa Azul (Blue House) on Allende Street in the village of Coyoacán, a southern suburb of Mexico City, on July 6, 1907. Her father built the Casa Azul in 1904. It was a U-shaped building with an inner court filled with subtropical plants. Frida and Diego Rivera would live in the house for many years, and after her death, Diego would have it enlarged and turned into a museum dedicated to Frida’s work and Mexican culture. Frida immortalized the house in a paint- ing, My Grandparents, My Parents and I, in 1936. In it, she depicts herself as a naked little girl standing in the courtyard, holding ribbons that extend to images of her parents and their parents. Frida’s mother must have been a difficult woman. She refused to raise her husband’s two daughters by his first marriage (his first wife died in childbirth) and had them sent to a convent orphanage. She was a sickly woman, especially after her last daughter, Cristina, was born just 11 months after Frida’s birth, and she sought solace in the Catholic Church. “My mother was excessively religious,” Frida once said.