frida kahlo

retrospective

frida kahlo
retrospective
Exhibition concept by

Helga Prignitz-Poda

With essays by

Peter von Becker Ingried Brugger Heike Eipeldauer Salomon Grimberg Cristina Kahlo Arnoldo Kraus Helga Prignitz-Poda Francisco Reyes Palma Florian Steininger Jeanette Zwingenberger

Edited by

Martin-Gropius-Bau Bank Austria Kunstforum

PRESTEL
Munich Berlin London New York

contents

6 8

Acknowledgments Forewords Consuelo Sizar and Teresa Vicencio lvarez

52 Frida Kahlo: Pain as Life Arnoldo Kraus 58 Frida Kahlo: A Gift-Wrapped, Anti-Stalinist Bomb Francisco Reyes Palma 66 Frida Kahlos Human Landscape Jeanette Zwingenberger 74 catalog with texts by Helga Prignitz-Poda (HPP), Florian Steininger (FS), and Heike Eipeldauer (HE) 178 The Drawings Helga Prignitz-Poda 204 Photographs Photographs as Witnesses: Frida Kahlo and Photography Cristina Kahlo 236 244 252 253 254 biographical timeline works shown in the exhibition selected bibliography authors photocredits and copyright

10 Foreword Ingried Brugger, Joachim Sartorius, and Gereon Sievernich essays 12 A Small World Thats Become So Big Ingried Brugger 18 The Celestial Love Story and Encoded Ciphers in the Work of Frida Kahlo Helga Prignitz-Poda 28 Any Friend of Fridas is a Friend of Mine Or, Who Collects Frida Kahlos Art? Salomon Grimberg 36 Frida Kahlo, Poet On the Letters, Poems, and Notebooks of a Literary Artist Peter von Becker 44 Frida Icon The Authoritarian Eye of Frida Kahlo Florian Steininger

acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the following public institutions for their generous help and support in the realization of this exhibition: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores de Mxico Direccin general de Protocolo, Sr. Embajador Jorge Castro Valle Kuehne, Director General Direccin General de Cooperacin Educativa y Cultural, Sra. Embajador Martha Cecilia Jaber Mexican Embassy in Germany Miguel A. Padilla Acosta, Charg dAaires Daniel Tamayo Astie, Cultural Attach Mexican Embassy in Austria Alejandro Daz, Ambassador Sergio Garca Hofer, Cultural Attach German Embassy in Mexico Roland Michael Wegener, Ambassador Tanja Hutt, Cultural Advisor Claudia Kilp, Cultural Attach Austrian Embassy in Mexico Alfred Lngle, Ambassador Wolfgang Kutschera, Cultural Attach German Embassy in Argentina Gnter Knie, Ambassador Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Consuelo Sizar Presidencia Fernando Serrano Migalln Secretara Cultural y Artstica Ral Arezana Secretara Ejecutiva Martha Gonzlez Ros Asesora para Asuntos Internacionales

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Teresa Vicencio lvarez Direccin General Sergio Ramrez Crdenas Subdireccin general de Bellas Artes Efran Salinas Arciniega Subdireccin general de Administracin Alejandra Pea Gutirrez Subdireccin general del Patrimonio Artstico Inmueble Magdalena Zavala Bonachea Coordinadora Nacional de Artes Plsticas Hayd Zavala Leyva Direccin de Asuntos Internacionales. Centenario y Bicentenario Uvillado Len Zaleta Subdireccin Administrativa Centro de Conservacin, Restauracin y Registro del Patrimonio Artstico Mueble Jos Luis Gutirrez Direccin de Difusin y Relaciones Pblicas Monserrat Snchez Soler, Directora Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, INBA Osvaldo Snchez Crespo Director Museo de Arte Moderno, INBA Coordinacin Nacional de Artes Plsticas Mara Eugenia Murrieta Romo Subdirectora Gabriela Glvez Morales Departamento de Gestin Patrimonial Laura Prez Durn Departamento de Investigacin y Exposiciones Nacionales

Angela Fuentes Corts Departamento de Vinculacin Institucional Mariana Gonzlez Correa Jennifer Rosado Sols Departamento de Exposiciones Internacionales Vctor Garca Corts Departamento de Desarrollo Museolgico Carmen Cabrera Hernndez Departamento de Enlace y Seguimiento Liz Selene Martnez Rodrguez Departamento de Administracin Colaboradores Coordinacin Nacional de Artes Plsticas Jess Alvarado Santamara Juan Pablo Bocanegra Garca Marilyn Castillo Reyes Alejandra Correa Gonzlez Roco Espinosa Domnguez ngela Fuentes Jos Sal Galicia Garca Guadalupe Galindo Snchez Miguel Monroy Snchez Arizbe Rodrguez Tellez Wendy Gretchen Ortiz Prez Gabriela Santacruz Machuca Katia Gutirrez Glvez Jorge ngel Rodrguez Rosas Luca Terrones Gonzlez Griselda Salinas Arciniega Crdito de la Exposicin Coordinacin, Ejucativa, INBA Magdalena Zavala Bonachea Mariana Gonzlez Correa Banco de Mxico and Fideicomiso Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo

Fabin Ortega Aranda Federico Rubli Kaiser Jos Luis Prez Arredondo Luis Alberto Salgado Rodrguez We would like to express our gratitude to all public collections and institutions that generously supported this exhibition by providing items on loan: Banco Nacional de Mxico, S.A. John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Lola Alvrez Bravo Des Moines Art Center Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Galera Arvil, Mexico City Galera de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City Galera Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City Galera Lopez Quiroga Galerie Nader Fine Art, Miami The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/Museo de Arte Moderno Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/Museo Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, INBA Instituto Tlaxcalteca de Cultura, Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art, New York Museo de Filatela de Oaxaca Museo Nacional de Agricultura/Universidad de Chapingo Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, Xochimilco, Mexico City The Museum of Modern Art, New York Nickolas Muray Photo Archives, Alta/Utah Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin Promotora Cultural Fernando Gamboa A.C., Mexico City University of San Francisco, School of Medicine, San Francisco General Hospital as well as all private lenders: Omar Alvarez Fernndez Rogerio Azcrraga Andrs Blaisten Bolognini Cejas Collection, Miami

Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera Patty and Jim Cownie Maestro Arturo Estrada H. Arq. Enrique Garca Formenty Arturo Garca Bustos, Rina Lazo Mr. and Mrs. Abel Holtz Collection, Courtesy Gary Nader Fine Art, Miami Cristina Kahlo Graziella y Susana Daz de Lon Javier Lumbreras, Artemundi Global Fund, Mexico City Alejandra Matiz Beatriz Mendvil de Holtz Carlos Pellicer Jorge Ramos Olivares Manuel and Mara Reyero Collection, New York Diego Lpez Rivera Coleccin Prez Simn Coleccin lvarez Bravo Urbajtel Dr. Richard Zapanta Family Collection and all private lenders that wish to remain unnamed. Furthermore, we wish to thank all of those who in many ways contributed to the realization of the exhibition and the accompanying catalog. Vctor Acua Lucienne Allen Laura Bechter Vera da Costa Autrey Sandra Benito Vlez Claudia Cabrera Maria del Refugio Crdenas Ruelas Magda Carranza de Akle Paul and Trudy Cejas Josena Trottner de Cesarman Armando Colina Teresa del Conde Alejandra Corts Guzmn Alvaro J. Covacevich Agustn Cristbal Gaudencio Cuahutle Angulo Alberto Davido Aline Davido Maria Estela Duarte Surez John Eldereld Candida Fernndez de Caldern Alberto Fierro Garza Stephen Fleischman Je Fleming Adela Obregon Formosa Teresa Franco

Gaby Franger Maria Gaida Jean Paul Gaultier Salomon Grimberg Edda Gilbert Busche Richard Haas Helena Hernndez de Valle-Arizpe Hayden Herrera Rainer Huhle Ibero-American Institute, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Cristina Kahlo Jochen Kahlo Howard Karno Andrea Kettenmann Taisia Koller Milena Koprevitza Acua Oscar de Len Montemayor Glenn D. Lowry Mary-Anne Martin Cesar Moheno Medellin Judith Gomez del Campo Mendvil Luis Morett Alattore Mimi Muray Levitt Holly Myers Gary Nader Nelleke Nix Lorcan ONeill Jos Ortiz Izquierdo Alejandra de la Paz Njera Carlos Pellicer Mariana Prez Amor Carlos Phillips Olmedo Melike Poda Yakub Poda Helga Prignitz-Poda Richard Shi Johanna Spanke Thomas F. Stanley Daniel Tamayo Cathryn Thurow Raquel Tibol Hilda Trujillo Soto Alfredo Vzquez Galicia Sergio Vela Roxana Velsquez Martinez del Campo Sandra Weisenthal de Galewicz Alejandra R. de Yturbe Jeanette Zwingenberger

foreword

Frida Kahlo was part of the major transformation which fostered the Mexican Revolution. This revolutionary spirit manifested itself in the re-evaluation of the indigenous past and of a present rich with traditions. The works of Frida Kahlo represent the fusion of the naked yet complex expression of her own self with the imagery, language, colors and symbols of Mexican popular culture. At the same time she was a product of the artistic avant-garde and the cultural exuberance of her times. Her painting oers the viewer images of a gaunt realism, of Estridentismo, Surrealism and what decades later would be known as magic realism. This retrospective allows us to grasp the process of maturation in the artists production. CONACULTA joins in this celebration of Frida Kahlo, Mexican by birth but universal in the signicance of her work for the world of visual arts. Consuelo Sizar
President of CONACULTA

foreword

Since its founding in 1946 the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) has been the cornerstone of artistic creativity in Mexico and its constant promoter abroad. In this sense and as part of its fundamental activities the INBA has exhibited the most varied types of artistic expression from around the world in its various venues, convinced that the cultural interchange thus established encourages the mutual spiritual enrichment of societies, as well as their reciprocal knowledge and understanding. Inspired by this conviction, it is an honor for the National Institute of Fine Arts to contribute to the eorts that have made it possible for the European public to enjoy the Frida Kahlo Retrospective shown in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Kunstforum in Vienna during spring and fall of 2010 respectively. We are convinced that this major exhibition will meet the expectations raised by the oeuvre of this Mexican artist, particularly since her works will be seen for the rst time in Austria and since never before have so many of them been displayed in Germany as in this exhibition. The approximately 140 pieces that make up this retrospective, sixty paintings and eighty drawings, many of them hardly known, constitute a notable artistic journey which has been initiated thanks to the commitment of the curator Helga Prignitz-Poda. As one of the foremost international specialists on Frida Kahlo, she seeks to present the Mexican artist in an objective and comprehensive perspective. That Frida Kahlos work is viewed time and time again; that it is studied with care and freed of unnecessary externalities, is for Mexico a guarantee that the wealth, greatness and timelessness that characterize her oeuvre will be revealed. It has been proven that Frida Kahlo created a bridge between Mexican and universal art, demonstrating that the former forms an integral part of the latter and above all that it can enrich it in a number of valuable ways. An exhibition of such major dimensions as this one could not have been successfully achieved without the cooperation of many people and institutions. For this reason the INBA would like to thank the directors of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Gereon Sievernich, and the Kunstforum, Ingried Brugger, for the

synergy which allowed this Frida Kahlo Retrospective to be realized. In this collaborative eort our thanks also go to Roland Michael Wegener, the German Ambassador in Mexico, and Alfred Lngle, the Austrian Ambassador in Mexico, as well as to their respective sta: Tania Hutt, Cultural Ocer and Claudia Kip, Cultural Attach for Germany; and Wolfgang Oliver Kutschera, Cultural Attach for Austria. Our thanks are also due to Miguel ngel Padilla Acosta, Charg dAaires for Mexico in Germany and Alejandro Daz y Prez Duarte, the Mexican Ambassador in Austria, as well as Daniel Tamayo Astie, Cultural Attach for Mexico in Germany. The generosity of various institutions and private collectors who lent their works has made it possible to assemble such a vast range of works. It includes works from the Banco Nacional de Mxico, S.A., the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation, the Galera Enrique Guerrero; the Museo Nacional de Agricultura de la Universidad Autnoma Chapingo, the Instituto Tlaxcalteca de Cultura and the Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala, as well as the Galera Arvil and the Galera de Arte Mexicano. To all of them the National Institute of Fine Arts extends its deepest gratitude. It has contributed to the works loaned by others with the riches from its own museums, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Casa Estudio Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Thanks to the invaluable contribution of all of those involved the work of Frida Kahlo, one of our most representative artists, can transcend the frontiers of Mexico, transforming itself into a link of knowledge and appreciation of art which unites our nations. Teresa Vicencio lvarez
General Director Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes

foreword

Frida Kahlo is regarded today as the veritable queen of the art shows; her ratings, internationally, could hardly be higher. Kahlo regularly attracts record numbers of visitors to museums, since she is an object of personal identication for a broad public fascinated by her art, but above all by her moving life-story. Kahlo is today an object of veneration for millions, a circumstance also of interest to those who mount art exhibitions. This catalog attempts at several points to illuminate aspects of the history of Fridas reception specically and to analyze that great success story from which for years now it has been impossible to isolate Kahlos works per se. Such an analysis contributes to an understanding of the oeuvre itself. Or rather, it directs our attention also to those artistic strategies which give the journal intime of this Mexican artist a complexity far transcending the merely biographical-voyeuristic aspect. In many respects Frida Kahlo dwelt and traveled on borders. The multi-layered nature of her work reects the manifold roles and identities of her life. Her pictures may on rst sight appear naive, but the symbolic content of the stories related in them is always enigmatic. The results of Helga Prignitz-Podas research decipher Fridas pictorial language once more, leading to new and surprising interpretations which also throw light on her life. The catalog also explores more deeply other aspects of this life, developing explanatory models for that intertwining of raw expressive drive and cool calculation that characterizes Kahlos art. Frida Kahlos various stagings of herself be it as a martyr, as a native Mexican, or as a seductress form central elements of her pictures and are reected also in the numerous photographic studies of her that have survived, above all those of the New York photographer Nickolas Muray. Cristina Kahlo, Fridas grandniece, selected the photographs for both exhibition and catalog. She has

added here, to Murays familiar portraits, lesser-known and unpublished material, some of it drawn from the family archives. This serves to supplement the ocial image of Kahlo with material illuminating her very private and human side. Frida Kahlo left to posterity barely 150 paintings in total: a relatively small oeuvre for a painter, now largely scattered in private collections in Mexico and the USA. For the present exhibition in Berlin and Vienna, we were able to gather together more than 60 of these paintings as well as 80 of her more important works on paper. This alone would make the present show one of the most signicant in the history of the public exhibition of Kahlos work. Frida Kahlo is, so to speak, a major Mexican cultural asset, and the realization of this project would not have been possible without the help and support of Mexican authorities not only on the ground at the various locations associated with the artist but also at the highest diplomatic level. Our sincere thanks go to Consuela Sizar, President of the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA) and to Teresa Vicencio lvarez, the General Director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), along with their co-workers, as well as to the representatives of the Mexican Embassies in Germany and Austria and of the German and Austrian Embassies in Mexico. We also thank the Banco de Mxico and the Fideicomiso Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo. Nor could this exhibition have been realized without the help of Carlos Phillips Olmedo, Director of the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio in Mexico City, and particularly not without his kind willingness to loan out certain important works. Our sincerest thanks go to him as they do also to Robert Littman and to the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation,

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out of whose holdings several very important artifacts are here on loan. The Galera Arvil and its Director Armando Colina also helped us to acquire numerous signicant works. Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, grandson of Diego Rivera, also supported this exhibition, as did numerous private collectors and institutions, all of whom deserve our gratitude. At the very center of this demanding project stands the exhibition curator herself, Helga Prignitz-Poda. It is impossible to overestimate the value of her commitment, her knowledge, her eorts in all questions relating to the loan of works to enrich the exhibition, and last but not least the eorts she has invested in the present catalog. She was ably assisted in all this, in Vienna, by Florian Steininger, whom we also wish to thank. We also thank Prestel Publishing and all the authors contributing to this catalog. An exhibition like the present one also represents an adventure and a risk on the nancial level. The close cooperation between our institutions has made this risk a viable one. For its part, the Vienna Kunstforum owes particular thanks to the Bank of Austria for its support. In view of what both exhibition and accompanying catalog have become, we believe we can say, with justied pride, that the commitment of all those involved in this project has not been in vain. We wish all visitors and readers much joy and pleasure in our Frida Kahlo!

Ingried Brugger
Bank Austria Kunstforum Director

Joachim Sartorius
Berliner Festspiele Intendant

Gereon Sievernich
Martin-Gropius-Bau Director

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a small world thats become so big

ingried brugger

During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo did not participate to any signicant degree in the international art scene. The list of her exhibitions is a short one, and the contemporary reviews she received can also be taken in at a glance. It was rather her husband, Diego Rivera, who enjoyed international attention as an artist and as one of the leading

gures in a left-leaning bohemian milieu. This erstwhile fame of Riveras, however, has faded during the intervening decades. Not in his homelandone doesnt have to spend much time in Mexico to be assured that the hype around Rivera still enduresbut certainly abroad, in Europe and the USA, which remain the main showplaces of modern and contemporary art. On the other hand, the art world has, in recent years, simply not been able to get enough of Frida Kahlo. Exhibitions of her work draw hundreds of thousands into museums all over the world but are infrequent because they are dicult to mount. Kahlo has a community of fans comparable to those of pop stars. Revered by an audience of millions, she enjoys today the status of a cult gurea status far transcending the individual life she lived as a painter and a woman. Kahlo dealt with her own personal fate in her paintings: a processing of her own inner state, with only minimal variations. She reacted to her immediate environment, sometimes allowing herself political allusions or, more precisely, portrayals of the connections she perceived between her own person and wider complexes of ideas. This means that her repertoire is limited, her language of signs and images, once deciphered, repetitive. Which is not to pass judgment on the quality of the paintings nor on the fascination they exert. But it remains the casewith all due respect to the artists personal destinythat the world Frida reects in her art is a relatively small one. Also a very private one. The posthumous reception of Kahlos work has usurped this private quality and turned her personal cosmos into something accessible to all her fans. Fridas role as an artist has been consistent cannon fodder for both feminism and post-feminism. Her potential as an object of identication, however, extends far beyond feminism alone. Kahlo has become something for the masses, with globally proliferating media systems and merchandising techniques not-tobe-underestimated, andlast but not leastSalma Hayeks Hollywood biopic assuring her a worldwide celebrity. Fridas star factor tends to keep the potential of her art very much in the shadows, as it would indeed the art of any artista phenomenon impressive and disquieting in equal measure. In the rst place, Kahlo is, of course, a typical product of todays mediadominated society. However, the question of just why she now enjoys

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Nickolas Muray Frida on White Bench, Nickolas Murays Studio, New York Collection of Nickolas Muray Photo Archives (cat. 226) Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress, 1926 Private collection, courtesy Galera Arvil, Mexico City (cat. 2) Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943 The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation (cat. 36)

this status of a heroine all over the globe cannot be answered without some reference to the artist herself, to her staging of her own personality during her lifetime, and to an art whose expressive power is sensitive and brutal at the same time. Both of these factors are key to her mass appeal. Kahlos idiosyncratic imagefacial features in which beauty contends with harshness, the unmistakable coiure, the trademark peasant regaliahas penetrated our collective visual memory, whether from photographs (g. 1), from the recent Frida biopic, or from the artists own use of herself in her paintings. Kahlo created her rst self-portrait at the age of 19 (g. 2). The Self-Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress was painted in the Casa Azul in Coyacn as she lay in bed seriously injured. As soon as I saw my mother, I said to her, Im still alive and besides, I have something to live for, and that something is painting. As I had to be lying down with a plaster corset that went from the clavicle to the pelvis, my mother ingeniously made a very funny contrivance that supported the easel I used to hold the sheets of paper [She made] a canopy with a mirror I could look in to use my image as a model.1 More than a third of Kahlos uvre consists of self-portraits (g. 3). And perhaps, as is otherwise only the case with Van Gogh, it is the artists own image that draws us under its spell. However, inasmuch as Kahlos self-portraits imbue this image with an iconic quality, they are more than just pictures of herself. They embody another realitya higher reality, one might say. They do not just stand as symbols of the artist, of her suering, of her search for love; they actually give body to all these things. Fridas self-portraits are incarnations of Frida and therefore as worthy of reverence as the artist herself. Gazing on an image of Frida, we think we see Frida herself! Her portraits are self-referential artworks and, as such, constitute a contribution to the history of the development of the avant-gardes. The idiosyncratic subtlety of Kahlos art consists in the fact that, while she seems so childishly intent on mimetically reproducing nature, the artistic strategy she adopts is actually an anti-mimetic one. Kahlos work and her life are thus directly interwoven with one another. This is how she herself wanted it, since she oers us, as it were, pieces of her life in her paintings. It is a life that still fasci3 2

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nates and enchants us with what appears to be a profound authenticityeven in our awareness of her fondness for role-play, of how
4

calculatingly she could strike poses and attitudes and even develop a skilful theatrical rhetoric of the body in pain. If we are to understand Kahlos cosmos of images, we need rst and above all to contemplate this cosmos through the grid of her biography, a lifetime full of struggle and suering that is indeed moving. She had a long-undiagnosed spinal illness that caused her pain from the age of six on; at eighteen, the terrible bus accident that damaged her health for life and necessitated repeated operations; the on-o relationship with Diego Rivera; the abortions performed on medical advice and the miscarriages (g. 4); her stressful activism in the communist cause; her friendship with the leading Surrealists; her sensational love aairs; her personal cultivation of exoticism; and her stubborn resistance to the death-wish of her own profoundly damaged body. Kahlos pictorial language is nourished above all by these personal, indeed intimate, experiences: Frida in the midst of dreams, fears, pains and hope; amidst her unborn and stillborn children; her family, and Diego Rivera; her wet-nurse; ties of blood and of aection, with all their instability; and love, with all its joy and pain. At the same time, however, there presides over Kahlos life and work a captivating and fascinating spirit of contradiction and antagonism. Her artistic exploration of her own self may strike us initially as having yielded only an art naf of remarkable folkloric air such as we generally associate with what is directly, authentically experienced. But on closer examination, we nd we are dealing with an interlinked cycle of paintings whose ideas and motifs are on a level such as to t harmoniously into the complex polyphonic project of international Surrealism in the secondary and tertiary stages of its rapid protean development. The viewer who follows the thread of what appears in Fridas paintings to be a mere random concoction of droll motifs from an illustrated diary is led to the Surrealists key question of how to achieve perception of reality in an expanded sense, with the aim of abolishing the fundamental distinction between outer and inner world (Max Ernst) (g. 5), or, as Breton expressed it, of dissolving such basic antinomies as waking and sleeping [reality and dream], reason and madness, objective and subjective, perception and representation, past and future, love, life and death even. Kahlos

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4 Henry Ford Hospital, 1932 Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, Xochimilco, Mexico City (cat. 16) 5 Portrait of Luther Burbank, 1931 Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, Xochimilco, Mexico City (cat. 11) 6 Self-Portrait as Tehuana or Diego in My Thoughts, 1943 The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th Century Mexican Art and The Vergel Foundation (cat. 38) 7 Self-Portrait with Small Monkey, 1945 Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, Xochimilco, Mexico City (cat. 50)

only apparently nave painting had, indeed, nothing to do with that hermetic semi-automatism, that mere registration of amorphous lines and forms, which had dominated the graphic art of Surrealism down to Masson and Tanguy. But Breton himself had abandoned this approach already in the Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 and advocated instead the method of dream-pictures executed with illusionistic clarity and accuracy. It was Salvador Dal who delivered this, along with Ren Magritte, whomuch like Frida Kahloborrowed, on the formal-aesthetic level, greatly from the seemingly mimetic artistic procedures of the German New Objectivists. Behind Fridas magical pictorial invention there lies, in fact, a real knowledge of the strategies of art in the modern age. Besides other contemporary stylistic possibilities found in the various international avant-gardes, these strategies consciously took into account not only the potential inherent in giving free play to the unconscious and the oneiric, but likewise that inherent in folklore and the nave. These entirely new sources of inspiration were used to drive on the larger project of dissolving the old conventions of form and representation. Not least among the eects achieved by Kahlos recourse to the aesthetically nave, and to stories told in a nave manner, is a deliberate questioning of accepted artistic norms. She consciously pledged herself to the art of artlessness as one of the basic categories of the avant-gardes. And it is this pictorial language which, in interpreting reality with a nave mimetic exactitude, renders the stories told in the paintings so impressive and leaves the viewer convinced that he is rediscovering the direct expression of Fridas personality in her pictorial self-reections. I believe there is a common denominator here. Seldom so perfectly as in the pictures of this Mexican artist has the moment of authenticity been paired with artistic calculation to form a constructed semi-naivety. This, also, has its appeal. And Frida Kahlo is anything but a nave artist, no more than Natalia Goncharova or Marc Chagall or Henri Rousseau were really nave artists. Kahlos decision, however, to make her own life and suerings the main theme of her painting created a climate of discussion in which the formal aesthetic questions raised by her work tended to be ignored. That moment of exoticism, too, which clings to Kahloand which she emphasized and fashioned into a personal imagetended, while fascinating her contemporaries as it does us,
7 6

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to consign her to a niche that from the start left little latitude for a contextualization of her art in international terms. Both Kahlos art and her public self-staging were spiced with a heavy dose of Mexicanidad, that drive toward collective recollection of the nations indigenous origins and its own national culture that emerged in the course of the Mexican revolution. Pervaded as they are with pre-Columbian symbols and motifs from the everyday culture of Mexico, her paintings make not just an aesthetic but above all a political statementjust as does Fridas own styling and staging of herself with her colorful Tehuana dress as a woman deeply rooted in Mexican peasant culture (Figs. 6, 7). How successful Kahlo was in making this statement is conrmed by a text of Andr Bretons written in 1938 shortly after rst meeting Kahlo and her husband Rivera on his trip through Mexico. Breton, already enchanted by Mexicos alien feel, by its exotic birds and fruits, and by the pre-Columbian gurines of Colima, writes that he would not really have experienced any of these things had there not nally appeared to mein a burst of light like that said to be generated by the bird called the Resplendent Quetzal, which, as it ies, leaves precious opals on the sides of common stonesher, so similar to all these wonders in her bearing, and adorned like a fairy princess with magical spells at her ngertips: Frida Kahlo di Rivera.2 Breton here transforms Kahlo into a natural phenomenon, as if expressly created to serve as inspiration to him, the European and the artista stance in fact typical of Breton. Nevertheless, this article by the chief Surrealist, published in the catalogue of Fridas rst solo exhibition in New York, does represent the very rst serious critical engagement with her work. Breton was the rst to see more in Kahlo than a practitioner of art naf, recognizing in her paintings the elements of a contribution to the solution of problems both politically philosophical and artistic, and acknowledging her evident knowledge of the European avant-garde. It was also Breton who persuaded Kahlo to exhibit in Paris and made possible her participation in Surrealists group exhibitions. But let us return to the question of the exotic. In her paintings, Kahlo transposes her own struggle for survival into exotic paradises, which we enter as if they were stages, ready to imitate this struggle, often as a strategy for dealing with our own lives. To venture a

comparison that leaps several decades: Maria Lassnig has also repeatedly portrayed herself in all her bodily frailty and imperfection. She omits, however, the paradise. Indeed, she paints it away which is why Lassnig remains a singular, oppositional gure insulated against our longing for someone to identify with. On the other hand, what Frida Kahlo oers is, in the last analysis, an invitation into this great paradise. This, and the extremely feminine pictorial and symbolic language, provide key indicators as to why there has arisen such a broad interest in her art. Andr Breton writes, I add today that no painting has ever seemed to me so exclusively feminine as hersin the sense that, in order to be the most tempting of arts, it consents to be, by turns, the purest and the most corrupt. The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.3 Taking up a stance between femme fragile and femme fatale, between magical seductress and vulnerable victim, and between emancipation and need for protection, Frida does indeed present herself in the self-portraits as a thoroughly ambivalent character. And this, too, provides a basis for identication on the part of the viewer. Frida was dead at 47. In the years that followed, she was almost forgotten. She had had her successes as an artist in her lifetime. But, in the last analysis, Frida had always been perceived as little more than an exotic ower that her husband Rivera wore on his lapel. Nonetheless, she had made every eort and had succeeded, within her limits, in generating the maximum possible publicity for herself. One is still moved today by the images of the vernissage of the rst Kahlo exhibition in her own country in Mexico City in 1953 and can well understand why Salma Hayek opens her lm with this scene. Frida took part in the celebration from her bed, made up carefully in the look that had become associated with her. She presents herself as a woman who, despite her physical degeneration (Frida had at this point just undergone several serious spine operations and was about to have her foot amputated), continues to create a recognized art of her own and, in the face of death, still wrests whatever joy she can from life. Viva la vida is the legend that appears several times on the fruit and ower still lifesgorgeous, but doomed to decaythat she created in the last years of her life. Kahlo herself laid the basis for her posthumous transformation into a mystical gure. She staged her own beauty in a manner that

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8 Self-Portrait with Portait of Dr. Farill, 1951 Private collection, courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zurich London (cat. 59)

blended it with frailty and ugliness. She made public display of her physical shortcomings and her sexuality and placed herself as a woman in the center of her (pictorial) world (g. 8). Like no one else, Frida Kahlo continues to be a gure suitable for projecting innumerable clichs upon. The background for her self-staging was provided by the typically French gure of the artiste maudit personied by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlainein the last analysis, that concept of the sick, wounded, pariah artist that also denes our perception of Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. Kahlos presentation of herself in the role and costume of a martyrwith thorn necklace, skin pierced by nails, her body torn open in her corset, or transxed by arrowsdraws on an iconography of the sacred. Such images and gestures, petried metaphors nourished by recollections of the Passion, serve as allegories for loneliness and melancholy to which the viewer can easily relate. It is in the eld of associations around the artiste mauditthe ever-maltreated creatorthat loneliness, as a perversion of contemplative inwardness, nds its place in our culture. Alsoindeed, most particularlyin Kahlos case, this loneliness is to be traced to the fact of

emancipations tendency to result in isolation; an isolation that takes the form of a grand aesthetic gesture in her work and in her public life. Frida Kahlo is counted among those who have managed to shift their personal crisis, the awareness of this crisis, denitively into the realm of the aesthetic. But that is not all. Kahlo and her uvre embody, as it were, a universal dialectic in which the personal can be connected with the political, the private with the public, and the search for ones own identity with crises of social and cultural consciousness. Decades before the womens movement made the personal is political its slogan, and even longer before identity politics and post-colonial hybridities became elements of a global discourse on power-structures and interdependencies, Kahlo touched on all these themes with her work. In some paintings, she does this very simply; in others, she interconnects and interweaves many themes in compositions planned with evident rigor and consistency. Her uvre is the interpenetration, as it were, of two historicities, one absolute, although aesthetically experienced, and the other private. The emotional shock of the images results from this collision between the absolute (the ancient soil of Mexico; the new America; the political and social situation) and the reections on and of a very personal fate. The movement of history and her own transitoriness crash into one another head on. I is someone else (Arthur Rimbaud). Driven by her awareness of the irreducible failings of her own body and by the longing for wholeness and perfection, Kahlo develops a strategy for an imaginary compensation of these failings. From this there results both the compulsion to self-staging that distinguishes her personally and, in her work, the staging of the self in another sense, namely, as the creator of a highly complex cosmos that shatters the boundaries of the mere, individual I and in which the search for ones own identity expands to become a multi-faceted, poetic engagement with other, universal identities.

1 Raquel Tibol, Frida KahloAn Open Life (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 44. 2 Andr Breton, Prface, in: Frida Kahlo (Frida Rivera), exhib. cat., Julien Levy Gallery, New York 1938 (Archivo Museo Frida Kahlo), reprinted in: Andr Breton, Le surralisme et la peinture: 19281965 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965, here: p 143). 3 ibid., p. 144.

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the celestial love story and encoded ciphers in the work of frida kahlo
helga prignitz-poda

Frida Kahlos dramatic and always interesting biography is for the most part well-known to the public at large. The artist has acquired the status of a canonized saint, with her pictures being compared to icons. Unfortunately, however, the familiar stories and legends are for the most part merely repeated like a mantra. As long-lasting as myths, these stories persist and cloud the view of the works. It has often gone unnoticed that research in the last few years has corrected various points in the biography1beginning with the now well-known fact that Frida Kahlo herself repeatedly made false

statements, including about her age. Her fathers origin has also been wrongly reported, for he was not Jewish but Protestant and came from a family of jewelry traders in Pforzheim. Likewise, Frida did not attend the German School in Mexico City, but a primary school in Coyoacn before she transferred to the next level of schooling, the Preparatoria.2 Just as unveried is Fridas supposed bout of polio during her childhood, as it is neither conrmed by the Mexican physician Henriette Begun nor by Fridas closest condant, Dr. Eloesser.3 He diagnosed many of her problems with her leg as being caused by an undetected spina bida occulta, which he considered the cause of all her later health aictions. Pablo Picassos remarks about Frida Kahlo similarly belong to the realm of ction, since they were invented by Diego Rivera and cannot be veried. Surprising corrections and additions to the biographic details have come to light in recent years thanks to the opening of an archive in the long-locked bathroom of the Casa Azul (Blue House), which, according to Diego Riveras testament, was to remain closed for ten years after Frida Kahlos death. Little by little, these treasures are being studied and published. The contents of the clothes closet were published rst,4 then a small address book,5 and now researchers are concentrating on the correspondence with Fridas doctor and the publication of the private photo album. The fascinating psychological evaluation of Frida Kahlo by Olga Campos has been discovered and published by Salomon Grimberg.6 All in all, since the 100th anniversary of Frida Kahlos birth, a whole series of biographical facts have had to be re-evaluated, and consequently many established and cherished ideas about her reconsidered. The iconization of her works must likewise be modied. For even though Frida Kahlo does make herself the subject of every picture, each time it is in another context, with another background, and in another role. No detail is repeated and no brushstroke is without signicance. This means that none of her pictures is easy to decipher, and just as only certain points of her biography have been unmasked, many secrets continue to lie concealed in her works behind seemingly innocuous, encrypted faades.

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Frida Kahlos diary, page 115

2 Frida Kahlos diary, page 128 3 Frida Kahlos diary, page 137

Her dressing in various types of folk costume is widely known, whether as a Tehuana or a doctor from Yalalag, as Kali or Parvati, or as Malinche, and sometimes even as a saint in a owing robe.7 In addition to the theatrical changes of costume, she also employed the encrypted iconography of emblems. And lastly, her pictures also contain as yet completely undiscovered aspects, humorous images, satires, and caricatures. Occasionally, she provoked people who had commissioned paintings or the friends portrayed by such veiled allusions. The fact that some of her pictures were returned to her shortly afterwards testies to the sensitivity of her clients. This applies, for example, to the painting for the dining room of the President of the Republic, in which Kahlo depicted a hollow pumpkin. This amounted to a veiled insult to the oce of president, since in Spanish a hollow pumpkin means a jackass. The perfectly painted picture was not rejected because its artistic execution was unsatisfactory, but rather because the allusion was regarded as inappropriate. In my interpretations of individual works in this catalog, I have aimed to decipher similarly concealed, humorous secrets in those works. Kahlo encrypted her works in order to challenge or even to mislead the viewer who attempts to understand her pictures. Similarly it was her intention that anyone browsing through her

diary besides herself should fail to comprehend what was written on the pages.8 In order to free Kahlos pictures from the rigidity of their iconization, I would like to draw attention in the following pages to several new clues that help to decipher her encryptions. Their very nature makes it necessary to examine closely these hidden details. Therefore, I beg the reader to be patient when my descriptions sometimes become very detailed.

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4 The Cuchachas, c. 1927 5 What I Saw in the Water or What the Water Gave Me, 1938 (1934) Private collection 6 Detail with marking by the author 7 Detail with marking by the author

the love story of the heavens

Myths from all periods and peoples are concerned with events in the heavens, centering on the sun and the moon, the celestial pair apparently destined for one another. The sun is seen as the man, the glorious hero, and the moon as the woman, beautiful but ckle. Both love each other, but higher powers prevent them from being happy together. For it is during the full moon, when the moon goddess is at her most beautiful and the suns desire for her is strongest, that she is farthest from him at the opposite side of the earth. When she nally does approach him after 14 days, she has become the new moon and is once again invisible. She can only be with him at the cost of submission. Frida Kahlo used the sun and moon in a number of her paintings to depict this classical love story and, through it, her relationship to Diego Rivera. It has been repeatedly stated that the sun and moon in her pictures demonstrate how strongly her conception of the world was pervaded by dualism. That is not entirely wrong, but it is also not entirely correct. For the most part, she is only directly stating with these ciphers how close or how far apart she and her husband were at that moment. One must keep in mind that Mexico is considered the land of the sun and moon. The Aztec creation myths recount extensively how the gods once gathered in Teotihuacan to create the sun and the moon. According to this myth, the sun was from then on dependent on human sacrices to keep it from falling down to earth and destroying it. Kahlo begins her diary on the rst page with the words No, Luna, Sol (g. 1). She immediately delineates in this manner the arc of the plot of her diary. Everything centers around the great love story of the heavens and her own with Diego Rivera, but also around its negation: the large number of their aairs and lovers. Diego Rivera was her sun. Just like the sun, which moves in a course across the heavens marked by great calmness and serenity despite the turbulent uctuations of its surface, Diego Rivera embodies the great calmness and certainty of doing everything immutably right, while on his surface numerous love aairs create turbulences.
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In contrast, Kahlo sees herself as the moon with a cold, rigid surface and yet with an extremely changeable, irregular course.9 Her rigid, apparently serene mask hides the torn and inconsistent core inside. In her paintings, she makes the impossibility of the union of sun and moon her subject and above all her awareness that it is futile to want to inuence the course of the sun with any type of sacrices. The three pages from her diary shown here (pages 115, 128, 137, g. 13), for example, reveal how in the beginning she conceived herself as a disintegrating being, ready to make sacrices in the

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attempt to halt the sun in its course. On the second page she notes: Now? Everything is reversed. Sun and moon, feet and Frida. Like the dying Buddha, she lies on her side on the ground. The moon has set and the sun could fall directly on her; as though the sacrice of the one foot which was to be amputated were not enough to appease the sun. In the last gure on page 137, she depicts how the sun has actually fallen on a pyramid, leaving behind it only ruins, the sad concession of her own supposed failure. It is a melancholy image in which Frida Kahlo admits that Diego Rivera is not satised with her, that she has failed in her eorts to win him. The representations of the sun and moon in her oil paintings also clearly and heartbreakingly depict how Frida Kahlo was consumed by her love for this sun and ultimately gave up the struggle. The rst time that Frida Kahlo represented this celestial pair of lovers was in the Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the USA (cat. 15), painted in 1932 shortly after her wedding with Diego Rivera. Sun and moon are still naively portrayed here with human faces, yet the enormous tension and contrariety is evident in the thunder and lightning already exploding between them. In her painting Portrait of Lucha Maria, Girl from Tehuacn (cat. 35), the sun and moon have already lost their human countenances. Kahlo presents the cosmic celestial bodies from the perspective of a distanced astronomer and shows how the girl has fallen into the role of the victim. The ambivalence of the suns energy nally can be seen in the painting Moses or Solar Core from 1945 (cat. 52). It is life-giving, and yet its magnitude makes it absolutely deadly for the germinating fetuses and the abandoned childa symbol for the miscarriages and abortions that Frida Kahlo had to suer, because Diego Rivera did not want to have any children. In Without Hope (cat. 53) from the same year and in Tree of Hope, Remain Strong painted shortly thereafter, the full moon and the sun appear together in the sky; this in itself is impossible. The attempt to prevail against the facts is apparent. In one picture Frida resists the lies and stories Diego attempts to feed her, and ghts against his cheating and aairs. In another, she is sitting at the edge of an abyss confronted by her own lamentable psyche, trying to defy
6 7 5

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8 Self-Portrait Time Flies, 1929 Private collection 9 Fantasy (I), 1944 Museo Dolores Olmedo Patio, Xochimilco, Mexico City (cat. 103) 10 Fantasy (II), 1944 Private collection, courtesy Galera Enrique Guerrero (cat. 104)

11 The Second Eye, n. d. Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City 12 All-Seeing Eye!, 1934 Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera (cat. 96) 13 The Broken Hours, 1944, ceramic Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City

reality itself. The simultaneity of the sun and moon prove that she is aware of the irreality of her desires; she also knows that Diego Rivera will continue to betray her and she will not regain her health. The sun is portrayed in a completely dierent manner in Sun and Life, 1947 (cat. 55). Here the sun has already set and impregnates the germinating life during its course through the underworld. This is an old mythological idea of the suns activity in the underworld. Kahlos version of it is represented by the

changing cycle of love: Diego Riveras steady course through the world that always led him back to her, even if it was only at night. That masterpiece of 1947, The Embrace of Love of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego and Seor Xlotl (cat. 157), once more reveals the desire to reconcile opposites and to conquer the heavens together. The monstrous dream of having the celestial bodies of the night and the day in the sky simultaneously determines her own downfall. The moon would be consumed by re. Frida Kahlo already has bleeding arms in the picture, since she carries Diego as a child in her arms. As the Indian God Shiva, he singes the immediate surroundings with his third eye and with his lifes ame because he has been torn from his meditation by Parvatis embrace. The moon no longer appears in Frida Kahlos nal pictures, nor in the recently re-discovered Self-Portrait Inside a Sunower (cat. 65). The sun has triumphed. A moon-less darkness prevails for the sun has distanced itself, and the earths shadow rests on the moon. Frida Kahlo sees her energy dwindling; the burden of bodily life has fallen over her as a shadow.

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ligatured monograms
Frida Kahlo found in the art of abbreviating names an even smaller, even more concealed symbolic language with which to encrypt secret thoughts. She learned this technique from her father, who liked to occupy himself by creating artful monograms for the members of his family. This art of interweaving a persons initials ornamentally had at one time been popular and useful as an identifying mark on diverse household objects or, as embroidery, to personalize clothes and textiles. The fathers monograms were passed on to his daughters in the form of gifts. Kahlo subsequently employed this monogram technique in dierent ways in her pictures. If one follows the patterns of individual branches, twigs, or the veins of leaves, then further monograms can be discovered among them. Let us look at just three examples: In an early and unknown work by Kahlo, The Cuchachas (before 1927), which has unfortunately been lost, a woman is shown from behind wearing an unusual cap. We can recognize the same rear view of the woman in a sketch from the collection of Father Ruben in Tlaxcala signed by Fridas school friend, Miguel N. Lira. Frida, however, did not simply copy the gure onto the oil painting, but slightly modied the cap by joining and inserting the monogram AZ. In this manner we can identify the woman shown from behind as Fridas schoolfriend, Adelina Zandejas. Kahlo reveals this womans name in a circumspect, almost conspiratorial manner by adopting an audacious shape for the collar below the nape of the neck that, like a crude drawing on a school bench, is a caricature of a very intimate part of her friends body. Kahlo likewise depicts other details quite candidly that were probably discussed in the group of friends represented in the painting. Further examples of Kalhos monogram art can be seen in one of her most famous works, the incomparable What I Saw in the Water or What the Water Gave Me (g. 5, 6, 7).10 Not one but two monograms are buried here. The strangely-formed tree on which a dead bird lies on its back, together with the trees body of roots extending far to the left, rst alerted me to the possibility that a monogram could be involved here, since the calligraphic ourish is not merely part of the trees roots. It is also the continuation of the line of the

letter K (Kahlo), with which she has connected the W from her fathers rst name (Wilhelm). With the monogram concealed in the tree, she thus relates her father to this episode of the picture. The tree namely appears in the painting dealing with the story of Odysseuss wanderings that Frida Kahlo associates with her aictions, in the episode concerned with the Cyclops. Representing the father as the tyrannical ruler of the Kahlo family is something the artist would not have normally dared. Yet encrypted and encoded in a monogram, ideas emerge that she did not want to express openly. Very little is known about Frida Kahlos two half-sisters from her father Wilhelms rst marriage. His rst wife, Maria Cardea, died during the birth of the second child. Wilhelm married Fridas future mother shortly thereafter, and the two sisters were sent to a Catholic boarding school. Occasionally they visited the family, but were never really part of it and remained in the position of outsiders. Frida Kahlo makes their painful biographies, for which she otherwise found no words, the subject of the painting What I Saw in the Water or What the Water Gave Me, by linking the half-sisters with the episode of the Odyssey where Odysseus is forced to confront the Sirens. The two Sirens, the two young naked women on the sponge, were friends of Persephone and were playing with her on the beach when Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld, in other words, when she died. The two girls were then accused by Persephones mother of having been careless and of having allowed Persephone to disappear. As punishment they were transformed into half-human, half-animal beings forced to live in the ocean. Their task was to lure sailors to their destruction by means of their seductive singing. Similarly, the sirens in Kahlos painting are not good swimmers. They cling to the sponge as though it were a life raft. The two young women resemble the half-sisters Maria Luisa and Margarita Kahlo Cardea. The strange positioning of the arms and legs reveals, when we apply the art of calligraphy, the double monogram MMCK. Kahlo again portrayed the two young women the following year in the painting Two Nudes in the Forest or The Earth Itself (1939). The peculiar positioning of the arms and legs appears here once again almost unchanged, resulting in the same monogram. By depicting Margarita and Maria

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