By Philip Gambone
On one wall of my neighborhood taquería back in Boston, there is a larger-than-life-size photograph of Frida Kahlo. It’s perhaps a cliché to adorn a Mexican eatery with the image of Mexico’s most popular artist, but, for better or worse, Kahlo has become inescapably synonymous with all things Mexican. One cannot spend a day in San Miguel, or anywhere else in Mexico, without encountering her iconic image—a dark, androgynous beauty dressed in the costume of the china poblana. She’s depicted on all manner of souvenirs and trinkets. This kitschy appropriation is lamentable because Kahlo was a supremely talented artist, whose innovative, often shocking paintings are masterpieces.
Kahlo approached painting with a “fearless spirit,” says art historian Celia Stahr, whose latest book, Frida in America (St. Martin’s Press), offers an intelligent and lucid investigation of the artist’s formative years. Unafraid to reject conventional notions of beauty and appropriate subject matter, Kahlo arrived in America at a pivotal moment in her career. Until Stahr, no scholar had done an in-depth study of the work Frida produced during her time in the United States. Stahr’s biography sets out to rectify this neglect.
Frida’s American sojourn began in November 1930, when she accompanied her new husband, muralist Diego Rivera, to San Francisco, where he had a mural commission. She was in her early twenties, full of bravado, spontaneity, and a “provocateur spirit” (all quotes are from Stahr, unless otherwise noted). While Diego worked on his mural commissions—which took him to Detroit and New York as well—Frida pursued her own painting projects, pouring into her art a desire “to shake things up.” The paintings she produced during her three-year sojourn in the US radiate both fierce pride in her Mexican heritage and a sensibility that is decidedly modern. Stahr contends that while in the US, Kahlo “mastered her visual language.”
Kahlo often chose intimate, painful, even taboo subjects for her paintings. One incomplete canvas, Frida and the Caesarian Operation (1931), about an abortion she underwent, is a case I point. In so many of these early works she dealt unequivocally with pain, loss, and isolation. She didn’t sugarcoat anything. Because of her cross-cultural family heritage and a debilitating physical condition, Kahlo understood what it was like to be an outsider. Her signature style, Stahr emphasizes, was “one that foregrounds her physical and psychological state alongside important aspects of Mexican art and culture.”
America opened Kahlo’s eyes. Much of what she saw she didn’t like, especially the huge disparity between the wealthy, high-society set with whom she was obliged to hobnob, and the millions of Depression-era poor. As her time in the US went on, Kahlo became increasingly disenchanted with the American scene, writing to her mother, “everything here is pure show, but deep down it’s all real shit…. I’m completely disappointed by the famous United States.”
Kahlo’s relationship with Rivera was a complicated and uneasy one. Nevertheless, in many ways they were kindred spirits. They both “espoused the importance of a down-to-earth existence peppered with imagination, creativity, irony, black humor, deep laughter, fantasy, and a passion for social justice.” Diego’s passion for social justice, brilliantly expressed in his many mural projects, earned him the sobriquet, the “Fiery Crusader of the Paintbrush.” Kahlo, too, saw painting as a place where she could express her desire for justice, especially in the face of the double standard applied to men and women.
Diego, who was 20 years older than Frida, was also a self-absorbed “erotomaniac,” prone to unpredictable outbursts and manipulative behavior. When they married, he was already a major star in the firmament of international art. Laboring under his shadow, Frida was often dismissed as little more than the wife of the “master mural painter,” a woman who “dabbles in works of art.”
Stahr is fair-minded about Diego, even as she spares no details about his philandering and often cruel treatment of Frida. Kahlo found that managing his mercurial moods was an ongoing challenge. “She vacillated between accepting her fate with Diego as a caged woman … and seeking to be the rebel who wanted the same freedoms that society granted her husband.”
Stahr’s book crescendos toward the period when the couple returned for a second stay in New York, where Diego worked on murals at Rockefeller Center. His themes of social justice and economic equality, which included a positive image of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin, caused a ruckus. Before the mural was finished he was handed a check and ousted from the building. Those murals were eventually destroyed.
The stress of this brouhaha and Diego’s ongoing flagrant affair with another woman took a heavy toll on Frida. When the couple headed back to Mexico at the end of December 1933, their marriage was in shambles. He blamed her for his failure to get back to work. She fell into depression. Trying to maintain some sense of emotional balance, Frida returned to New York for several months, where she found her creative footing again.
Between 1935 and 1940, she did some of her best work. In 1938, she had her first solo show, a critical and financial success. At the beginning of the next year, she sailed to France for the group show “Mexique.” One of her paintings, The Frame (1938), became the first Latin American painting to enter the collection of the Louvre. A few months after she returned from Paris, she and Diego separated. By September, she was working on one of her greatest paintings, The Two Fridas, which was shown at the monumental 1940 MOMA show “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.”
Stahr, a professor at the University of San Francisco, has brought meticulous research and analysis to this project. She draws heavily on Frida’s letters and the unpublished journals of her friend Lucienne Bloch. My one quibble is that she often refers to photographs and paintings that are not included in the skimpy suite of illustrations included in the book. Stahr’s descriptions of Frida’s paintings are superb, but as I read the book, I found myself repeatedly searching on Google for an image of the piece under discussion. “Her paintings are her biography,” poet José Moreno Villa once said of Kahlo. It’s a shame that, in the interests of keeping costs down, St. Martin’s Press did not give more credence to that sentiment.
Philip Gambone has been writing fiction, nonfiction, and journalism for almost 50 years. His latest books, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe.
