A FAMILY STORY

A corner of Frida's kitchen, decorated with blue and yellow tiles from Puebla.  Frida's name is spelled out in tiny mugs on the wall.

A typical Puebla mole.  The ingredients are arranged on the wood stove in the kitchen of the Blue House.

Handmade painted wooden shelves in the dining room.  The table is also painted yellow, which was Frida's preferred color for decoration in the Blue House.

Frida, photographed in 1932 by her father, Guillermo Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo was a student at the National Preparatory School when she first met my father, Diego Rivera.  Diego had just returned from a ten-year stay in Europe and was painting his first murals, which were located in the amphitheater of the school, formerly the Jesuit Colegio de San Ildefonso.

Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo were working on murals in the old cloister of the school.  All of the painters, including Diego, were the object of verbal and physical attacks from the students, who were opposed to the murals and sought to destroy them any way they could.

Diego and Frida photographed in the kitchen of the Blue House in 1941.

Diego had chosen several of the most beautiful women in Mexico City's artistic and intellectual circles to serve as models for his allegory on the Creation. One of them was Lupe Marin (my mother), who had recently arrived in Mexico City from Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco. Lupe and Frida thus met each other through Diego.

When he had completed the amphitheater mural, Diego moved his scaffolds to the headquarters of the newly created Secretary of Public Education to begin work on a new painting there. He lost touch with Frida but continued to see Lupe, whom he married in 1923. 1 was born the next year, and my sister, Ruth, came along three years later.

Through these years Frida continued her studies at the National Preparatory School, where she was deeply involved with Alejandro Gomez Arias, the brilliant student leader. She was with him in 1925 when a streetcar accident changed the course of her life, forcing her to spend a lonely and tedious year in bed and leaving her forever disabled.

While Alejandro traveled around Europe, Frida took up painting to pass the time. Her first portraits of friends and acquaintances date from this period, as does an especially successful portrait of the absent Alejandro. It was perfectly natural for her to compose her first self-portraits in the style of Sandra Botticelli, whose painting Primavera was one of her favorites.

Frida soon determined to switch from the sciences to art. She tucked a few of her canvases under her arm and went off to see Diego. She wanted the Master's opinion of her art and hoped he would take her on as assistant in the ongoing mural project. Diego advised her to keep on painting; he also told her that she could look forward to a very successful artistic career.

As Frida's interview with Diego was drawing to a close, Lupe Marin walked in, bearing lunch on a tray for her husband. She was furious to find them together, and she would have started throwing the lunch plates had not Diego, alarmed and laughing nervously, intervened to keep these angry women, who were clearly fighting over him, safely apart.

Two years after this episode, Diego received a surprise official invitation to attend celebrations that were to be held in the U.S.S.R. in honor of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He was also asked to paint a huge mural in the Red Army Palace in Moscow.  When Diego left Mexico, he had no idea when he would return. He left my mother in the charge of her former boyfriend, the poet Jorge Cuesta. Not surprisingly, when Diego returned (sooner than expected) he found that Lupe and Jorge were deeply and happily in love, and my parents divorced. Frida and Alejandro Gomez Arias had meanwhile split up. At the instigation of her friend German del Campo, Frida had joined the Communist Party and befriended Tina Modotti, who was already famous for her photography and political activism. It was in Tina's house that Frida and Diego met for the third time. Without Lupe to get in the way, they became engaged and were eventually married on August 26, 1929, in the village of Coyoacan on the outskirts of Mexico City.

By this time my mother was happily married to Jorge Cuesta and had, for all intents and purposes, forgotten her rivalry with Diego's female admirers. In fact, she used to get together with Diego's girlfriends to complain about him. And so it was that when Tina offered to hold Diego and Frida's wedding reception at her house, Lupe volunteered to cook some of Diego's favorite dishes.

Tina's patio was lavishly decorated with pendants and streamers, transformed into a festive setting with all the friendly charm of a Mexican village. A mariachi band played nonstop, and the guests sipped tequila and munched on pork rinds with avocado as they waited for the newlyweds to arrive. The crisis came when Lupe could control her jealousy no longer, and emotion triumphed over manners. Lupe began flaunting her own beauty in the face of Frida's physical deformities. She lifted the bride's skirts for all to see the consequences of the polio Frida had suffered as a child and called out; "Your legs are scrawny, but mine -- just look at them!" Frida responded by giving Lupe a violent shove; she lost her balance and went tumbling to the ground. Diego had to hold them apart in order to prevent bloodshed.

After the wedding the Riveras moved into a big house in the Juarez quarter of Mexico City, fronting on the very grand Paseo de la Reforma. In those early days of their marriage they shared the house with David Alfaro Siqueiros and his wife, Blanca Luz, and other artist couples. Everyone pitched in to pay the rent.

Dwight Morrow was the United States Ambassador to Mexico at that time. He wanted to improve relations between the two countries in the wake of the Revolution that had swept Mexico between 1910 and 1917. With this in mind, he commissioned a huge mural dedicated to the story of the state of Morelos, where many prominent political figures -- himself included -- had weekend homes. With the support of the governor of the state, Morrow asked Diego Rivera to accept the commission. The murals were to be painted on the walls of an ancient palace that had belonged to Hernan Cortes in Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos.

A page of the notebook in which Frida recorded the sales of her paintings.

My sister, Ruth, and I went to visit him there. I remember clearly how anxious Frida was to cook and keep house for Diego, when in fact she knew nothing of housekeeping. She had even less of an idea how to look after a kitchen in the tropics, where ants, cockroaches, and numerous other insects came and went at their leisure and generally felt quite at home. But we all survived.

A few months later Diego secured a commitment from President Emilio Portes Gil to finance a mural on themes from Mexican history to be painted in the central stairwell of the National Palace.

By then, relations between my parents and their respective spouses had become friendly enough to encourage joint residency in the same house. So it was that the two couples -- and their "appendages" Ruth and Lupe (or Chapa and Pica, as we were nicknamed) -- took up residence in a small apartment house that my mother had recently built. My father and Frida lived on the ground floor, and the rest of us on the third floor. The space in between was only symbolically unassigned; in point of fact we constantly met there for meals or to spend the evenings, unless friends dropped by to visit.

My father, who never stopped working, began on the murals in the National Palace while paying sporadic visits to Cuernavaca. At the same time he was engaged in painting murals at the Department of Public Health, where the youngest of the Kahlo girls, Cristina, posed nude for him. Jorge Cuesta divided his time between poetry and his career as a chemist. Frida worked on easel painting. And my mother was in charge of sewing everyone's clothes and teaching Frida how to cook.

The apartments had very small kitchens. One cooked with charcoal and wooden implements, kettles, and earthenware crocks. When Lupe and Frida worked together there was hardly room for both of them. Where Lupe took up space with her height and ample limbs, Frida filled it with her elaborately starched and frilly skirts. They took equal delight in preparing country-style chiles en frio, stuffed with chopped meat and bathed in a sweet-and-sour sauce of tomatoes and sliced onions, or the romeritos with shrimp tortitas and sour prickly pears, or the refried beans smothered in cheese and garnished with crisp totopos. For these were Diego's favorite dishes.

Page from the Nuevo Cocinero Mexicano, the cookbook that belonged to Mrs. Matilde Calderon de Kahlo, Frida's mother.

Frida was taught to cook most of these dishes by Lupe, who for her part had learned them from my grandmother Isabel Preciado. Like many ladies of her period, Grandmother relied on a cookbook that was revered as a classic in Guadalajara. It was called Practical Recipes for Housewives, and it came in two volumes. Frida would later consult a cookbook in the format of a dictionary that had belonged to her mother. Called The New Mexican Cook, it was a collection of the finest and tastiest traditional recipes. I eventually inherited these books from my grandmother and from Frida, complete with their own recipes and kitchen secrets -- the very same ones that appear in this book.

Page from the Nuevo Cocinero Mexicano, the cookbook that belonged to Mrs. Matilde Calderon de Kahlo, Frida's mother.

The superficially idyllic life that the Riveras and Cuestas lived together could not last forever. Under considerable pressure from the Mexican government due to his political ideas, Diego accepted an invitation to participate in a project at the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the School of Fine Arts. Frida took advantage of her new life in California, and the weeks they later spent in New York, to get to know the United States and to experiment with her own painting. Since she and Diego were living in hotels and furnished apartments without kitchens, they had to eat out. In her letters home, Frida spoke of how much she missed Mexican cooking and how hard it was to get used to the monotony of North American food.

In 1937, Frida celebrated Leon Trotsky's arrival in Mexico with a fiesta, decorating the dining room table in the Blue House with flowers.

Months later, when she had recovered from a spell of bad health and was living in Detroit, Frida went back to cooking her favorite Mexican dishes. She was able to do this because all the necessary ingredients were available in stores she had searched out in the city's Mexican quarter. People stared when Frida arrived at the Detroit Institute of Art bearing a huge basket full of the great Master's food, but his assistants and friends helped themselves and found it very much to their liking.

The Riveras returned to Mexico toward the end of 1933. Their ultramodern house in San Angel, designed by Juan O'Gorman, was ready, and they moved in at once. The furnishings were totally modern, with tables, chairs, and other furniture made from polished steel with cushions and upholstery of fine leather, lemon-green in color. This made a vivid contrast with the red tiles on the roof, the white walls and yellow tile floors covered with petates (reed mats).  Even more striking was the presence of Diego Rivera's colorful canvases, which took up most of the wall space.

There was an all-electric kitchen, so tiny that it discouraged anyone from cooking in it, so Frida built a second kitchen where she could enjoy making meals. But the Riveras were still not happy. They came to the conclusion that it would be best to refurnish the Blue House in Coyoacan -- Frida's family home. San Angel would then function as a studio for them both, while the Blue House would be their home.

In 1942, family events made it convenient for me to go to Coyoacan and live with my father and Frida Kahlo. In the Blue House I had some of the most important experiences of my youth. I met people who had a tremendous impact on my life, but the most important influence of all was learning to see the world through the way Frida and Diego lived.

Frida was an enthusiast; she got the most out of everything. The world around her was more than enough cause for permanent rejoicing. She celebrated saints' days, birthdays, baptisms, and most of the popular holidays, both religious and secular. She got everyone involved -- friends and family, students and colleagues -- and she loved to mingle with the crowds in the marketplace on traditional holidays. She used to go to Garibaldi Square, where the mariachis -- her constant companions in good times and bad -- sang her favorite songs, one after another. I had lived a fairly sheltered life until then, so this was a new world for me.

I have put in writing some of the most significant and moving moments of Frida Kahlo's life, the ones that are most indelibly impressed upon my memory. I also speak of Frida's daily life, her habits and personality, and the artistic talent that is so apparent in the works she created between 1940 and 1943. I write about her enthusiasm for food and preparing Diego's favorite dishes. I have called these events Frida's Fiestas, although I must admit that my father, myself, and everyone else who knew Frida took part in these celebrations with her. Setting these experiences down on paper has not been terribly painful, nor has it been particularly easy. But I must confess that it gives me great personal satisfaction to see them written down in the words that make up this book.

Guadalupe Rivera

Frida's photo album, on display in the Frida Kahlo Museum.

Go to Next Page