| The Elephant and the Dove |
by Anabella Martinez
This season we have been celebrating all things Frida, by running a series on Frida Kahlo, one of Mexico’s most loved artists, this is part II.
In 1928, Frida Kahlo became a member of the Mexican Communist Party and met Diego Rivera again, and the rest as they say is history. She shows her work to him and they start a relationship. They fall in love and in August 1929, Frida Kahlo marries Diego Rivera, 21 years her senior. Through Diego, Frida joined a group of artists, intellectuals and bohemians that argued for a return to the nation’s roots and the reinstatement of Mexican Folk Art, this movement was called “Mexicanismo.” Her affiliation with this movement inspires Frida to change the way she dresses, she starts wearing “huipiles” and “rebozos” and her paintings become more and more Mexican oriented.
The couple live first in an apartment in the center of Mexico City. While working on a mural commission in Cuernavaca Diego is expelled from the Communist Party, and Frida leaves the party as well. It is in 1930 that Frida starts having health problems that lead to a series of abortions and miscarriages that will scar her for the rest of her life, and will spawn images that appear in her later work. She dearly wanted to be a mother, and certainly wanted to be the mother of Diego’s child.
Diego is offered commissions in the United States and in November of 1930 the couple moves to San Francisco, California. In 1932 they move to Detroit, Michigan where Diego is awarded another commission, and where after three and a half months, Frida’s second pregnancy ends on the 4th of July with a miscarriage at the Henry Ford Hospital. In 1933, the Rockefeller Center in New York gives Diego a commission for a mural, and Frida joins him in New York. After several trips to the USA, they return to Mexico and decide to build and live in a new house in San Angel, a very nice suburb of Mexico City. But their happiness is short lived. Health problems continue to plague Frida and a third pregnancy is again terminated at three months. She also has her right foot operated on for the first time and has several toes amputated. But for Frida it was never merely physical problems but emotional anguish as well, it is in this time she discovers a love affair between Diego and her sister Christina Kahlo. With a lot of pain she decides to move and takes her own apartment. She meets the American sculptor Isamu Naguchi and has an affair with him. It is in this period that she travels to New York with a number of women friends and has several lesbian affairs.
Back in Mexico she has another operation on her foot, again hospitals. Frida was always very interested in social problems and she decides to join a solidarity committee in aid of the Spanish republicans. She spends her time between hospitals and social activism but still finds time to paint and meet other artists and intellectuals. She meets Leon Trotsky and Natalia Sedova who arrived in Mexico in 1937 and were her guests in the “Blue House” in Coyoacan. Also in April of 1938 she meets Andre Breton, the father of surrealism who had come from France to meet Trotsky. While in Mexico Breton stays with Lupe Maria, Diego’s previous wife, and spends time with both Frida and Diego. Frida and her work make a large impact on Breton, Frida has an affair with Breton’s wife. Her first solo show is organized and exhibited in Julian Levy’s gallery in New York to great success. The next year she travels to Paris, where she exhibits her work in the Renoir and Colle Gallery and meets the surrealist world. After returning to Mexico she moves back into the family house “the Blue House” in Coyoacan and divorces Deigo Rivera in 1939. But it doesn’t last long, on December 8, 1940, they marry again for the second time, and stay married until Frida’s death in 1954.
The attraction and love the couple had during the years is very obvious in the work of Frida Kahlo, her trademark self-portraits often hold images of him as well. The painting shown here, “Self-Portrait as a Tehuana”, 1943, clearly depicts the image of Diego emblazoned across Frida’s forehead, as if he is as much a part of her as herself. The passion that she had for Diego helped her to understand and suffer through his infidelities but marked her for the rest of their lives. She struggled to be recognized as a painter in her own right, and as a woman who suffered, but always stayed in the battle.
The intimate paintings of Frida Kahlo show the struggles of her life in detail. For Frida, life with Rivera was very difficult but very intense, and perhaps that is what made the inexplicable attraction between the elephant and the dove.
Anabella Martinez owns Casa Frida B&B in Barra de Potosi, which houses a small Frida Kahlo museum, and offers dinner by reservation, (755) 556-3944 / 556-7462
March 2003
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