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FRIDA KAHLO, THE BRUSH OF ANGUISH |
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Tree of Hope, Part 1
Tree of Hope, Stand Fast, 1946
In 1946 Frida painted Tree of Hope, Stand Fast, tided with a line from a favorite song and a phrase she used often. Frida lies on a gurney, a sheet pulled back to reveal bloody incisions in her back. Another Frida sits on a chair, costumed and holding a brace and a banner proclaiming "Arbol de la esperanza, mantente firme." The picture refers to her most recent operation: Frida had been to New York in June for surgery to fuse four vertebrae with a metal rod and a piece of bone extracted from her pelvis. Before the surgery, Frida had presented another picture, The Wounded Deer (The Little Deer) (1946), to her good friend Arcady Boyder. A beautiful animal, with the body of a deer and Frida's head, has been impaled by arrows. The creature faces her fate with equanimity, much as Frida did when she agreed to the operation. She was optimistic about the prospect of relief from the constant pain she endured, but as time went on, it became clear that this point marked the beginning of the end. For some time prior to the U.S. trip, Frida had been suffering increasing fatigue, weight loss, anemia, and pain in her right leg and back. A fungus growth had reappeared on her right hand, and she was in a nervous and despondent state. Doctors diagnosed and treated her for a variety of ailments, prescribing complete rest, diets, medicines, injections, and steel and plaster corsets. The corsets offered some relief but did not stop the pain. After months of confinement, she finally flew to New York with her sister Cristina for the operation. Although again bedridden for several months, Frida seemed to recover well. But once back in Mexico, her condition did not improve. Frida's mood swung from euphoria to deep depression, and she was subject to fits of paranoia. At times violent, she would throw things, even at Diego, and hit people with her cane. She was drinking, and her constant pain required daily doses of Demerol and other drugs on which she became hideously dependent in her last years. As her health deteriorated, Frida became absorbed in the details of her case, perhaps morbidly so, discussing her ailments at length with her physicians. Her doctors now included a psychiatrist. (Frida was the first woman in Mexico to undergo psychoanalysis.) Medical expenses and construction costs of the Anahuacalli museum were exacerbating Diego and Frida's already strained financial condition. They often painted with sales in mind, hoping to generate quick income. Diego once took watercolors around to sell to friends to pay the electric bill. Occasionally when in need, Frida would send a painting to a friend unasked, with a bill for ten thousand pesos, her going price. (Delores del Rio once sent back an unsolicited work; Frida was furious and ended the friendship.) Now under a heavier burden than ever before, Diego would sometimes paint two watercolors a day. Largely housebound, Frida was spending long hours alone. Diego was seeing the beautiful film star Marfa Felix, and the newspapers talked of a possible divorce. But the marriage held, and their relationship, although pervaded by illness and infidelities, was not without sudden displays of loving affection. Salvador Novo wrote, "At night when he stayed to take care of her, Diego closed the doors one by one and slept in the room next to hers .... The evenings that he spent in Coyoacan he tried to amuse her. He danced and sang songs in French, English, Russian, and native Indian languages .... Frida could watch from her bed, Diego all the while forgetting that it was three o'clock in the morning, because when he worked, or when he played, he completely forgot the time." Adelina Zendejas recalls visiting Frida at the hospital late one evening to find Diego with a tambourine, dancing around her bed like an enormous bear.
Diego and Frida, 1950
Frida sketching a Huichol Indian, 1950
The Wounded Deer (The Little Deer), 1946
The Broken Column, 1944 By 1950 Dr. Juan Farill decided Frida should undergo another bone graft, one which proved disastrous. The implanted bone caused a severe infection, and Frida spent the next nine months in the hospital. For a time Diego took a room next to hers. Throughout the day, her room became a meeting place for doctors and for friends who brought films, books, decorated candy skulls, and all kinds of gifts. She continued to paint although confined to her bed. Diego even sent a fully costumed Huichol Indian to pose for her. In the midst of the visitors, the attention, the support of her sisters and the drugs that sustained her espiritu contento, as she called it, she went from treatment to treatment, hoping to relieve her constant pain. A letter from her sister Matilde to Frida's old friend Dr. Eloesser catalogs the grim details of Frida's condition. On removing one of her orthopedic corsets, the medical staff found a purulent abscess, which again sent her to the operating room, how the smell of "a dead dog" emanated from another wound that would not heal, and how the blackened tips of the toes of Frida's infected foot fell off spontaneously. Matilde also told Eloesser that "Diego had behaved himself very well this time," and therefore Frida was calm, grasping at the edges of hope, still dreaming that each operation would be the last. Despite these trials, there were attempts to maintain the old ways of gaiety, excitement, and drama. In December 1950, when Frida was home again, she and Diego held a big fiesta to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their second marriage. Frida appeared as a bride with a veil and a crown. Diego was elegantly garbed in a theatrical cape and broad-brimmed hat. Her brother-in-law "married" them in a mock ceremony, asking if anyone knew of any obstacle to the wedding; at this point Diego's daughter by Lupe Marin, Ruth Rivera, then tall and husky and in her twenties, to everyone's amusement entered dressed like a baby and carrying a big pacifier, shouting "Daddy! Daddy!" Although she became gradually distanced from many old friends, Frida in her last years enjoyed a close group of special visitors. Cristina and her children continued to visit, as well as Frida's older sisters. From her bed upstairs in the Casa Azul, she held a mini-salon where she reminisced about long-ago adventures such as going with Picasso to the Deux Magots. Poet Carlos Pellicer and art critic Antonio Rodriguez were frequent guests. Teresa Proenza, Diego's secretary until his death, and Elena Vasquez Gomez, who worked at the Foreign Ministry, came often; their names, with those of Marfa Felix, Diego, and painter Irene Bohus, were painted in red letters around Frida's bedroom wall as a tribute to their special friendship.
Aurora Reyes, Frida, and Cristina Kahlo, c. 1950
Josephine Baker talking with Frida, c. 1952
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