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FRIDA KAHLO, THE BRUSH OF ANGUISH |
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Preface
I began my research for the Spanish-language edition of this book twenty-seven years after Frida Kahlo's death, when the recollections of her contemporaries were already worn smooth by repetition and selected by memory. The soul's capricious reporter, memory filters out what hurts, combines the incidents that remain, and then adapts them to the form it wants to remember. Memory composes its own truth. Imagination slips into the retelling; contradictory though loving statements combine with the luminosity of released memories. All of this is useful in composing a portrait of the multifaceted Frida. It is inevitable that I present her differently from the heroine we have been given in previous works. We frequently sculpt our important personalities in marble, polishing them to excess until, frightened by their purity, we draw away from them. I prefer to show Frida with the fragility and imperfection of a human being, one whose talent has left us an exceptional and thrilling body of work. But I am aware that every individual is a mystery. Frida is still so near that the events I narrate involve many people who are living, and further confounding my' investigations, each of them offers personal, often differing, interpretations of Kahlo's story. Virginia Woolf said that a biography can be considered complete if it covers six or seven of the thousand personalities that a person might have. In my quest for the truth, I was even struggling against Frida herself, who seems to have wanted to invent her own biography, to plot her own myth and legend. To begin with, she invented a birth date and perhaps also a birthplace. She changed the names of her pictures, sending me in search of ones I had already located under other names. She recounted stories with so many changes drawn from her imagination that it complicated my discovery of the facts. I began my work in total fascination before the perfect romantic heroine: one who suffered greatly, died young, and spoke directly through her art to our atavistic fears of sterility and death. Like many others, I am sure, I thought of her as a stoic woman who had suffered constantly in her life, as much from her problems of poor health as from the continual deception of a philandering husband. I believed Frida to be faithful and resigned, as she described herself in her writings. I viewed her as a marvelous artist who painted very little and lived a reclusive life, semi-invalid and continually sad, in her house in Coyoacan. What I found was very different from my preconceptions. My profile turned out to be too simple and narrow to contain the vital force of Frida Kahlo. Frida's friends remember her as greatly enjoying life, happy, clever, and lively, always ready for fun. She had many and varied interests. She smoked too much and drank to excess. Bisexual during much of her life and a lesbian in her last years, Frida was unfaithful to her husband with the same frequency he evidently was to her. She traveled in Europe and the United States. She built for herself a personal world separate from that of her famous husband, and she produced many more paintings than I had at first imagined. Frida was much more than an artist's model or the wife of a famous painter. With strength and patient dedication, she created her own work, distinct from the art movements of her time. She demonstrated that she could flourish beneath the shade of a tree as prominent as Diego. All the physical and spiritual suffering Kahlo experienced is reflected in her art. Obsessed with her health and suffering, she created a pictorial oeuvre that is intense and emotive. It narrates with a desolate sensitivity what she wanted us to know of her life; her own pictures give shape to the Frida Kahlo myth. A marvelous masochist, Frida united the natural anguish of her fate with an enormous propensity for self-destruction. Placing herself constantly in extreme situations, she tested her limits with a vital intensity. Her paintings reveal her interior world at the same time that they force an awareness of her loneliness and misery. Standing alone, they have a value that requires no biographical corroboration. In this book I have not eliminated the anecdotal, because it brings us much closer to the warm human being, to the woman with sparks flashing from her mischievous eyes. The anecdotes give a clear picture of the Frida that many people remember: a woman who was as sweet and tender as she was brave, tough, or haughty. Interested in everything, delighted by dirty words and phrases, she had a malicious, intelligent sense of humor that brought smiles to her lips, smiles that never appear in her self-portraits. Frida must have scattered an enormous amount of love in her lifetime, for now, more than thirty-five years after her death, her image is still with us. At times she seemed to support and even cause terrible misfortunes in order to fall headlong into heartbreaking circumstances. All the while, she observed with detached fascination. I regret not being able to tell all the adventures of my search for Frida, a journey that took me from sumptuous mansions to humble environs, to hospitals, tombs, and museums, looking for her people and her paintings. I noticed how rarely historical events alone had left a mark on the memory of the people I interviewed. Instead, it was the emotional response to an experience that remained deeply engraved in their treasured remembrances. Now, with the image of her paintings in my mind, I call up the excitement of my one childhood glimpse of Frida walking along Avenida Juarez, elegant and colorful. I offer her this book, which lovingly presents some of what I have learned. Martha Zamora
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