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?
3 Comments
6/1/2016 12:37:02 pm
It is unbelievable, but she is really strong woman. To my mind her helplessness and weakness woke up her inner patience and wisdom some time after. This is why she was strong. Thank a lot!
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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.
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October 2022
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