An exhibition displaying portraits and many artefacts of her life, Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up — sponsored by Grosvenor Britain and Ireland — is at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London until November 4
and there were 11 fractures on her right leg and foot. Her pelvis was shattered, and the steel rail penetrated her abdomen and emerged through her vagina. Thus, she quipped afterwards, it was how she lost her virginity.
Her mother had a Mass said in thanks for her survival, but in the three months of treatment that followed painting became her religion. Again, she recovered but over the course of her life she was to have 37 operations, in an endless battle against “death and decay”. Towards the end of her life, she had a leg amputated and had to wear constricting medical body corsets.
The pelvic and abdominal injuries would make pregnancy problematic, which heightened her intensity of fertility. Infants in the womb appear repeatedly in her work. Surreally, she also paints herself giving birth to herself, her head emerging through her own vagina.
When she first glimpsed Diego Rivera — then a celebrated muralist in the thick of Mexican politics — she said, according to her biographer Hayden Herrera: “My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera.” She did marry him — as his third wife — but, to her grief, she never managed to have a child. There were several miscarriages, but also at least one, possibly, two therapeutic abortions, carried out for medical reasons.
In her letters she shows some ambivalence about her pregnancy history. One miscarriage happened spontaneously and she studied the outcome as to why the child “wasn’t properly formed”.
Another pregnancy then occurred and she was uncertain as to whether she should risk proceeding with it, although she is assured that a Caesarean birth can make it safer. Her language is what would now be called ‘pro-choice’: would the child be healthy? Would she be in a position to care for it? And Diego doesn’t want a baby.
Finally, encouraged by a doctor, she decides she will continue the pregnancy. But fate intervenes and another miscarriage occurs.
All her life, Frida mourns her childlessness: she even kept a miscarried foetus preserved in formaldehyde in her studio. And yet this sorrow lends more intensity to her work. Her marriage to Diego Rivera was stormy, sometimes violent, often faithless — they both had affairs, though he cheated more frequently and flagrantly. He also had a double-standard about her relation- ships. He didn’t object to lesbian involvements, but he was furious about her affairs with other men.
Among her lovers was Leon Trotsky, in flight from Stalin’s henchmen. She and Diego provided hospitality for the Trotskys, but it’s been hinted that when they had to move out of the Riveras’ home — the iconic ‘Blue House’ in Coyoacan — because his wife was miserable about Frida, he became more vulnerable to his assassin.
Frida and Diego travelled to the United States — she called it ‘Gringolandia’ and despised Americans as ‘boring’ and ‘lacking sensibility’. And yet America brought her artistic renown and success. She also disliked the pretentiousness of Parisian intellectual circles when she travelled there. The influential Surrealist Andre Breton promoted her, but she didn’t care for what she called ‘the bitches’ of that art world. She was most at home in Mexico and she put Mexico on the artistic map. She frequently dressed in nativist Mexican costumes, which brought colour and flounce, and hid her injured — and then prosthetic — leg.
At the end of her life she said she only wanted three things: Diego (they divorced but remarried), her painting and the Communist Party.
As death approached she was painting a ‘devotional’ portrait of Stalin. Her attachment to Moscow-line Communism seems naive, to say the least: but it’s obvious that, for Frida, this has become a replacement religion. Marx and Stalin are almost transcendental saints, delivering healing to the people.
Yet, Frida (whose elder sister was a nun) could serenely intermingle the Infant of Prague with the Hammer and Sickle in imagery.
Frida Kahlo is a great artist because of her unique vision, and what she brought to the work — as she said herself “pain, pleasure and death”. Pain, she said, “can be converted into life”. It was she who said that “What doesn’t kill me, nourishes me.” She aspired to be ‘an original’ — and she was.
❝ Diego didn’t object to her lesbian involvements, but he was furious about her affairs with other men