The Blue House

8/14/2019 The Blue House

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ART & ANTIQUES OCTOBER 1994


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the resilience of the human spirit in

the midst of adversity. Now the sub-ject of numerous biographies, exhi-bitions, and documentary lms, notto mention souvenir T-shirts, calen-dars, and posters, Kahlo has attract-ed a following all over the world. Forwomen and feminists, especially, sheis a heroine of enormous strengthwho overcame great odds to createan identity for herself in art.

A

visit to Casa Azul bringsall the contradictions of

Kahlos life into focus, andher passion is present everywhere.One envisions her in her spacious,second-oor studio, propped in herwheelchair in front of the large easel,horsehair brush in hand, completingthe portrait of Joseph Stalin that nowrests there. Or she could just as eas-ily be lying in the adjacent bedroom,in her four-poster bed, where she re-covered from her many spinal opera-tions, painting her reection from themirror inserted into the wooden can-

opy above. Crowding the bedroom

shelves and a large curio cabinet are

her collections of dolls, decorativeboxes, and toys. On the wall acrossfrom her bed are photos of Marx,Lenin, Engels, Stalin, and Mao, re-minders of Kahlos and Riverascommunist activism. (The exiledRussian revolutionary leader LeonTrotsky and his wife, Natalia, werefriends of the Riveras and lived for abrief time at Casa Azul in 1937.)

Kahlo also surrounded herselfwith photos and portraits of her fam-ily, herself, and Rivera, and always

lived among an abundance of freshdahlias, her favorite ower. Articialdahlias are now scattered throughoutthe museums rooms, along with thepre-Columbian fertility sculpturesand popular art that she and Riveracollected. Kahlo decorated her homewith rough-hewn Mexican colonialfurniture, folkloric masks and paint-ings, glazed green and brown earth-enware, and numerous tin paintingsof saints called retablos.

Lurking around every corner and

dangling from the walls and ceil-

ings are life-size Judas gurespapier-mache skeletons, devils, ahalf-man/half-animal creatures thMexicans burn during the Easter esta. Along with Kahlos wheelchaand crutches, these eerily whimsiccreatures suggest the omnipresenof death in the ow of lifea majtheme of Kahlos paintings.

Adding to the festive ambiance Kahlos home are the yellow-painttables and cabinets in the kitchand dining room, and the long greeframed windows opening into tmagnicent courtyard garden. Heamong lush palm, avocado, and trees, guarded by a menagerie pre-Columbian sculpture, Kahlo aRivera would take lunch on the vocanic rock patio or meet for coffatop a small, red Aztec pyramid thRivera built. Today, black cats wa

der stealthily through the garden; Kahlos day, it was her spider mokeys and a Mexican itzcuintli dowhich appear in many of her painings.

Kahlos presence emanates, tofrom her coral and jade jewelry, coorful long dresses, and embroiderskirts and blouses on display in tmuseums glass cases. It reasserts self in the kitchen, where she spellout FRIDA and DIEGO on the wwith small ceramic cups, and it li

gers in her passionate love letters Rivera, in the illustrated pages of hdiary, and in twenty paintings exhiited at the entrance to the museumHer spirit is so expansive that twalls of Casa Azul seem barely abto contain it; one senses even thathas spilled into the fuchsia bougaivillea along the streets of Coyoaca

Rivera, too, carved a place for himself amid the peculiar magic of CaAzul. One can imagine the rotupainter lumbering in and out of hrst-oor bedroom, where his campasino hat and huge denim overahang. Also on display in the museuare a selection of his paintingsacademic studies, portraits from t1920s, and cubist compositions. Rveras delightfully cluttered studin the nearby suburb of San Angis open to the public. It occupithe linked blue and pink modernhomes where Kahlo and Rivera livfor several years after their marriain 1929.


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It was through the self-portraitthat Kahlo gave birth to her-self. Each stage in her lifeher severe illnesses, her im-

passioned love for Rivera, and hisbetrayalsrequired her to chart theraw landscape of emotion. She han-dled each trial with uninching hon-esty, simultaneously expressing andpurging her pain. In one portrait after

another, Kahlo enchants us with herdark-skinned beauty, her thick, wing-spread eyebrows and beribboned eb-ony hair, the slant of her eyes and thefullness of her lips.

I paint self-portraits because I amso often alone, because I am the per-son I know best, Kahlo said. I paintmy own reality. The only thing that Iknow is that I paint because I needto. Kahlos self-portraits reveal herdual existence: The more miserableshe was, the more she adorned her-

self with colorful Mexican costumes,ribbons, and jewelry.

She began painting at eighteenwhile recovering from a bus accidentin which a metal handrail pierced herabdomen, leaving her with seriousspinal and pelvic injuries. From thatmoment, her life became a succes-sion of operations and convalescenc-es, worsened by the after-effects of achildhood bout with polio. She spent

months at a time hospitalized or bed-ridden in a plaster corset, a routinewhich she called her martyrdom.

The image of Kahlo as a secularsaint has become her most enduringlegacy. Kahlo painted herself withthorny vines clutching at her neck(one of her many references to Chris-tian iconography), sleeping with askeleton, and holding her extractedheart in her hand. In a letter to herchildhood sweetheart, she wrote ofthe transforming effect of the acci-

dent:Not much more than a few days ago,

I was a child who went about inworld of colors, of hard and tangib

forms. ... If you knew how terribit is to know suddenly, as if a bolt lightning illuminated the earth. No

I live in a painful planet, transpareas ice; but it is as if I had learneverything at once in seconds.

Her preoccupation with deathrooted as much in her own expeence as in the collective Mexicconsciousness, which is shaped the Aztec belief in a dualistic unverse of light and dark, male and fmale, life and death. In his book TLabyrinth of Solitude, the Mexicpoet and Nobel laureate Octavio Pwrites:

We are seduced by death. The fasc

nation it exerts over us is the resuperhaps, of our hermit-like solitu


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and of the fury with which we break out ofit.... solitude and communion, individual-ity and universality are still the extremesthat devour every Mexican. This confictcharacterizes our most intimate selves andgives a special color--alternately dark andbrightto our private conduct and our re-lationships with others;... it has a profoundeffect on all our political, social and artis-

tic efforts.

Rivera, the other locus of her suffer-ing, was ever present in her thoughts andappears in miniature on her forehead inpaintings such as Self-Portrait as a Te-huana (1943) and Diego and I (1949), oras a child in her maternal embrace. Kahloonce called Rivera the other accidentin her life, and she lamented her inabilityto possess him completely. Her diary en-tries and the love letters preserved at CasaAzul reveal her lifelong obsession with

her husband, whose constant philanderingincluded an affair with her younger sister,Cristina. Diego: Nothing is comparableto your hands and nothing is equal to thegold-green of your eyes, Kahlo wrote.My body lls itself with you for days anddays.

Kahlos agony over Riveras betrayalswas compounded by her inability to have achild. The loss she experienced in severalmiscarriages became a theme in paintingssuch as Henry Ford Hospital (1932), whichdepicts a naked Kahlo weeping and hemor-rhaging on a hospital bed.

Her psychic pain undoubtedly intensi-ed her artistic vision. By the time she wasthirty-two, her work was being exhibitedin Paris and New York and praised by thelikes of Picasso and Kandinsky. Surrealistpoet Andre Breton enthusiastically pro-claimed her a surrealist and referred to herart as a ribbon around a bomb. Rivera,who called the self-taught Kahlo a supe-rior painter, also said, Frida is the onlyexample in the history of art of an artistwho tore open her chest and heart to revealthe biological truth of her feelings.

When Kahlo returned to Mexico in 1939after her successes abroad, she and Riveradivorced. While she had her own shareof indelities, counting Trotsky and thesculptor Isamu Noguchi among her lovers,Kahlo was devastated. Her health deterio-rated, yet she continued to paint.

In The Two Fridas (1939), on displayat the Museum of Modern Art in MexicoCity, two Kahlos are connected by a redvein linking two heartsone whole andone broken and bleeding. Although sheand Rivera remarried in 1940, Kahlo re-

turned again to the theme of the doubself-portrait in Tree of Hope (1946) as hphysical condition worsened. Aware of tnearness of death, Kahlo depicted an aternately light and dark landscape wherehealthy Frida keeps watch over an anesthtized, surgically wounded double.

As Kahlo has increasingly b

come an icon, her paintinhave skyrocketed in valuefrom tens of thousands of do

lars in the late 70s to the 1991 sale that sher auction record: $1.65 million for SePortrait with Loose Hair (1947). WhKahlos works seldom appear for samore are now available for viewing. Mexcan art patron Dolores Olmedo, owner the largest private collection of Kahlopaintings, recently opened her home, LNoria, to the public. The restored 16century monastery is about fteen minut

from Casa Azul.And it is at Casa Azul, home of her bginning and her end, where Kahlos spiresides. Her painted plaster corset still satop her bed, where, after several attempat suicide, she reportedly died of a pulmnary embolism. On her pillowcase sembroidered the words, Dont forget mmy love; in her studio, a frog-shaped prColumbian urn holds her ashes. Her lpainting, Viva La Vida (1954), or LoLive Life, a sensual still-life of slicwatermelons, hangs among the museumother paintings.

Despite her pain, Kahlo celebrated lieven at her death. I have achieved a lotshe wrote during her last months. I will able to walk. I will be able to paint. I loDiego more than I love myself. My willgreat. My will remains.

Further Reading

A complete study of Kahlos life andart can be found in Martha ZamorasbookBrush Of Anguish and Hayden

Herreras Frida: A Biography of FridaKahlo and Frida Kahlo: the Paintings

Kahlos spirit iso expansive thathe walls of Casa

Azul seem barelyble to contain it;ne senses that itas spilled into theuchsia bougainvil-ea along the streetf Coyoacan.

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The Blue House