A Ribbon Around a Bomb

“I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.”
What does pain do to humans? A lot. The more intense, excruciating and soul-searing the pain, the greater is its impact on the human mind. Near-death encounters get indelibly etched on one’s psychic slate and alters one’s perception of existence immutably. Those with these experiences usually either overcome the fear of death completely or become so obsessed with its prospect that they continue to die every moment of the remainder of their existence.
Frida Kahlo lived her life in the shadow of such an experience. She belonged to the former category of sufferers who not only overcame the imminence of death, but became defiant in its inevitability and ridiculed it. She was a brilliant painter. She was also an exceptional woman. While her recognition today is far greater, she was ahead of the contemporary mould even during her life-time. She was, first demurely and later boldly, more than willing to break the cast and establish a uniquely extraordinary identity. And she did so with style, substance and panache.
Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón to a German father and a mestiza mother in 1907, Frida spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán, Mexico. It was during her recovery from a bus accident at the age of eighteen that she returned to her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist. Her corporal pain and disability and the attendant loneliness blended so beautifully with her creativity that the outcome was effortlessly brilliant, eloquent and touching. But this was only the beginning.
Frida recovered, though she continued to physically agonise in some way or the other. This may explain her preference of themes of pain. Her attitude showed in her derision of the same in her creations – vibrant in colour, aglow with luminosity, drenched in sublime pathos, douce but disturbing at the same time. She immortalised her personal experience of chronic pain in her paintings, celebrating her spirited triumph over the inflictions of fate.
In keeping with progressives of the times then, Frida was attracted to ideas of socialism; gender, class and race equality. These were the times when to do so was not only passionately popular but also deemed fashionable, even romantic. Frida empathised with the resentment against injustice, rebellion against discrimination and intolerance against the exploitation of the poor and underprivileged. Given her highly emotional nature, her fascination and attraction to men with strong conviction and commitment to these ideologies were distinctly pronounced; this partly explains her fascination for and attachment to acclaimed muralist Diego Rivers, who was older and could offer an intellectual fulfilment she had always craved.
Diego’s Delight
A passionate love affair with Diego early in her life culminating in their marriage and transformed her in extraordinary ways. Content to be introduced as Diego’s wife, she preferred to remain in his shadows even when she had begun producing paintings in her own distinct style. When they were in Detroit together, none of Kahlo’s works were featured in exhibitions, though she did give an interview to the Detroit News on her art. The article that appeared was condescendingly titled “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”.
Her growth out of Diego’s shadow was gradual and to an extent, never complete. Much later, even after she had held more than half a dozen exhibitions, Time wrote “Little Frida’s pictures … had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds, and yellows of Mexican tradition and the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child”; not very flattering, and typically patronising to a woman artist.
It must be said though that Diego did encourage and mould her creativity and introduced her to his circle of friends and fellow artists; allowing her own sensitivity and restlessness to bloom. This was further made possible after he introduced her to Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism. Breton saw in her the very essence of surrealism, where the dream and reality indistinguishably mingle and merge. While her subsequent exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston and Paris brought her recognition, it was with Breton’s support and encouragement that she began to discover her own independent identity, giving her the courage and boldness to experiment with newer techniques of paintings focusing on themes that appealed to her and touched her sensitivities.
It did not help Frida that Diego’s wandering affections and numerous liaisons also embraced her own younger sister. The paintings made by her during this period of separation from him were intensely distressing, deranging and destabilising, depicting a range of emotions – helplessness, revenge, rage and surrender against a person she could not live without. No painter had ever portrayed so poignantly and passionately the hold of affection and dependence of a woman for and to a man. To draw self- images on such a volatile theme was by any standard an intrepid defiance of the prevailing conventional position of women in society in Mexico then, in an unprecedented assertion both courageous and unprecedented.
If the marriage with Diego was a delicious episode in her physically painful life, the divorce and reconciliation with him after one year, contributed to diversifying her portrayals of the colours and contours of life and took her expressions of sensitivity to as yet unknown and unexplored levels.
An Artistry of Pain, Mexico, Feminism and Experimentation
There are three aspects of Frida’s oeuvre that stand out. The most evident one is the underlying pain her body and soul had received early in life and which endured as an abiding aspect of her physical existence. She gives this best expression in her portraits, with so many of them being her own. This aspect dominated her initial years of creativity, while she was still unexposed to the influences of the world outside Mexico.
The second aspect was her passionate attachment to the popular culture of Mexico and of artefacts, folk art, even natural bounties of her homeland, which she mirrored majestically in her portrayals. This aspect became so pronounced in her paintings that they are treated by many as emblematic of Mexican national tradition and culture. This second aspect dominated her work after her travels abroad and got her paintings noticed in US and France.
The third and the most striking aspect, however, remains the depiction of feminine experience and form fearlessly and boldly, stated without compromise or reservation. A feminine perspective underlined almost all her works, at times boldly and eloquently; and at others, subtly and subliminally, even mutely. Frida’s unique identity as a painter makes her stand out largely owing to this permeated, suffused and yet brightly emitting scintillas of feminine sensibilities.
Painting for Kahlo was also an exploration of questions and conundrums of identity and existence. To answer these, she experimented with different techniques, such as etching and frescos. Dramatically, despite the popularity of the mural in Mexican art at the time, Frida experimented with a diametrically opposed medium, ‘votive images’ or retablos – religious paintings made on small metal sheets by amateur artists to thank saints for their blessings during a calamity. She herself maintained an extensive collection of approximately 2,000 retablos, establishing her interest in using narrative and allegory to the limits of iconic purity.
A Legacy of Opposites
Trees, roots, thorns, hair and eyebrows and anatomy were some of the icons that Frida liberally used, as also Aztec symbols drawn from Mexico’s mythology. Her visual portrayals were bold and vivid, yet the underlying meanings and messages were subtle and often ambiguous, as if revealing the conflict in her mind. Her paintings were also invariably an exercise of reconciliation between opposites. So, while there was death, there was also life side by side, if there was hope, there was despair as well, and if there was decay and destruction, there was regeneration and growth too. That surrealists like Breton and the Mexican traditionalists were simultaneously able to see powerful though conflicting messages in her paintings only illuminate her genius.
Variously described by art critics as ‘symbolist’, a ‘folk artist’, practising elements of ‘magical realism or new objectivity’ and drawing elements of fantasy, naivety and fascination with violence and death, hers was a style that evolved with the spontaneity of elemental energy spurred by the diverse experiences of life.
Frida Kahlo thus created in herself a unique and unusual woman of art who was at once feminine, Mexican, modern, and powerful. She may have been derided by Time late in her artistry, but she was also the first Mexican to sell a painting to the Louvre. Her oeuvre embodied a distillation of a synthesised amalgam of prevailing artistic traditions, indigenous movements, peer influences and above all a personal life replete with pain and an indomitable spirit of its defiance. In daring to diverge from the dichotomy of roles of either the ‘mother’ or the ‘other woman’, usually the only two open to females in then Mexican society, she was perhaps, in her own way, no less of a revolucionario(a) for Mexico than Zapata, Villa or Madero.