Oil on hardboard, 47 x 62 cm.
Collection Raquel M. de Espinosa Ulloa, Mexico City.
On July 13, 1954, Frida Kahlo died at age 47. In a drawer near her bed was a large cache of Demerol vials, but some of her friends claimed she would never have taken her own life. Others disagreed. The official death certificate cites “pulmonary embolism.”
She had chosen cremation. Meticulously dressed in a Tehuana costume and bedecked with her jewelry, Frida’s body was driven to the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City where more than 600 visitors paid their respects beneath the lobby’s towering neoclassical ceiling. A distraught and shaken Diego Rivera sat at her side throughout the visitation. Earlier, in his state of weeping denial, he had her veins cut to make sure she was truly dead. The funeral became a politically charged (a red hammer-and-sickle Communist flag had been draped on her coffin), overwrought, emotional event totally in keeping with her chaotic lifestyle.
In his autobiography, he admitted, “…Too late now, I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.”2 Diego Rivera died in Mexico City in 1957.
In her 1953 autobiography, Frida wrote:
“Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.”