Portrait of Miguel N. Lira, 1927, oil on canvas Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala Frida created Portrait of Miguel N. Lira, 1927, while she was wearing a plaster corset. Quite a feat considering her psychic and physical pain. From letters Frida wrote to Alejandro, we know that Miguel, Frida's friend who was part of a group she and Alejandro hung out with called Los Cachuchas, asked her to paint his portrait. Miguel also asked if Frida could paint a modern portrait in the "Gomez de la Serna style." This is a reference to a 1915 portrait Diego Rivera created of Ramon Gomez De La Serna, done in a Cubist style. This is an interesting request in 1927 because Frida is not romantically involved with Diego at this point and Diego's style had changed quite a bit once he moved back to Mexico from Europe in 1920. Frida takes on the challenge of trying out a different style from some of her previous works. Even though Diego no longer used a Cubist style in 1927, there were Mexican artists who did. These artists were connected to a movement called Stridentism or Estridentismo. This was really a literary movement that emerged in Mexico City in 1921, just one year after the Revolution had ended. There were lots of artists, such as the muralists, who were painting the country's history in a naturalistic style. Stridentism, however, embraced a Cubist and Futurist aesthetic and philosophy. The Italian Futurists, beginning in 1910, used a Cubist style to create works of art that promoted the speed of the machine age. They rejected past art, advocated destroying libraries and museums, and glorified war as "the only true hygiene of the world" ( Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto). In Mexico, the painters, who identified with Stridentism, focused on images of the modern city as a symbol of progress. In the post-revolutionary period, these artists wanted to build a new society with a new style of art to represent these ideals. Frida's portrait of Miguel places him in a shallow space surrounded by symbolic objects. Miguel occupies the foreground in a profile position with a steady gaze as if he is looking at someone outside the picture plane. While he is still, even stiff like "cardboard," as Frida herself noted, there is the illusion of some movement around him. The bell clangs TAAAAAAAAANN, the doll looks as if it is ascending, and the hobbyhorse faces left as if it is headed toward the space outside the picture frame, mirroring Miguel's profile position. You have to know something about Miguel Lira to understand these symbols. The horse, for example, connects to Miguel's poems and his hometown of Tlaxcala because he published his first poems in Tlaxcala's newspaper called Pegasus of Tlaxcala. The book, seen floating near Miguel, and the pinwheel in his hand also symbolize his profession as a poet because the pinwheel recalls Chinese mandalas and his love of Chinese poetry, which inspired his first poetry books (Frida Kahlo Retrospective, Martin-Gropius-Bau, ed., 82). Even though Frida didn't like this portrait she made of her friend, saying "...it is so bad I don't know how he can say he likes it. Buten horrible...," nevertheless, it is a testament to her strong will. If you go back and read the letter she wrote to Alejandro just one month before she writes another letter that indicates she is finishing her portrait of Miguel, it is hard to imagine how the person who is desperate to the point of wanting to die if her condition doesn't improve, could muster the focus, patience, and physical strength to create a portrait in a new style. Footnote: Although buten sounds German, Frida made up the word to mean "very."
7 Comments
Six days after Frida wrote Alejandro about her physical and emotional suffering, she wrote another letter that details how she feels wearing a plaster cast on her torso.
April 31, 1927 "I feel suffocated, my lungs and whole back hurt terribly; I can't even touch my leg. I can hardly walk, let alone sleep. Imagine, they hung me by just my head for two and a half hours... I'm going to have this martyrdom for three or four months, and if I don't get well with that, I sincerely want to die, because I can't stand it anymore. It's not only the physical suffering, but also that I don't have the least entertainment. I never leave this room, I can't do anything, I can't walk" (The Letters of Frida Kahlo, compiled by Martha Zamora, Chronicle Books, 31). We often think about healing in a linear manner, that is, with every passing day, we gradually get better, but that's not how the healing process often unfolds. Frida discovered this after her accident. She entered the Red Cross Hospital on September 17, 1925, but in April of 1927, she's still struggling to find her way back to health. The plaster corset was supposed to strengthen her spine and heal her sciatic nerve pain. If it did, it only lasted a short while because she would wear more corsets and contraptions throughout her life and undergo many surgeries. In some ways, the "martyrdom" never left Frida, but she tried to present a vivaciousness to her friends. Adelina Zendejas remembers: "When we went to see her when she was sick, she played, she laughed, she commented, she made caustic criticisms, witticisms, and wise opinions. If she cried, no one knew it" (Boletin del Grupo Preparatorio 1920-1924, no. 44). Another friend, Lola Alvarez Bravo, put it this way: "The struggle for the two Fridas was in her always, the struggle between one dead Frida and one Frida that was alive." (Interview with David and Karen Crommie). Painting was one way for the dead Frida to create life. Even if she couldn't walk, she could paint. One month after she wrote this letter about her corset, she informed Alejandro that she was working on a portrait of their friend Miguel Lira, nicknamed Chong Lee because of his love for Chinese poets. Tomorrow, I'll try to upload the painting and begin by discussing it and some of the other paintings she created around this time. Even though my book focuses on Frida's art and life while she was living in the United States, I think it is important to understand Frida, as best I can, before she marries Diego and moves to the U.S. I'm planning to post more excerpts of her letters today and for the next few days to hear her words. Even though many of her letters have been quoted in articles and books, the challenge for me as a researcher is to read them with fresh eyes. It's easy to form a fixed picture of Frida based upon what others have written, but I want to strip away all the assumptions and start anew, as much as possible.
Three months after the letter I quoted in my last post, Frida wrote another to Alejandro on April 25, 1927: "Yesterday I was very sick and very sad: you can't imagine the level of desperation one can reach being this sick. I feel a dreadful discomfort that I can't describe and besides sometimes I have a pain that nothing can take away. ...nobody at home believes that I'm really sick, because I can't even say it, since my mom, who is the only one who worries a little bit (about me), gets ill. And they say it's my fault, that I'm very imprudent. So nobody suffers, despairs, and all that, but me..." (The Letters of Frida Kahlo, compiled by Martha Zamora, Chronicle Books, 28) I admit, I don't think I can fully imagine the level of desperation Frida must have felt. I try and I've had moments when I've been sick with the flu and imagined what it would have been like for Frida to feel that awful for months and years. A few years ago, I contracted some virus that attacked my joints. I could barely do anything for ten days. Opening up a jar was impossible. Walking was nearly impossible because every part of my body hurt. I was in physical pain, but it was the emotional pain that haunted me. First, there was the intense fear that took hold. Am I ever going to get better? If I do, will I still have pain in my joints? What if I can't take care of my daughter? What if I can't take care of myself? What if I can't ever type again without severe pain? I had to work very hard at not letting the fear overtake me, but I underscore work very hard. Then, the despair kicked in after a few days of being an invalid. Watching television is a nice break for one or two days, but then it gets old. In those moments of deep despair, I consoled myself by thinking about how Frida (and many others) was in a much more difficult situation. I tried to imagine what she endured. This letter makes me feel so sad because not only is Frida in physical pain, but no one believed that she was really sick. She couldn't even talk about how she was feeling. She had to worry more about her mother's feelings than her own. And, on top of it all, the family said Frida's suffering was of her own doing. Now, of course, this is Frida's perspective. If we could talk to her parents and sisters, they would probably give a different account. This doesn't mean that Frida is lying. This letter conveys how Frida felt in that moment. It must have been torture to have no outlet for discussing her feelings (This is why these letters to Alejandro were necessary). On top of that, the family saw Frida's suffering as self-inflicted. That's a lot to deal with. Letters are a wonderful find for any researcher who wants to get a little closer to the inner workings of the mind. Frida lovers are fortunate that she wrote many letters to Alejandro after the accident because we know a lot about what she experienced in the years right after the accident. I wish I could find more letters when she was living in the United States. It could help fill in some of the gaps.
The unrequited love of Alejandro turned Frida into a passionate letter writer because she needed to feel his love and support and, yet, he stayed away. It must have been hard for Frida to understand how the man who saved her life could have vanished after the accident. He wrote back to her, but he didn't take the bus from Mexico City to Coyoacan to visit her. Then, he moved even farther away by going to Europe for an extended stay. What happened? Sounds like Alejandro was emotionally traumatized. Perhaps he felt guilty that he wasn't physically scarred from the accident like Frida. Perhaps he couldn't handle her colossal needs. You can hear Frida's anger, frustration, and despair building in this excerpt from a letter she wrote to Alejandro four days after her 20th birthday on July 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'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, who dreamed so many times of being a navigator or a traveler! Patino would answer that this is one of the ironies of life." Frida didn't know it in that moment, but she would go on to travel in and outside of Mexico, going to the United States several times and Paris. Some of this travel was directly connected to her art. She found something useful to do, but did she ever recover from the emotional trauma of the accident and her lover's withdrawal? Drawing: Accident, 1926, pencil on paper, 7.8" x 10.6," collection of Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera Anyone who knows anything about Frida, knows that she was in a life threatening bus/trolley accident when she was eighteen. On September 17, 1925, Frida and her boyfriend Alejandro Gomez Arias caught a new shiny bus in downtown Mexico City. As they were sitting on the long bench, they felt the bus sway when the bus driver tried to pass a trolley that was turning a corner. The electric trolley went right through the bus, splitting it apart. Frida ended up in a puddle of blood with gold powder shimmering all over her nude body. This sounds like a made up story, but Alejandro, who was alright, recounted it to Hayden Herrera when she was writing her biography. So how did Frida end up nude with gold on her blood stained body? Apparently, the force of the accident was so great that it stripped off her clothes and some gold flakes that a man on the bus was carrying landed on Frida's body. People began to shout: "the ballerina, the ballerina" because they thought she was a dancer. The beauty of the red and gold shimmering body gave way to horror when Alejandro realized that Frida's pelvis had been impaled by a metal rod. The scene was chaotic. Alejandro picked Frida up and a man noticed the metal rod and said he should take it out. He did and Frida screamed so loud that it drowned out the sound of the sirens. Alejandro covered Frida's body with his coat and waited for an ambulance to take her to the Red Cross Hospital. He thought she was going to die. Once Frida was brought in to the hospital, he was relieved; however, this feeling soon turned to fear as he realized that the doctors weren't interested in Frida because they wanted to work on the patients they thought had the best chance for survival. Alejandro pleaded with the doctors to look at his girlfriend. They finally did and decided to operate. Alejandro saved her life. If he wasn't there, the doctors probably wouldn't have gotten to Frida in time to save her. She was lucky she survived, but the trauma and life long spinal, pelvic, and leg injuries changed her life forever. Why does an accident like this change someone's outlook on life? The answer seems obvious, but I'd be curious to hear more details about how it feels to wake up after the operation. How do you feel when you are not able to walk at all? How do you feel when you can take a few steps? How do you feel when you are able to walk? How do you feel in your new "broken" body? How do you feel about death? How do you feel about life? Do you appreciate life more or is it agony because of the physical pain and limitations? Do you ever ride a bus or electric trolley again? If you do, are you terrified? How do you feel several years after the accident? Are you burdened by fears or, just the opposite, are you less burdened by fears because you survived such a horrendous accident? Frida gives us some clues about how she felt after her accident, but she didn't write extensively about it. Here, in this drawing seen above that she made on the one year anniversary of the accident, we can see that it was still fresh in her mind. Our eyes immediately zero in on her bandaged body that lies on a stretcher in the foreground. Her head is tilted toward us, the onlookers, but her eyes are closed. Is she dead or just unconscious? Directly behind Frida, we see the bus/trolley accident in the upper part of the composition. The trolley is drawn with a fair amount of detail, but the people strewn about on the ground are flat and sketch-like. At the bottom on the drawing, Frida writes the date, her name, and (Accidente). This inscription is reminiscent of retablos, small religious paintings that were made by untrained artists to depict a life threatening event and the divine intervention that saved a loved one's life. Usually, an inscription at the bottom or on the top details what happened and thanks Mary or the Virgin of Guadalupe for saving their loved one's life. It's interesting that Frida doesn't thank anyone. The information is merely factual. Frida was raised Catholic and it's clear from letters that she was a believer, but I wonder if her faith was waning at this point? Eventually, she renounces Catholicism for communism. Frida did give thanks in a retablo that she bought with a bus/trolley accident depicted. She painted her body lying on the ground as if thrown from the bus into the already painted retablo and had her parents thank the Virgin of Sorrows for saving their daughter. This repainted retablo doesn't have a date to tell us when she repainted it. Therefore, it is possible that she repainted it shortly after the accident when she was feeling thankful and that the drawing, which came a year after the accident, reveals a Frida who has had more time to reflect upon her physical and emotional state. Perhaps, a year after the accident, she's tiring of her new broken body that prevents her from being a "real street wanderer," as she tells Alejandro in a letter. What do you think? Although Frida had enjoyed art before the accident, she had no plans of becoming an artist. She wanted to be a doctor. With time on her hands, she devoted herself to art. It was so wonderful to be able to share my passion for Frida last night with a such a receptive audience. It's nice to have large images on a screen that can really make the visual points I think are important. Thank you everyone for coming and for your great questions!
In my book, I focus on Frida's development as a person and artist while living in the United States. I think this was a pivotal experience for her. One of the questions I asked last night was: Would Frida Kahlo have become a great artist had she not lived in the United States? Obviously, there is no clear cut answer to this question, but it's one I ponder and I'd love to know what others think. I can't wait until my Frida talk on Tuesday. It will be so nice to have the opportunity to discuss my passion: Frida in America. I look forward to a discussion afterwards.
|
Celia Stahr teaches art history at the University of San Francisco. She’s interested in women artists and artists who cross cultural boundaries. She fell in love with the power of Frida Kahlo's art in the 1980s, a feeling that has intensified over the years. Frida in America took 10 years to research and write, but Stahr never lost interest in this fascinating woman and artist.
AuthorCelia Stahr's Archives
October 2022
Categories |