Frida Kahlo

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

By Hayden Herrera

Bloomsbury, 1998

507 pp, $35.00 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/19086

As Frida Kahlo was returning home from school one day in 1925 in Mexico City, a tram crashed into her bus. Her spine was broken in three places, her right leg received 11 fractures, her right foot was crushed and her pelvis was broken in three places.

At 18, the world of this high-spirited young woman closed in; pain and physical decay became her companions for life. She summoned a gritty resolve. Kahlo's accident forced her to abandon her intended career as a doctor. Confined to bed, she became a talented and challenging painter, a communist. She was the flamboyant wife of Mexico's most famous muralist, Diego Rivera, and a lover of the exiled Leon Trotsky.

Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, in 1907 (she later claimed it was 1910 in solidarity with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution).

Her trauma and pain provoked a self-obsessive artistic exploration of identity and suffering (most of her 200 paintings were self-portraits) but also an empathetic reaching out through communist politics to other deprived and wounded people.

Kahlo joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1928, only to be expelled one year later, with Rivera, for opposing Stalin's crackdown on Trotsky's Left Opposition. Although later reconciling herself to Stalinism, Kahlo remained on the left and always considered herself a communist.

The slender Kahlo, with her polio-withered leg and damaged spine, gradually emerged from the shadow of her husband's gigantic physique and reputation. She developed an increasingly self-assertive personality that came to rival Rivera's and to pursue a more independent art that expressed the pain of women's suffering — "agonised poetry on canvas", as Rivera described Kahlo's work.

What Rivera did not acknowledge, however, was that Kahlo's graphic depictions of physical injury were also symbolic of the psychic injury caused by Rivera's love affairs with young admirers and his intolerance of Kahlo exercising the same freedom with other men. Rivera's affair with Kahlo's sister in the mid-1930s provoked Kahlo to divorce him. Their separation lasted only a year, their remarriage heralding a more sexually autonomous Kahlo, although she still kept her affairs secret (11 male lovers from 1935 to 1940, by one reckoning, plus numerous lesbian relationships).

The most famous of Kahlo's lovers was Trotsky. The exiled leader of the socialist resistance to Stalin, Trotsky was admitted to Mexico in 1937, his last refuge. Trotsky stayed with Rivera (then a member of Trotsky's Fourth International) and Kahlo. Frida was attracted by Trotsky ("Little Goatee", she called him), the revolutionary hero with a keen appreciation of culture and art. Trotsky, quite simply, fell hopelessly in love.

Trotsky and Kahlo's affair lasted only a few months. With Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's wife and comrade, upset by the affair and the threat of an emotional eruption from the wildly jealous Rivera should he find out, there was the danger that it could provide an opening for Stalin's secret police to undermine Trotsky's political standing and breach his physical security. In the face of potential political disaster, both parties backed off.

When Trotsky broke from the politically erratic Rivera in 1939, Kahlo dragged her feet but in the end declared, "Diego is completely right". After Trotsky's assassination in 1940 by a Stalinist agent, Kahlo was questioned by police for suspected involvement in the murder. She had met the assassin, Ramon Mercader, in Paris and invited him into Trotsky's refuge in Coyoacán. The suspicions were unfounded.

Nevertheless, Kahlo and Rivera showed little remorse for Trotsky's fate, both seeking readmission to the Stalinist Mexican Communist Party. Kahlo, dutifully denouncing Trotskyism and spicing her repentance by slandering Trotsky as a coward and a thief, was readmitted in 1948.

Kahlo and Rivera were looking for a political home on the left, one with a bigger "family" than that of Trotsky's embattled followers. Rivera had never worried about political consistency, and Kahlo found political theory wearisome. Both found emotional identification with the radical image of the Communist Party, suppressing its Stalinist deformations. Kahlo's last painting was an unfinished portrait of Stalin.

"She lived dying", wrote a friend of Kahlo. In her last, ever more painful years, confined in orthopaedic corsets to straighten her spine, Kahlo clutched harder at the material and spiritual supports of her life — Diego, politics, painting, painkillers. After 32 surgical operations in 29 years, it was the amputation of her right leg which caused Kahlo finally to give up the battle. An overdose of painkillers and a suicide note in her diary in 1954 were the last acts in her short life.

Although Herrera's biography is valuable for its interpretation of Kahlo's enigmatic paintings, she underplays the centrality of communist politics to Kahlo's life and art. If Rivera chose the artistic telescope to bring the horizons of history up close in his communist art, Kahlo took to the microscope to explore the murkier but equally political depths of individual psyches, particularly women's. Kahlo confronted pain and suffering but in her communist and feminist politics and art, she affirmed life and struggle.