Fridiego
by Deborah Brand Probst
If you ask anyone if they are an art lover, my guess is 9 times o out of 10 they would say yes. Not many people would confess to not really liking or caring about art. But there is a lot of grey area of what loving art means. Are you someone who avidly goes to museums? Do you collect art? Do you invest in pieces? Do you seek out new artists? Or do you simply like things that you consider pretty / attractive or that moves you.
Being an architect by education, and having spent my whole life in the creative fields, I fall somewhere in the middle in the art lover spectrum especially when it comes to travel. I have taken busses to a remote town in Northern Italy to visit the home of the sculptor Canova but I have never been to the MET in New York despite having been to New York hundreds of times.
On one trip to Spain I went to 3 different Picasso museums. And I will probably go back to those same museums every time I go. So as far as art lovers go – I have my obsessions I should say. Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Jean Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dali, Leonardo Da Vinci, Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol.
A Woman Named Frida
And then there is Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, known to you and me as Frida. Even non art lovers are familiar with the flowers in the hair, the endless self portraits, the floor length dresses, the brow. Among the many fantastical self portraits she created, my most favorite image of her is the photograph by Tina Modotti. There she sits braiding her hair in all her unadorned fragility, without the dresses, the flowers and the piercing stare. She is less of an artist than a cultural and fashion icon, a pop star, an activist, a muse to more than just Diego Rivera her husband and comrade. She is a Communist bisexual Mexican artist more famous for her eye brow than for The Two Fridas, perhaps her most famous painting. She transcends the word artist and became an everlasting global phenomena.
The Facts
If you ask your AI tool to tell you about Frida, this is what comes up – Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who is best known for her self-portraits and her works that explore themes of identity, gender, and politics. She was born in Coyoacán, Mexico City, in 1907. She was seriously injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which severed her spine and left her with lifelong pain and mobility issues. She began painting during her recovery from the accident, and her art became a way for her to express her pain and her experiences. She married the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, and they had a tumultuous relationship that lasted for over 20 years. Through her life she was in and out of hospitals suffering multiple miscarriages and surgeries. She died in 1954 at the age of 47.
The Work
Bright tropical colors with dreamlike imagery infused with overt symbolism, Frida Kahlo’s artwork is often described as “folk surrealism.” She drew inspiration from Mexican folk art, as well as from European surrealism. Kahlo’s paintings often explored themes of identity, gender, and politics.
She was a strong and independent woman, and her work often reflected her own experiences as a woman in Mexico. She was also a political activist, and her work often expressed her views on social justice.
Confined to her bed through many periods in her life, physically bound by her injuries, her self portraits became her frequent subject. Emotional explosions onto canvas, her physical constraints only seemed to unleash a riot of resilient expression of strength and frailty. Despite her injuries, she was a prolific artist, and she created over 150 paintings during her lifetime and her work has been exhibited in museums all over the world.
Then There Was Diego
“My husband, my lover, my brother, my father, my son, my friend.“ – Frida Kahlo about Diego Rivera
The celebrated Rivera was 36 year old, internationally reknown and married when he met the diminutive 15 year old Frida who was an art student at the time. They proceeded to have a torrid affair for years which ended Rivera’s marriage and led to their eventual first marriage.
Throughout their life they would feature prominently in each others art even as their relationship was rife with infidelity, divorce, and reconciliation. Inextricably bound to one another, they were each others muse, source of inspiration and joy as well as pain and suffering.
Rivera’s infidelities are widely viewed as a chronic addition of Kahlo’s pain reflected in her paintings. His 5 year relationship with her sister Cristina Kahlo was probably the most painful. It is also well known that his love for her knew no bounds and she drove his creativity as much as he was her mentor. When Kahlo was in a coma after her bus accident, Rivera painted a mural of her on the wall of her hospital room.
The Work
The Palacio Nacional in Mexico city houses some of Diego Rivera’s most magnificent work. He is best known for his murals rife with political symbolism and an overt populist themes of social justice and exploitation of the common man.
Rivera is one of the most successful Mexican artists of all time commanding massive fees for his commissions by government and corporatons worldwide.
Together Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s representation of everyday life in Mexico introduced an aspect of Mexican and Aztec culture to generations. But here in this grand space I quietly reflect on “”Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Alameda Central”. where you see the child Diego with Frida the mother accompanying La Calavara Catrina.
The Blue House
In the Colonia del Carmen area of the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City, lies a striking blue house in a residential neighbourhood, once also the home of Salvador Novo, Octavio Paz, Mario Moreno, Leon Trostsky and Dolores del Río. Now the Frida Kahlo museum, this is the house where Kahlo grew up and where she eventually died.
Walking through the house and gardens you see her elaborate clothing designed to bind her broken spine, the tiny beds, the chair which held her broken body all that look more like instruments of torture than clothing and furniture that belong in a childhood home.
As we were there throughout much of the city during the month of October, there was a magnificent “ofrenda”, the altar that is built to pay tribute to the dead. You also see the peaceful gardens, the humble kitchen, and all throughout the voice of Frida and Diego in small gestures throughout the garden. The creation of the museum is the work of Rivera, who after her death assembled unseen pieces of their work, the museum was only to be opened to the public after his death.
The Studio
15 minutes away in the neighborhood of San Angel lies another Casa Azul – the twin house Kahlo shared with Rivera through most of her life, and where he lived after she moved back to her child hood home. The twin houses – sit side by side joined by a bridge where she would bring him his meals that she would cook in the tiny kitchen in her house. His by contrast only contained his bedroom and a massive studio.
The studio windows ran floor to double height ceiling and fully opened up to the garden below and opened up completely flooding the space with light and allowing his pieces to be moved through the window instead of through the door of the house. This housed his archeaological collection and the works in progress that he would create, larger than life like the man himself. After Kahlo’s death, Rivera had her ashes placed in an urn in his home. In the end this giant of a man was broken by the force of nature of the tiny Frida. “I love you more than my own skin, more than my own heart, more than my own soul,” he writes. There he lived till he died in 1957.
FRIDA KAHLO EVERYWHERE
“I’m Frida Kahlo, and you’re my Diego.” – Madonna in the song “Hung Up”
60 years after her death, Frida Kahlo’s image, her personal brand, is perhaps greater than ever. she has been referenced by artists, musicians, and writers. From the movie, “Frida” where she is played by Salma Hayek, the fashion brand Rodarte with their Frida Kahlo-inspired clothing collections, the cosmetics company MAC with their Frida Kahlo-inspired makeup collections, Frida Kahlo, the icon lives on. She has even been the subject of a Barbie doll.
And all over the world in our travels and our own personal lives, we see her – on the streets of Tel Aviv, in a restaurant in Galway, in the alleys of Tropea, all over Mexico. We manifest her at the Voodoo Festival in New Orleans, my sisters wedding in Puerto Vallarta, a mourning for a friends passing at Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca. Her paintings may be the riot of colors unleashing pain, the long dresses covering up the braces, but its the flowers and the brow intertwined with the image of this powerful woman – a manifestation of personal expression and triumph in the face of extreme adversity, Frida the muse is forever imprinted in our minds.
