Painting to Survive
Frida Kahlo is extraordinary for many reasons, among them the fact that the fate of her painting demonstrates the tremendous revolution a good biography can sometimes spark in matters of artistic judgment. And by the same token, just how precarious artistic judgments have become in our day.
Until 1983, Kahlo was known only in Mexico and to a limited international community of art lovers, more as a surrealist curiosity praised by André Breton, and as the wife of Diego Rivera, than as an artist whose work deserved respect in and of itself and not as an appendix to a movement or a mere complement to the work of the famous Mexican muralist. In 1983, Hayden Herrera’s book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo appeared in the United States. Her fascinating account of the life and artistic odyssey of the Mexican painter, read everywhere with well-warranted absorption, had the virtue of catapulting Kahlo into the epicenter of curiosity within the planet’s artistic hubs, beginning with New York; soon her works had become some of the most famous and sought-after in the world. For the last ten years or so, those rare paintings reaching the auction floors of Sotheby’s and Christie’s have sold for the highest prices ever commanded by a Latin American painter, including, of course, Diego Rivera, who is more and more often identified as Frida Kahlo’s husband.
What is most notable about the sudden and inexorable rise in prestige of Kahlo’s painting is the unanimity of opinion on which it is based. She is praised by critics serious and frivolous, clever and foolish, formalist and political, and at the same time that she is installed as an icon of the feminist movement, she is seen by conservatives and antimodernists as a reminder of the classical among the excesses of the avant-garde. But what is perhaps most astonishing is that her reputation was cemented even before her paintings could be seen, since besides the fact that she painted few of them (fewer than one hundred) many—the best—were until recently firmly ensconced in a very strict private collection, to which only a handful of mortals had access.
This story could certainly give rise to an interesting reflection on the vagaries of the wheel of fortune that today raises artists up or silences them and blots out their work for reasons often having little to do with its true merits. I mention this only to add that in this case, for mysterious reasons—fate, justice, the whims of a playful god—instead of resulting in one of those familiar if absurd false canonizations of fashionable artists, Hayden Herrera’s biography and its aftereffects—everything about Frida Kahlo’s fate is incredible—have served to put one of the most captivating figures of modern art in her rightful place, four decades after her death.
My enthusiasm for Kahlo’s painting is of very recent origin. It derives from a trip I took a few weeks ago to the Alpine community of Martigny, a Swiss town that in two thousand years of history seems to have witnessed just two noteworthy events: the passage through town of the Roman legions—they left behind some stones that are now exhibited with excessive veneration—and the present exhibition devoted to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, organized by the Pierre Gianadda Foundation. The show is a model of its kind, in the quality of the selection and in the skill with which the paintings, drawings, photographs, and text have been arranged, immersing the spectator for hours in the world of both artists.
The experience is conclusive: although Rivera had more technical skill and ambition, was more wide-ranging and curious, seemed more universal in his appeal because he reconciled the main artistic currents of his era and his own historical circumstances, and left a vast oeuvre, Kahlo, despite the occasional clumsiness of her hand, her pathetic lapses into gruesomeness and self-pity, and also, of course, the grating naïveté of her ideas and proclamations, was the more intense and personal artist—I would say the more authentic, if that term weren’t rife with confusion. Overcoming the almost indescribable limitations that life dealt her, Kahlo was able to create a consummately coherent body of work, in which fantasy and invention are extreme forms of introspection and self-exploration and the artist extracts in each painting—each drawing or sketch—a horrifying testament to suffering, desire, and the most terrible vicissitudes of the human condition.
The first time I saw Kahlo’s paintings was twenty years ago, when I visited the Blue House, her museum-home in Coyoacán, with a Soviet dissident who had spent many years in the gulag and got chills at the sight of Stalin’s and Lenin’s faces on those canvases, painted in loving medallions over the hearts or foreheads of Frida and Diego. I didn’t like them either, and from that first contact my impression was of a rather crude, naïve painter, more picturesque than original. But her life had always fascinated me, thanks first to some texts by Elena Poniatowska; later, when I read Herrera’s biography, I was just as enthralled as the rest of the world by the superhuman energy with which this daughter of a German photographer and a Mexican Creole, struck down at the age of six by polio and at seventeen by the terrible traffic accident that shattered her backbone and pelvis—a pole of the bus she was riding in entered her neck and came out her vagina—was able to survive not just those two incidents but also the resulting thirty-two operations and the amputation of a leg. Despite it all, and despite having to remain immobile for long periods of time, sometimes literally hanging from ropes and wearing suffocating corsets, she loved life fiercely and managed not only to marry, divorce, and remarry Diego Rivera—the love of her life—but to have many affairs with men and women (Trotsky was one of her lovers), travel, engage in politics, and, above all, paint.
Above all, paint. She began just after her accident, leaving an obsessive record on paper of her battered body, her rage, her suffering, and the visions and delirium that her misfortunes inspired in her, but also her will to keep living and to squeeze all the juice—sweet, acid, or poisonous—out of life. That is what she did until her death, at the age of forty-seven. Her work, viewed chronologically as it appears in the Martigny exhibition, is a spell-binding autobiography in which each image, while chronicling some horrific episode of her physical or romantic life—her abortions, her sorrows, her wounds, her lovers, her mad desires, the extremes of desperation and impotence in which she foundered at times—also functions as exorcism and curse, a way of freeing herself from the demons that tormented her: she transferred them to the canvas or paper and brandished them at the spectator as accusation, insult, or heartrending plea.
The tremendous gruesomeness of some of the scenes and the shameless vulgarity of the depictions of the physical violence that human beings suffer or inflict on others are always bathed in a delicate symbolism that rescues them from ridiculousness and renders them troubling denouncements of pain, misfortune, and the absurdity of existence. It is a kind of painting that resists being called beautiful, perfect, or seductive but that nevertheless is deeply affecting and moves one to the core, like Edvard Munch or the Goya of the Black Paintings or like the music of Beethoven in his last years or certain poems by César Vallejo on his deathbed. Something in her work goes beyond painting and art and touches on the indecipherable mystery of life, that bottommost depth where, as Georges Bataille says, contradictions disappear, the beautiful and the ugly become interchangeable and interdependent, and so do pleasure and torture, weeping and rejoicing, the hidden root of experience that nothing can explain but that certain artists who paint, compose, or write as if immolating themselves are capable of making us feel. Frida Kahlo is one of those special cases that Rimbaud called “les horribles travailleurs.” She didn’t live to paint, she painted to live, and that is why in each of her paintings we can hear her pulse, her secretions, her howls, and the ceaseless tumult of her heart.
To come up from this plunge into the depths of the human condition onto the streets of Martigny and the clean and bovine slopes that surround the city on this cold and sunny afternoon is an unbearable anticlimax. No matter how diligently I do what I am supposed to do as a tourist—visit the Roman stones, fill my lungs with bracing air, gaze at the fields and the cows, and order fondue—the memory of the stark and piercing images I’ve just seen gives me no respite. They are always with me, whispering to me that all the placid, benign reality surrounding me now is nothing but illusion and appearance, that real life cannot shut out everything left behind in those flayed bodies and bloody fetuses, in the men like trees and women like plants in the painful imaginings and exultant howls of the exhibition. From it, as rarely happens these days, one emerges better or worse but certainly different from when one went in.