I went to Mexico City to search for Frida Kahlo.
Frida is everywhere in Mexico. The famed Mexican painter and feminist icon’s image is on the 500 peso, t-shirts, journals, handbags, and the compact mirror I carry in my purse. Knitted unibrow and braided black hair framed with flowers, Frida’s face graces street art and murals worldwide.
Upon the advice of my friend Alejandro, an art teacher in Mexico City, I begin my search at the Palacio de Bellas Artes on the western edge of the city’s historic center. By examining the work of Frida’s husband, Diego Rivera, and their contemporaries, I hoped to learn more about the times and culture Frida worked. I scurry past a group of protesters calling for better working conditions, pay an entrance fee, and climb the majestic marble staircase to the first floor.
Of Her Time
Sprawling, muscular, and piercing were the murals of David Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, and Rivera – the most famous Mexican muralists and artists of their age. Their work is a conversation with each other and the viewer.
The conversation begins with Rivera’s mural The Man Controlling the Universe, also known as The Man Crossing the Road. Recovering bits of the destroyed mural Rivera painted at the Rockefeller Center in New York, Rivera’s mural speaks to the white man being at the center of technology, chaos, revolution, social class, and science.
Vladimir Lenin, the cause of Rivera’s ostracization from the Rockefeller Center and the destruction of the initial mural, takes pride of place in Man Crossing the Road. It reflects Rivera’s hopes that communism would bring together a multicultural collective that would redeem the world. Contraposed to Lenin is a group of society women playing cards while ignoring street riots.
Catharsis by Orozco shares none of Rivera’s optimism that collective communities will serve as a redemptive counterforce to technology and capitalism. Orozco painted it between 1934 and 1935 for Bellas Artes; at the same time, Rivera painted The Man Crossing the Road. Delivered with the full-force punch of a prized boxer in his prime, Orozco in Catharsis illustrates a violent and gruesome world in which technology aids in the killing. Grotesque figures of nude women in states of both horror and ecstasy lay sprawling beside phallic guns. For Orozco, salvation comes through the purification of fire.
Siqueiros’ The New Democracy, also called Life and Death, sits between Rivera’s and Orozco’s murals. Painted in 1944, The New Democracy mitigates the ferocity of Riviera and Orozco’s visions of technology, the future, and war. A woman with a naked torso stretches to the viewer, offering a torch and flower. Her shackles still gripping her wrist, she offers a triumphant hope of the future, although decomposing corpses and war victims with exposed organs frame her.
Birth of Our Nationality, Tamayo’s allegoric blend of conquest and the birth of a new nationality is also housed with Mexican’s major muralists, almost as a coda. Painted in 1952 in the shadow of the Cold War, the abstract expressionist piece serves as the peacemaker, uniting a modern ideal with a nod to Mexican art’s indigenous beginnings.
Riviera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Tamayo. These are ambitious, mythic men with big ideas about the tumultuous times in which they lived. Each artist wrestled with ideas of war, freedom, humanity, destruction, and technology. And where was Frida?
Out of Time
The line of tourists snaked on both sides of Casa Azul, the “Blue House” where Kahlo was born and raised and later shared with Rivera. Female peddlers traverse the tree-shaded sidewalks like the servants of a priestess selling combs, miniature dolls, and colorful woven fabric. These souvenirs carry a false connection to Frida as if proximity to Frida through commerce is all you need to become an artistic legend.
Visitors are spoiled for choices to discover Frida once inside the compound – tour her home, see a special exhibit of her clothes and jewelry, lounge in the gardens, or snag souvenirs at the gift shop.
Casa Azul was a place of shadows amid light-dappled memory.
There is the Frida that iconographers want you to see and hints at who Frida was. I felt the tension most acutely while viewing the special exhibit of Frida’s clothes and jewelry. Biographers and historians explain the elements of Frida Kahlo’s style – embroidered shirts, frothy skirts, and chunky necklaces – as her connection with indigenous Mexicans.
As writer Rosalind Jana noted in an article about Frida’s fashion, her style came from various influences. They included Tehuana dresses originally worn by the women of the Tehuantepic region of southern Mexico, Huipil blouses derived from the Maya, Rebozo scarves, and fabrics from China and Europe.
Frida’s clothes revealed a myth creating herself a work of art. Yet they also concealed the vestiges of childhood polio — a right leg that remained six inches shorter and thinner than the left. A traffic accident in 1925, when Frida was 18 years old, shattered her already thin frame. A metal handrail impaled Frida through the pelvis, crushed her pelvic bone, and fractured her legs and collarbone. Frida’s unique fashion sense also hid the extraordinary circuitry of leather and steel corsets, and torso-length plaster casts to support her spine.
Her corsets and clothes are displayed in a special Casa Azul exhibit. Strapped over designer dresses, the corsets could easily be part of an Alexander McQueen retrospective instead of the remnants of a life of physical, psychological, and emotional trauma resulting from the accident. Observers, critics, and Frida aficionados breezily point out that she “painted her pain.”
However, in the fetishization of Frida’s corsets, clothes, and pain, we miss that the theme in many of her self-portraits was transcending and escaping her body. She was on a constant diet of painkillers towards the end of her life. Her pain ultimately won her acclaim, fame, and immortality as an artist, but what did it cost her as a woman?
The Largeness of Human Frailty
The extent of Frida’s physical pain didn’t hit me until a tour of the main house at Casa Azul brought me to the separate bedrooms of Frida and Diego.
Museum curators created a snapshot in time of the couple’s bedrooms. Frida had two bedrooms – one that served as her studio when the pain was excruciating and another for sleeping. Frida’s studio bed has become a shrine. A gleaming white crochet coverlet and sheets form a blank canvas for the metal mask of her face framed by a blue and white shawl. A row of books perched on the shelf, and her crutches, a reminder of her physical disabilities, were tucked in the corner.
Frida’s sleeping bedroom reminded me of that of a dollhouse. Cheerful rose embroidery decorated the white coverlet and sheets. “Carina” (“dear one”) was emblazoned on the pillow. Playful skeletons and human figures draped the wall and from the front of her four-poster bed.
The Frida of our imagination looms large because of her talent, personality, and myth. Yet, her frame was tiny. She was doll-like. Accounts of their marriage claimed Diego sometimes used her smallness to bully her. But she also used her frailty to manipulate others to meet her emotional and physical needs.
A pair of denim overalls, the kind Diego would have worn, are neatly hung between two khaki hats for which he was known. A king-sized bed draped in a white crochet blanket and embroidered pillows topping it hint at Diego’s large frame. He stood over six feet tall and sometimes weighed more than 300 pounds. How did Frida bear the weight of him during lovemaking?
Maybe there were times when she couldn’t. Maybe there were times when inventive sexual positions and play avoided the force of Diego’s body on Frida. And maybe that’s when both of their extramarital affairs became useful. The affairs may have given Frida a sexual reprieve from Diego’s appetites, even if they were emotionally devastating. None of Frida’s lovers matched Diego’s physical stature. Perhaps lovers with smaller frames lightened her load as well.
Where Frida’s Spirit Resides
I felt Frida’s presence most in her kitchen and art studio.
Shuffling between the cavernous pots on the stove, Frida ladled dollops of velvety black mole with one of the wooden spoons hanging from the wall. Or so I imagined. Frida as “cook” is a curious image. She didn’t like to cook and didn’t know how when she and Diego married. Frida became a good cook because Diego and her marriage demanded it.
She learned to cook from Guadalupe Marin, Diego’s second wife, who lived above the couple in their first apartment. It could have been a scene from a telenovela. The second and third wives bent over pots of thick, bubbling sauce or rolled out their mutual frustration with Diego as they made tamales.
Whereas Guadalupe brought the prestige and tradition of being from a generations-old family, Frida brought style. Frida artfully arranged the table with fruits, flowers, and whatever else was at hand to create Diego’s aesthetic and sensually gorgeous gastronomic experience when he came home for lunch. She watched him eat, listened to him talk, and reflected to him whatever he needed at that moment — just like any woman who has ever loved a man.
Frida’s freedom came from her work.
Bursts of sunlight streamed through the windows of her art studio as she sat in the wheelchair in front of her easel. Paint jars, pastels, mortar, and pestle depict an artist just before she begins. Frida’s color palette was autumnal and earthy – shades of brick red, pine green, burnt orange, mustard yellow, cocoa brown, and sapphire blue.
Each color signified an emotional or symbolic state that was sometimes contradictory. Solferino, a moderate purplish red darker than a rose, meant “Aztec” and “ancient.” Yellow, for Frida, was both “madness, sickness, fear” and “part of the sun and happiness.” Black was “nothing,” a void. Marine Blue symbolizes “distance” and “tenderness.” And red? Frida said, “Blood? Well. Who knows?”
Frida created and recreated herself and her imagination from this emotional color palette. Her portraits depict her always in flight, being taken out of her body and into spirit or nature, where she experienced herself as she truly was – whole, beautiful, suffering, mutilated, and mythic. If my words to describe Frida seem inadequate, that’s because they are. Only her work tells us who she was.
Who Are You Calling a Feminist?
“Frida Kahlo was not a feminist,” declared Alejandro two days after I visited Casa Azul. We met for a late lunch at Casa Azulejos (“House of Tiles”). The eighteenth-century palace now houses the flagship restaurant of the famous Sanborn’s, a drugstore/soda fountain chain.
“She waited on Diego hand and foot,” Alejandro continued. “Other female artists in Mexico painted simultaneously as Frida, such as the surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. In photography, you have Lola Alvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti. Nahui Olin was another interesting character. Why Frida?”
Of the women artists Alejandro cited, Carrington, though British-born, was a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico in the 1970s. Alvarez Bravo was among Mexico’s first female photojournalists, her work was considered fine art, and she was a devoted friend of Frida’s. Modotti’s talent is clear, strong, and undeniable. Yet her revolving door of relationships and convulsive political activities are considered too “messy” for feminist icon status. While Olin was one of Mexico’s talented and revolutionary women who helped shape its identity through creativity, she was known more for her beauty and love affairs than her artistic talent.
The answer to “Why Frida?” lies in the capitalist rule of supply and demand. Like the French diarist Anais Nin, Frida was the right female artist with the right fashion sense, whose work was the right kind of self-referential, and who lived the right kind of bohemian life. Frida became a feminist icon because the mostly white female artists, art historians, and gallerists of the 1970s needed one. They needed someone who echoed and embodied a restless, independent spirit of the times. Seventies artistic feminists craved a guiding spirit who searched for answers, not in the world of men and their big ideas, but in women and their expansive imaginations.
Conspiring With Frida
We conspire with Frida to perpetuate her iconography because we also need her.
In this disheveled time, we need artistic brujas and shamans to show us the way. Frida was gender fluid before there was a term for it. She leaned into her work as ferociously as she loved Diego. When his extramarital affairs diminished her spirit, she walked away and divorced him in the ultimate act of self-care. Frida gave birth to herself and carved herself out of the clay of what nice, upper-middle-class Mexican girls should be.
It doesn’t seem revolutionary now when more people and younger generations of artists and creators are demonstrating how to become “architects of liberatory change,” to borrow a phrase from my friend Pam Slim, “an author, business coach, and co-founder with her husband Darryl of the Main Street Learning Lab in Mesa, Arizona.” However, Frida’s life and work were revolutionary for a Black girl like me, who listed cinnamon tea and Anne of Green Gables among her favorite things in her high school yearbook listing in the early 1990s. Yet, I was also the young Black girl audacious enough to claim her life’s ambition was to “make my mark on the world.”
I admired Frida because she created art from joy, pathos, and complexity. This was not the curated, contained flashes of life of a modern influencer. While self-reverential and even self-centered, Frida’s art was urgent, as if she knew she would run out of breath before paint.
Nevertheless, by using her personal experience while incorporating Mexican folkloric elements, she created a visual vocabulary that was bold, heartbreaking, and universal.
For example, two years after my Mexico City trip, I encountered Frida’s painting Arbol de la Esperanza (Tree of Hope), in 1946. Frida sits regal and composed in front of her lacerated body, with its face turned away from the viewer. Again, we see the “Two Fridas” – the survivor and the victim – which provide the audience with a choice. Which version of ourselves would we reveal to the world, and which would we conceal?
I discovered the painting while recovering from an emergency hysterectomy in Mexico due to decades of medical neglect and racism. The surgery severed my uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. I endured four blood transfusions. After the procedure, my gynecologist, who led the surgical team, confessed they doubted my survival. The hysterectomy catapulted me into menopause. As my hollow body cowered against the threadbare white hospital sheets, I wondered how I would be a “woman” again without my womb.
While I understood we are not the sum of our biological assignment at birth, nor its assignment to procreate, I wrestled with how I would move in the world again without the parts that defined and terrorized me for years. Who was I now? What was I now? Would I sit tall like “Regal Frida,” or would I turn from life and choose to die like “Botched Frida”? Most importantly, would I have the strength and courage to make art and meaning from my suffering?
The answer lies on my ancestor altar. It features a framed photo of my parents, who died in 2013 and 2016, respectively, a Buddha statue, the perfume I’ve collected from global adventures, a Columbian statue of the Black Madonna and child, a Native American flute, candles collected in Mexico and Belgium, gifted crystals and jewelry, and a framed print of a Frida painting. In this 1948 self-portrait, we see Frida nearing the end of her life. Her stoic face conveys a sense of fatalism, although a lace ruff nearly smothers her. Tear droplets tumble from her eyes. Perhaps, Frida painted herself as she was from her bed with the canvass poised above her. Did she finally reveal the Frida she really was? Had I finally found Frida? Or even near death, did Frida hide away from us, remaining just out of reach, laughing?