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FRIDA KAHLO, THE BRUSH OF ANGUISH |
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The Other Accident, Part 1
Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931 "When I was seventeen, Diego began to fall in love with me," Frida once explained to a journalist (subtracting ,three years from her age). "My father didn't like him because 'he' was a Communist and because they said he looked like a fat, fat, fat Breughel. They said it was like an elephant marrying a dove, Nevertheless, I arranged everything in the Coyoacan town hall for us to be married on the twenty-first of August, 1929." To a friend, Frida said, "I have suffered two serious accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me.... The other accident is Diego."
It was Diego Rivera's first legal marriage, although there had been many women in his life and two other long-term relationships. The Russian artist Angelina Beloff lived with him as his common-law wife for ten years in Paris during the 1910s; she bore him a son, who died at an early age. Another lover, Marievna Vorobiev-Stebelska, also had a child by him, a daughter, whom he did not acknowledge as his own for many years. In 1922 in a church ceremony, Diego married the beautiful Mexican Lupe Marin, with whom he had two daughters. According to Mexican law, which required a civil ceremony, this union was not legal, but it was considered a serious commitment by the couple. However, a divorce was not necessary when Diego decided to marry Frida.
"I borrowed petticoats, a blouse, and a rebozo from the maid, fixed the special apparatus on my foot so it wouldn't be noticeable, and we were married. Nobody went to the wedding, only my father, who said to Diego, 'Now, look, my daughter is a sick person and all her life she's going to be sick. She's intelligent but not pretty. Think it over awhile if you like, and if you still wish to marry her, marry her, I give you my permission.'" According to Diego, Frida's father added he rightfully had to warn him that she was un demonio, a devil. "Then they gave us a big party in Roberto Montenegro's house. Diego got horrendously drunk on tequila, waved his pistol about, broke some man's little finger, and destroyed some other things. Afterward, we got mad at each other; I left crying and went home. A few days went by and Diego came to get me and took me to his house at 104 Reforma." Tina Modotti wrote to Edward Weston in September 1929: "Had I not told you Diego had gotten married? I intended to. A lovely nineteen-year-old girl, of German father and Mexican mother; a painter herself." Modotti added in Spanish, "A ver que sale!" (Let's see how it works out!)
Frida, c. 1930 Many others were struck by the incongruity of the petite, young Frida marrying the overweight, middle-aged artist. When her school friends heard about her marriage, they were shocked and surprised, considering it una cosa mons/roosa, a hideous thing. But Frida was the last unmarried daughter of ill parents in sad financial straits. Her decision had pragmatic as well as romantic repercussions; in fact, Diego paid off the mortgage on her parents' home.
Certainly the striking pair's marriage, reported widely in the international press, offered Frida an opportunity to move not only in Mexican but leading European and American artistic and intellectual circles; she relished the contacts she made and the attention she received ~s the wife of a famous artist. But perhaps ultimately she was attracted by an attribute described by each of Diego's previous companions, his dynamism, by which he vitalized everything and everyone who came near him. He was possessed of a great and genuine warmth along with a capacity for charmingly tender gestures. Frida began her married life in Diego's house in the first block of Mexico City's Avenida Reforma. In an interview she said, "For furniture we had a narrow bed, a dining set that Frances Toor (editor of Mexican Folkways) gave us with a long black table, and a little yellow kitchen table that my mother gave us. We arranged it out of the way in one corner for the collection of archaeological pieces. We couldn't have a child, and I cried inconsolably, but I distracted myself fixing meals, cleaning house, painting at times, and going along with Diego each day to the scaffolds. He really liked me to come along bringing his lunch in a basket covered with flowers."
Self-Portrait with Necklace, 1933 Hospitably, if unpredictably, Diego's ex-wife Lupe Marin took the young newlywed under her wing, going with her to buy pots and pans and kitchen things, then teaching her to prepare Diego's favorite dishes. Frida painted Lupe's portrait as a gift in thanks for the cooking lessons. Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to Cuernavaca, where Diego had been commissioned by U.S. Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow to paint a mural in the historic colonial palace of Hernan Cortes. While Diego tackled long work days, Frida passed the time visiting neighboring villages with a friend, Luis Cardoza y Aragon, who was living with them. He remembers with affection, "Frida was what she always was, a marvelous woman. There was a spark in her that was growing and beginning to light up her canvases, to light up her life and, in turn, the lives of others." In the fall of 1930, Frida for the first time traveled out of Mexico. She and Diego went to San Francisco, where he had commissions to paint two murals. While he worked on the scaffolds at the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club and the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), she explored the streets of Chinatown and the North Beach area near their studio living quarters. She visited with the wives of his assistants and other artists they knew. Together they often played "Exquisite Cadavers," drawing by turns on a piece of paper folded in equal sections, each player inventing a part of the human body without knowing what had been drawn by the preceding person. When the paper was unfolded, the hilarious result was revealed, to which Frida always added the most erotic and audacious details. In San Francisco Frida and Diego attracted the attention not only of artist friends but of wealthy' art patrons and prominent business figures, beginning the torrent of adulation, praise, and later, controversy that would accompany Diego throughout his U.S. visit. They made a dramatic couple: the dark and slender beauty in long Mexican dress with her elaborate jewelry, the genial, towering fat man in rumpled suit and broad-brimmed hat. The press loved them, and newspaper coverage was extensive wherever they went. Meanwhile, Frida was sketching and making pictures of herself and of friends. She painted a double portrait of herself and Diego for Albert Bender, an influential businessman and philanthropist who had intervened with the State Department to get Diego an entry visa in spite of his Communist ties; he also helped them Albert Kahn, Frida, and Diego at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1932 financially by purchasing Diego's work and by encouraging friends to do so. In one corner of the double portrait, using a. motif from Mexican folk art, Frida painted on a ribbon held in the beak of a dove, "Here you see us, I, Frida Kahlo, with my adored husband. I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California, for our friend, Mr. Albert Bender, and it was in the month of April in the year 1931."
Albert Kahn, Frida, and Diego at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1932 During the six months they spent in San Francisco, Frida was briefly hospitalized for a problem with her foot. Her physician, Dr. Leo Eloesser, became a lifelong friend and adviser. She painted Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser for him in thanks and perhaps as compensation. After a short trip to Mexico in the summer of 1931, the Riveras returned to the United States, this time to New York for a major exhibition of Diego's work at the Museum of Modern Art, only the second one-person show held there. Once again the center of attention, Diego and Frida were feted by New York's business and art elite, including John D. and Abby Rockefeller, who became patrons. Frida at first took a dislike to the crowded city, and Diego had little time for her as he prepared for the exhibition's opening. But as the months went by, Frida began to meet and enjoy new friends with whom she could explore Manhattan. Diego's career next took them, in the spring of 1932, to Michigan where the Detroit Arts Commission had invited him to create an extensive series of murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Diego again immersed himself in his work, putting in long, arduous days with his assistants. It was a lonely time for Frida. Her stay in Detroit was also marked by a serious medical problem. On the fourth of July, in the midst of severe hemorrhaging, she was rushed to Henry Ford Hospital.
Portrait of Dr. Leo Eloesser, 1931
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