Frida Kahlo`s Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration

Woman's Art Inc.
Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration
Author(s): Sharyn R. Udall
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Autumn, 2003 - Winter, 2004), pp. 10-14
Published by: Woman's Art Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358781 .
Accessed: 05/06/2012 18:34
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Woman's Art Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Woman's Art Journal.
http://www.jstor.org
FRIDA
KAHLO S MEXICAN
BODY
History,Identity, and ArtisticAspiration
By Sharyn R. Udall
rida Kahlo(1907-54),whose body and biographywere her
chief subjects, mythologized them into a revealing life
epic. Her paintingstell stories-intimate, engaging,terriand
tragicones. Togetherwith her writings,they explorethe
fying,
toughness and vulnerability of the human body. When Kahlo
looked into death's dark mirror, she saw herself. In the act of
paintingand in the resultingcanvases,she documentedher own
attemptsto survivepain, to make sense of it, to act out through
images layeredwith fantasy,irony,and allegory.Her work is searingly candid,overlaidwith the unrealityof an endless nightmare.
When she abandonedhope in her dailylife, Kahloembedded her
despairwithin paintings,which, by virtue of their very existence,
act as the artist'senvoysin searchof salvation,or somethinglike it.
At times archaizingand romantic,at times brutallyimmediate,
Kahlo'ssubjectsimpose stasison history,freezingtogetherthe ancient past with livingmemories.When she used time as a referent,
it was with ambivalence;she refused time'slinearityand its arbitrarydivisions."Heute ist immer noch"(Todaystill goes on), she
wrotebeneathher signatureon the backof SelfPortraitwith a Velvet Dress (1926; P1. 5).1 In that revealing statement the artist
demonstratedearlyon that in her mind the present is living,continuouswith a past of historyand of art. By followingKahlo'slead,
by thinkingabouttime as a threadconnectingthe episodicwith the
eternal,we canbeginto understandherworkin new andtellingways.
This earlywork echoes severalart-historicalprecedents:Kahlo
admiredBronzino'sfamousmanneristportraits,especiallyA Young
Womanand her LittleBoy (c. 1540), and praisedthe refinedgrace
of Botticelli,whom she mentioned several times in letters. After
she gave the self-portraitto AlejandroG6mez Arias,her firstlove,
painterand portraitbecame one in her mind. She wrote Alejandro
that "your[Botticelli]...remembersyou always."2It is here, perhaps,thatKahlo'sabilityto transcendboth time and inheritedidentity begins; in many future paintings she exchanges and merges
personaewith painted selves, with animals,plants,and mythicbeings. It is a practiceas much shamanicas artistic,one relatedto the
conceptof Aztec dualityand addressedin othertermsas well.
Timeand specificallythe oppositionof the modem and antimodem in her work figure prominentlyin her next self-portrait,Time
Flies (1929; P1.6). Painted the year of Kahlo'smarriageto Diego
Rivera,this severelyfrontal,well-litportraitappearsfarless mysterious and romanticthan the one she made for Alejandro.The clock
and airplaneground it in the modem era. Yet the paintingis far
more complex,far less direct than it first appears.Beneathits surface franknesslie multipletemporalclues,pullingthe here and now
into a web of art-historical,
narrative,and allegoricalreferents.
Spanish painting, particularlythat of Velazquez, has always
been a powerfulpresence in Mexicanart.As OrianaBaddeleyand
ValerieFraserhavewritten,"Velazquezis centralto anyconsideration of the impact of the European artistic heritage on that of
Latin America."3YoungFrida Kahlo, enamored of Renaissance,
Mannerist,and later Europeanpainting,certainlyknew the work
of Spain'sgreatest Baroque master.Velazquez'sQueen Mariana
F
0
(1652) belongs to a traditionof courtpaintingthat reachesbackto
Titianand forwardto Goya. Queen Marianamemorializesa royal
dynasty,the Spanish Hapsburgs,who represent (besides much
else) a significant part of Mexico's own colonial past. In many
forms, the ruling dynasty provided an enduring fascination for
generations of Mexican artists, among them the 20th-century
painter Alberto Gironella, who borrowed elements from Las
Meninasand other worksby Velazquez.More specifically,Queen
Mariana is a remembered prototype and a key to the multiple
meaningswithinTimesFlies.
Two immediate similaritiesto the Velazquezpainting are the
queen'sformalized,staticpose and the massive,tie-backdraperies.
The more criticalformaland symbolicelement in both paintingsis
a clock, an unmistakableallusionto the concept of time. In each
case the clock is located to the sitter'sleft and behind her. The
Velazquezgold clock, as Baddeleyand Fraserpoint out, is a "rare,
expensiveand ornate"object.4It would have been a statussymbol
in 17th-centurySpain, or perhaps an updated, secularizedreference to the transienceof life formerlysuggestedby an hourglassin
moralizingvanitaspaintings.In any case, the hour is not visible;
seemingly,Velazquezused the clock to make an oblique reference
to his own modernity,to timelinessin a paintingwhose immobility
places it otherwiseentirely outside time. Kahlo'suse of the clock
seems to place TimeFlies specificallywithintime. Hers is a cheap,
modernalarmclock, strictlyutilitarian,with large blackhands and
numeralsdeclaringthat it is 2:52, perhapsan oblique referenceto
the date of the Velazquezpainting,1652.
There are several ironies involved in Kahlo's invocation of
Velazquez. She appropriateselements from an Old World, Old
Masterpaintingin the New World;she is neither old, nor (being
female) a "master,"nor is she clear at this point in her life about
her own artisticheritage.She is tryingon identities,both personal
and artistic:from the melancholyaristocratof her first self-portrait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her own
mixedEuro-Americanand Indianheritage.
Other aspects of Kahlo'sclock compel notice:placed exactlyat
Kahlo's eye level, the wide oblique angle of the hands on the
clock'sface forms a shape that mimicsher own dense eyebrowsjoined like dark bird wings above her nose. The clock face thus
rhymeswith her own; and like it, she becomes an instrumentthat
measurestime-that mediates between past and present. It also
forecasts the way Kahlo would paint other faces to mimic her
own-on coconuts,her pet monkeys,and on a varietyof other objects, animateand inanimate.For example,in Tearsof the Coconut (WeepingCoconuts,CoconutTears)(c. 1950) a hairycoconut
is given prominenteyes fromwhich tears drop onto the surrounding fruit in a still-life arrangement.Kahlo also used clocks in a
number of other drawingsand even as a design in the rock-encrusted ceiling of her home.5The little alarmclock, or a similar
one, remainstodayon a bedside table at her home in Coyoacan.
In TimeFlies the clockrestson a carvedwooden column,whose
spiralshaft rises exactlythe length of Kahlo'sown spinalcolumn,
WOMAN'S ARTJOURNAL
furtherreinforcingthe interpretationof the clock and its pedestal which Rivera and Kahlo
as some kind of mechanicalalter-ego, looking over her shoulder lived in the Morrows'home
and markingtime. But it has an ancientresonanceas well. We are
while the Americanswere in
reminded in the visual pairing of "columns"of the ways preEurope. While Rivera was
Columbianpeoples in Mexicoanthropomorphized
painting the saga of the
objects,such as
the Zapotecterracottapolychromedvase in the form of a vertebral Spanishconquest,Kahlohad
column, from Monte Alban, Oaxaca(Fig. 1). Kahlo, whose own
time to thinkaboutthe proxshatteredspinalcolumnsuppliedonly fragilesupport,could relyon
imity of past and present in
these other columnsfor metaphoricalsupport.In her famous1944
Cuernavaca, where Cortes
self-portraitThe Broken Column(P1.7), she invokedstill another had spenthis lastyears.
kind of column-a Greek fluted one-as interiorsupport.It is a
Wingedflight,symbolized
crackedIonic column,the "I"and its traditionalassociationwith feby Lindbergh, seemed to
male proportionsperhapsa punningreferenceto herself.
hold endless promisefor the
Anothertime reference in TimeFlies is the necklaceshe wears
future,thoughit held signifiof heavy,hand-carvedjade beads, relics of Mexico'spre-Cortesian cant dangersaswell. In 1928,
a
a young Mexican aviator, f .^ . .
past. The center stone is inscribedwith the Aztec glyph for movement, with connotations of "beginnings" or "nowness." Such
Emilio Carranza, made a _cmr
meaningwould not have been lost on Kahlo,whose sophisticated flight to the United States to
.
... ......
knowledgeof the pre-Columbianpast fueled her art and her own
reciprocateLindbergh'sMexeventualmythification.6
It is also an appropriatesymbolfor a perico visit the previous year.
Fig. 1. Vase in the Formof a Vertebral
sonalbeginning:her marriageto Riverathatyear.7
Column(200 B.C.-200A.D.),
Forgottentodayin the UnitTime and history rise along Kahlo'sbody, from the ancient
ed States, but well remempolychromedterracotta,h. 161/2".
necklaceto the jeweled colonialearringsto the penetratingnow of
bered in Mexico, is the tragic
FromMonte Alban, Oaxaca.
her gaze. Above that gaze, pushing Kahlo'squestionsof time still
journey:
ending to Carranza's
further,hovers a plane, an element clearly announcingthe 20th
Upon takeofffroma Long Islandairfieldfor his returnhome, lightcentury.At the same time, like the clock, it poses multiplemythic ning struckthe plane,plungingthe pilotto a violentdeath.'2
The plane in Kahlo'sTime Flies, as well as its title, seems on
possibilities:not those of Velazquez'sSpanishBaroque,but of even
older allegoriesof flight,of striving,and of artitself.
one level a clear reference to Lindbergh'scelebratedaccomplishKahlo was certainly aware of Charles Lindbergh's1927 solo
ment or to Carranza'stragic flight. On the other hand, knowing
the kind of symbolicand allegoricalplay Kahlo enjoyed, another
flight over the Atlantic.Hurtlingeastwardthrough multiple time
level of meaningfor the plane can be consideredas well. For exzones, his legendaryflight turned considerationsof time and distance upside down. He joined other pioneering aviatorssuch as
ample, a closer look at the fuselage of the plane, small but insisthe Frenchflyer Louis Bleriot,whose 1909 crossingof the English
tently painted, reveals,beneath its whirlingpropeller,a red shape,
channelhad been memorializedby the painter Robert Delaunay.8 curvedlike an aviator'shelmet, framinglines that describe a crude
Like Bleriot,Lindberghbecame a moder hero, inscribedforever face. Seen this way, the plane becomes more than a machine;it
into popularhistory.His daring earned him millions of admirers takes on the vaguelyliving characterof an inhabitantof the skies.
on both sides of the Atlantic,but he gained special acclaim as a
Is it human, celestial, insect, bird-or some combination?Half
hero for the Americas.9Mexicanswere amongthose swept into the
plane, half wingedtalisman,it rises above Kahlo'shead into mythic
mass adulation, and the American ambassadorin Mexico City,
or allegoricalstatus. However,tryingto decipherpreciselywho or
what the plane representscan only end, as it begins, with speculaDwight Morrow,saw a way to build on Lindbergh'sheroicsto create good will for the United States among its southernneighbors. tion. With greaterconfidencewe can think of the plane merely as
A few months after the Atlantic crossing, Morrowinvited Lindan emblem of the artist'sinterest in flight. And with that demonbergh to pilot his single-enginecraftto MexicoCity.In a delirious strable fact as starting point, we can look at other examples of
winged flightin Kahlo'slife and work.
reception, more than 100,000 Mexicans, including President
Calles, welcomed the aviator-heroupon his arrivalon December
Even as a child, Frida had been fascinated by the notion of
14, 1927. Lindberghstayedtwo weeks in the Mexicancapital,durflight. Not long after she developed, at age six, the polio that
would atrophyher rightleg, she askedher parentsfor a model airing which he made many public appearancesand met his future
wife, the ambassador's
plane. Instead,they gave her a pairof strawwings and dressedher
daughterAnne.
in a white robe like an angel.'3The useless wings must have reinThen, and during a subsequent visit in 1929, Lindberghflew
over unexcavated ruins in Guatemala and the Yucatan,making forced the frustrationsof a child whose mobilitywas alreadyhampered. The memory of that childhood disappointment,coupled
photographsfrom the air. This effort (initiated by Lindberghin
New Mexicoin 1927) was hailed as the first successfulapplication with her sufferingmultiple foot surgeriesin the 1930s, is a likely
of aerialphotographyfor archaeologicalpurposes.'?It demonstrat- source of Kahlo's1938 painting(now lost) TheyAskfor Planesand
ed to the worldnew ways of using technologyto link past and preAre Given Straw Wings (Fig. 2). In it a child, whose Tehuana
sent; for many,it was an Americancounterpartof HeinrichSchliedress and hair ribbonidentifyher as a miniatureFrida,holds the
mann'srediscoveryof Troydecades earlier,a feat Freud declared model plane she did not receive. Tethered to the earth, yet suswas like bringingfortha mythicpast into moder reality."
pended by the strawwings from above, the child longs to fly but
Kahlowas very much aware of Lindberghand may well have
cannot.On a personallevel,thisis a paintingof frustratedaspirations.
met the aviator;she certainly knew the Morrowfamily. Late in
But, typical of the artist who universalizesher own experience,
Kahlo invites a broaderinterpretation:in 1938 the SpanishCivil
1929, the year of Lindbergh'smarriageto Anne Morrow(as well as
Kahlo and Rivera's), the Morrows commissioned Rivera to paint a
War aroused the artist'sgrave concern for its refugees and vicseries of murals on the wall of the old Cortes Palace in Cueravatims."4Newspapersin Mexicowere filled with accountsof the desca, outside Mexico City. The project took nearly a year, during
olation.To press their struggle,the SpanishRepublicanArmyreFALL2003 / WINTER2004
0
Av vkA
vS
I,c
fct,:.
7
i~ O&;k;
in her workboth more personaland more profound thanhe knew.
The butterfly was of vital interest to the peo-
-/::
IB
~
|S ||{>P; i
X :?:!
ples of ancient Mexico, for whom duality and
transformationwere foundingtropes. As Peter
and RobertaMarkmanwrite, "Throughoutthe
developmentof Mesoamericanart,the imageof
the butterfly recurs."2'Janet Berlo explainsin
greaterdetail:
The butterfly is a natural choice for a transformational symbol. During its life it changes from
caterpillar to pupa wrapped in hard chrysalis, to
butterfly: a process of birth, apparent death, and
resurrection as an elegant airborne creature. To
the Teotihuacano,the butterfly surely was an emblem of the soul as it was for the later Aztecs.2
!"
'g
>lRE~'; ~~r-Y?8.-
Fig. 2. FridaKahlo, TheyAsk for Planes and Are
Given Straw Wings (1938).
..
Fig. 3. FridaKahlo,Alas Rotcs, diarypage 124.
FridaKahloMuseum.
quested planes, but did not receive them. Kahlo'sThey Askfor
Planes and Are Given Straw Wings could allude to that tragic disappointment as well.'5 Her preoccupation with the war in Spain
may well have prompted still another painting that year. Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera suggests that The Airplane Crash
(1938), in which bloodied corpses litter the ground, may echo the
kind of searing war protest Picasso expressed in Guernica.'6
Throughout the 1930s Kahlo referred to wings and flight in her
painting and writing. In an era when most people traveled long
distances by train or ship, she and Rivera flew as early as 1931, returning by plane from San Francisco to Mexico. In a metaphorical
sense as well, Kahlo continued to think of herself as a winged being; in 1934 she wrote to friends of her disappointment in learning
they would not visit Mexico soon: "My wings fell down to the
ground, since you do not know what I would give to have you guys
here.""7Planes and wings, then, are metaphors of time travel in
Kahlo's work. But they demand to be seen as much more; as symbolic vehicles, they are keys to Kahlo's development of a private,
object-based language. And they raise personal events and present-day happenings to the level of allegory.'8Kahlo knew this, and
so did many of the people who admired her work.
Andre Breton, for example, visited Mexico in 1938, the year
Kahlo painted They Ask for Planes and Are Given Straw Wings.
But it was in another of her paintings that Breton caught the sensation of flight. Of Kahlo's self-portrait painted for Leon Trotsky
(1937), Breton wrote: "She has painted herself dressed in a robe of
wings gilded with butterflies."'9 Breton wanted to make Kahlo's
imagery surrealist, an appellation Kahlo resisted. A few months
later she protested, somewhat disingenuously, "I didn't know I was
a Surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was."20
Breton, though soon a collector of pre-Columbian art, knew little about the ancient sources of Kahlo's imagery. She, however,
was intimately familiar with the Mexican past and cloaked herself
in its conventions, as intermediary between past and present, myth
and reality. Whatever the level of Breton's understanding of Kahlo's
"robe of wings gilded with butterflies,"he had touched upon imagery
0
For Kahlo, the butterflywas clearlya kind
of emblem as well; she kept them near herphotographs show a collection framed under
glass and mounted under the canopythat surmounted her bed. Their brilliant colors and
transformative symbolism distracted and sus-
tained her duringher long bedriddenhours. In
butterflies as with other symbolic life forms,
Kahlo relished the escalating possibilities of
meaning-from winged insect to transcendentsoul-riding on the
wings of a butterfly.
Kahlomust have imaginedherself,in one of her winged avatars,
as a butterfly,so often did she use it in her self-portraits.Delicate
yet resilient, the butterfly mirrorsher own life. In Self-Portrait
(1940;P1.8) a pairof them, reproducedin colonialsilver,nestles in
her hair,while winged blossoms,the sexualorgansof plants,hover
above, carryingthe reproductivepromise of their species. Kahlo
paintedherselfwithina naturalworldthatis farfromnatural.Death
and transfiguration,
disguisedas plants and animals,populate this
mysteriousEden, with an iconic Kahloat its center.CarlosFuentes
saw this timeless,tragicelement in the artist'slife, likeningher to a
"fragile,sensitive,crushedbutterflywho foreverrepeatedthe cycle
fromlarvato chrysalisto obsidianfairy,spreadingher brilliantwings
onlyto be pinneddown,over and over,astoundinglyresistantto her
pain,untilthe name of both the sufferingand the end of the suffering becomesdeath."23
If pain and release inhabitKahlo'sself-portraits,they often arrive via the winged creaturesshe includes. Birdsare also frequent
companions.In the 1940 self-portraita dead hummingbirdhangs
suspended from her menacingnecklace of thorns. The tiny, panhemispherichummingbirdheld many meanings.In folk tradition
it was a love charm.As she paintedthis self-portraitin the months
followingher painfuldivorcefrom Diego, perhapsFridaincluded
it as a talismanto restorelost love.
Beyond the personal, Kahlo also would have cherished the
wider pre-Columbianassociations.Linkedsymbolhummingbird's
ically with the great god Huitzilopochtli, and with the rain god
Tlaloc,the hummingbirdis a multivalentimage of courage,oracle,
and magic. The Aztecs believed it to hang lifeless from a tree in
winter, then to renew its youth as summer approached.Because
Kahlopainted the hummingbirdso insistently,with a wing shape
that replicates her own dark brows, we must consider it as a
metaphorof self. Like the hummingbird,who also does not walk
well, Kahlo's oft-impaired mobility made her aspire to flight. And
because she tied the tiny creature so conspicuously (and literally)
WOMAN'S ART JOURNAL
page (92) a winged woman floats among the repeated word
Sueno-sleep. Wingsin suchimagessuggestescape,apotheosis.
Even more poignant, and considerably more complex, are
Kahlo'simageryand text on diarypages 140 and 141, which layer
personalhistoryand myth.To be understood,they must be taken
together with page 142, which reads, "Se equivoco la paloma;se
equivocaba..."(The dove made mistakes.It made mistakes.Instead
of going Northit went South/Itmade mistakes/Itthoughtthe wheat
was water/Itmade mistakes.)By themselves,the lines are mysterious, but when connected with the clues given on page 140, the
meaningbecomes clearer.There she muses on the greatnessof HieronymusBosch and Pieter Breugelthe Elder,whom she calls"the
magnificent"and "mi amado"(my loved one). Breugel,the 16thcenturyFlemish painterof moralisticallegories,providesthe context for Kahlo'swordsandthe wingedcreaturedrawnon page 141.
Famous among Breugel's allegories is that of the flight of
Icarus,a mythologicaltrope of aspirationand failure.Breugelused
Ovid's Metamorphosesas the source for his The Fall of Icarus
(c. 1558). Ovid's account describes the attempted escape of
Daedalus and his son Icarus from their exile in Crete. Daedalus
fashioned wax wings for both of them, instructinghis son to fly
north on a middle course, not too close to either sky or sea. But
the son, questing for the heights, soared too near the sun; his
wings melted and he plunged to his death. The Icarus myth has
long pointed to the ironyat the heartof the artist'squest:the more
one aspiresto the ideal, the more certainis her doom.27
Kahlo'sreferences to flying south instead of north and mistaking wheat for waternow read as clearreferencesto Icarus.So does
the drawingitself: upon her marriageto the massive Diego, her
True to its shamanic base, Mesoamerican spiritual thought sees man
parentslikenedthe union to that between an elephantand a dove.
In the diarydrawingthe dove nests atop the headless shouldersof
as spirit temporarily and tenuously housed in a material body. "Soul
the winged female creature,whose cracked spinal column is unloss" is a constant possibility, and curersfrom pre-Columbian times
to the present have been called on to reunite body and spirit. That
mistakablyKahlo'sown, as seen in The BrokenColumn.She labels
her two legs "SupportNumber 1" and "SupportNumber 2." The
spirit/matter dichotomy is represented metaphorically throughout
the history of Mesoamerica and for most indigenous groups today by
latter,stiff and columnar,is encircledwith a spiralingline, suggestthe belief that each person has a companion animal who somehow
ing a cast or an umbilicalcord from an earlierlithograph,but also
reminiscentof the carved spiralclock pedestal in TimeFlies and
"shares"his soul.25
the column supportingFrida in an earlier diarypage, captioned
"Yosoy la desintegracion."28
Ultimately,such soul-sharingbetween the person and her nahual
In that earlierdiaryentry(fromthe 1940s),as in the Icaruspage
in
one
of
"a
different
kind
the
add
Markmans,
uncovers,
reality,
which the spirit and the man, the magicianand the disguise be(July1953), Kahloshows herself with only one functioningleg. In
Such is the
came strangelyunified and, finally,interchangeable."26
both, curiously,it is the right one, the one crippledby her childhood polio and the one amputatedin the summerof 1953 to halt
case, we can argue,with Kahlo'suse of the winged creatures-the
her
her
the
the
and
nahuals,
advancing gangrene. In its absence she longs for wings, those
hummingbird,
butterfly-all
parrot,
totemic links to other realities.These links she frequentlyundermetaphoricaldefiersof gravity,disease,and time itself. On another
scoredwith ribbonsthattie her,literally,to her companionanimals.
diarypage dated 1953 (page 134), she drew her severed feet and
The diaryKahlokept duringthe last decade of her life was pubcaptionedit "Feetwhatdo I need them for/IfI havewingsto fly."
Kahlo'swings, like her art, were mythicallypowerful. Unlike
lished in 1995. Though fragmented,with long interruptionsbetween some entries,this intimatejournalprovidesglimpsesinto her
pedestals, spinal columns, and feet, which could not be relied
upon, her imagined bird-butterfly-Icarus-artistwings could lift
thoughtprocesses,emotionallife, and physicaldecline. The images
her above the pain of the physicalworld into a realm where difshe drew and painted on its pages occasionallyrelate to finished
with
ferences of time and reality collapsed. Even without the severed
a
visual
most
are
but
narrative,captioned
separate
paintings,
words and phrases-occasionally in Nahuatl,Sanskrit,or Russian. leg, she had appendages to spare: "I have many wings," she
Fantasticwinged creatures,some of a mythicor semidivinenature, wrote in another defiant diary entry from 1953. "Cut them off
and to hell with it!!"29
populate the pages. These include an Egyptianbird, a griffin, a
In these multipleexamplesKahloshiftedtime into spatialstrucwith
references
to
and
several
unmistakable
bird-woman,
pregnant
Alherself.Diarypage 124 (Fig. 3) is captioned."Tevas?No. Alas Rotures;she refusedlinearityand traditionalnotionsof "progress."
tas." (Are you leaving? No. Broken wings.) Here Kahlo stands,
ways,she drewher storyinto history.To her assertionthat "I never
painted dreams, I painted my own reality,"one can reply that
wingsunfurledbehindher shoulderswhile her body,surroundedby
a mass of foliage, is being consumed by flames below. Always,
dream,reality,andhistorywere for her interchangeable.
Frida Kahlowanted her paintingsto be timely-that is, modKahlomirroredher thoughtswith overt or concealedself-portraits;
here brokenwings seems a probablelament for her own physical erm,original,without precedent. But she also wanted them to be
and emotionalimmobilityat that stage of her life. On anotherdiary timeless, existingoutside time, like some ancient, essential truth.
to the thorn necklace, dead center along her verticalaxis,we are
reminded again (as in Time Flies) of the vertical ascent of time
along the columnaraxis of her own body. Once more, to understand Kahlo'scomplexlanguageof symbolsis to recognize,always,
its encodingwithinher biologicalself.
Still anotherbird must be consideredwithinthe iconographyof
Kahlo'sself-portraits.The parrotappearseven more often than the
hummingbird,particularlyin the early 1940s. The artistkept parrots and posed with them seated on her shoulderor nestled, like
children, against her breast. She drew too upon pre-Columbian
lore, in which the parrot was prized for its gift of speech and
looked upon as a supernaturalbeing. Kahlo used fantasyin her
paintingsto allow such ancient beliefs to co-exist as living memories with moder ones. As her friend Anita Brenner wrote, the
parrot'sAztec name, nahual,means a being that takesmanyforms:
"InculturedAztec circles nahual gave nahualli,wise man and poet, and nahuatato,speakerof manytongues."4In modernMexican
folklore,adds Brenner,the birdremainsa symbolof sorcery.Kahlo,
who thought of herself as something of a sorceress-she called
herself"lagranoccultadora,"the greatconcealer-recognized her
own veiledidentities,multiplelike the veryhistoryof Mexicoitself.
The concept of the nahual was of central and abidingimportance in Aztec thought, a key to the pervasiveconcept of duality.
Variouslydefined as an opposition of values, a cleavage in the
Aztec soul, the ancient dualities were managed by means of
shamanicpractice,the abilityto traversethe realmsof matterand
spirit.Peter and RobertaMarkmanhave describedthe role of the
nahual,or companionanimal:
FALL2003 / WINTER2004
0
To achieve that duality she incorporated elements from her nation's ancient past, as well as those, like the airplane, that unequivocally announced the 20th century. While Kahlo's 1929 self-portrait Time Flies at first seems to condense or telescope time along
the vertical axis of her own body, what it does ultimately is to condense other realities-historic, nationalistic, mythic, and symbolic-into its own. In this way art finally becomes its own reality. ?
NOTES
Permission
to reproduceall FridaKahloimageshas been receivedfromtheir
Nacionalde BellasArtesand Bancode
owners,as wellas fromthe Instituto
Mexico
Mexico,
City.
1. Picassosharedhisconvictionthatartformsone continuous
livingpresent."Tome,"he wrote,"thereis no pastor futurein art.Ifa workof artcannotlivealwaysin the present,it mustnotbe consideredat all.Theartof the
Greeks,of the Egyptians,of thegreatpainterswho livedin othertimes,is not
an artof thepast;perhapsit is morealivetodaythaniteverwas";quotedin
AlfredBarr,Picasso:FiftyYearsof hisArt(New York:
Museumof ModernArt,1946),270-71.
2. Kahloto Arias,March29, 1927, quotedin HaydenHerrera,Frida
Kahlo:ThePaintings(New York:HarperPerennial,
1993), 45.
3. OrianaBaddeleyand ValerieFraser,DrawingtheLine:Artand
Latin
America(London:
in Contemporary
Cultural
Verso,1989), 48.
Identity
4. Ibid.,55.
5. InherdrawingFantasy(1944), forexample,a weepingeye has a
clockat itscenter,and in jOjoAvisor!(All-SeeingEye, 1934) she placesa
These
clockwithinan eye filledwithotherobjectsand landscapefragments.
The
Kahlo:
in
Frida
are
Paintings,128, 108.
drawings reproduced Herrera,
in the
6. See, forexample,JaniceHelland,"Culture,
Politics,and Identity
D.
The
in
Broude
and
Frida
Norma
of
eds.,
Garrard,
Kahlo,"
Mary
Paintings
andArtHistory(New York:HarperCollins,
ExpandingDiscourse:Feminism
1992), 397-408.
7. Inthatconnection,theclockmayalso pay homageto hernew husworkfromhis
band,who had painteda verysimilarobjectin a Cubist-style
Parisyears, TheAlarmClock(1914).Thisworkbelonged,in fact,to Kahlo.
8. Delaunaypainteda seriesof workscelebratingmachineflight,circular
in his Homageto Bleriot(1914).Atthe
rhythms,
lightand space, culminating
in theirpoetmadeairplaneimageryimportant
sametime,the ItalianFuturists
historicflight.By
ryand painting,beginningin 1909, theyear of Bleriot's
1912, an "airplanemania"was at itsheightin France.TheLivredes Indepenof modernflight:Icarus,
dantsthatyear containedhomagesto the precursors
and Bleriot.Diego Rivera,who was in FrancedurLeonardo,Santos-Dumont,
ing thedecade of the 1910s, was influencedby Delaunayin hisCubistexplorations.He wouldhavebeen awareof the maniaforflightand the 1912 IndeRivera's
own avid inSuchactivitymayhave stimulated
pendantspublication.
in partby a phototerestin planesand the historyof flight,as demonstrated
graphtakenin hisstudio,wherea modelplane(ofthevintageof Lindbergh's
fromtheceiling.See Adrianna
is suspendedprominently
"Spiritof St. Louis")
of Texas,1994), 102. On the
Williams,Covarrubias
(Austin:
University
D. Wolfe,TheFabulousLifeof
connection,see Bertram
Rivera-Delaunay
Mich.:
Rivera
(Chelsea,
ScarboroughHouse,1963), 78, 87. On DeDiego
the
Futurists
and
mania,"see SherryA. Buckberrough,
"airplane
launay,
RobertDelaunay:TheDiscoveryof Simultaneity
(AnnArbor:UMI,1982),
226-31.
Americanhero,
9. Lindbergh
rapidlycame to representthequintessential
of theAmericanvaluesof daring,exploration,and
a modernreincarnation
a metaphoracrossgendersand occupations,AlfredStieglitz
risk;stretching
of
declaredin 1928 of hisprot6egeGeorgiaO'Keeffe,"Sheis the Lindbergh
art.LikeLindbergh,
MissO'KeeffetypifiesthealertAmericanspiritof going afterwhatyou wantand gettingit";quotedin
B.VladimirBerman,"ShePaintedthe Lilyand Got $25,000 and FameforDoing it!"New YorkEveningGraphic,May 12, 1928, 3M.
0
10. Fora fulleraccountof thisactivity,see HelenDelpar,TheEnormous
RelationsbetweentheUnitedStatesand
Vogueof ThingsMexican:Cultural
of Alabama,1992), 110;and
1920-1935
Mexico,
(Tuscaloosa:
University
of
CharlesA. Lindbergh,
Values
Brace,
(NewYork:Harcourt,
Autobiography
Jovanovich,1978), 85-88.
American
11. SuzanneCassirerBernfeld,"Freudand Archeology,"
Imago8(1951), 111.
12. See Delpar,TheEnormous
Vogue,64.
D. Wolfe,"Riseof AnotherRivera,"Vogue(October/
13. Bertram
November,1938), 131.
14. Demonstrating
theirconcernaboutthiswar, Kahloand Riverahelped
severalSpanishrefugeesupontheirarrivalin Mexico.See Herrera,Frida
Kahlo:ThePaintings,26.
of LuchaMaria(1942), is an im15. Anotherof Kahlo'spaintings,Portrait
a
a
of
seated
girlholding toy airplane.Inthe backgroundis a divided
age
skycontaininga sunand moon,each positionedabove the pyramidsof the
at Teotihuac6n.
sunand moon,respectively,
16. Herrera,FridaKahlo:ThePaintings,26. Thelocationis notknown.
17. Kahlo,letterto EllaWolfe,July11, 1934, in MarthaZamora,comp.,
TheLetters
of FridaKahlo:CartasApasionadas(SanFrancisco:
Chronicle,
55.
1995),
18. Womenpaintersand writershaveoftenexpressedelationor frustration
in termsof flight.O'Keeffe,duringherfirstexhilarating
summerin New Mexico, wrotethatthesightof Taosmountainloomingabove vastexpansesof
fieldsmadeherfeel likeflying.HeleneCixoushas concludedthat"Flyingis a
of women'sflightas deliberatelydisruptive
woman'sgesture."Herdescription
of thesocietalstatusquo (thoughnotwrittenspecificallyaboutKahlo),paraltheorderof space...disorilels manyof Kahlo'ssubversivegestures:"jumbling
entingit,dislocatingthingsand values,breakingthemall up...andturning
of theMedusa,"in Elizaproprietyupsidedown";see HeleneCixous,"Laugh
bethAbeland EmilyK.Abel,eds., TheSignsReader:Women,Genderand
of Chicago, 1983), 291.
Scholarship
(Chicago:University
19. Andr6Breton,Surrealism
and Painting,SimonWatson,trans.
(London:
TaylorMacDonald,1972), 35.
64.
20. Quotedin Wolfe,"Riseof AnotherRivera,"
21. PeterT.Markmanand RobertaH. Markman,
Masksof theSpirit:Image
of California,1989),
and MetaphorinMesoamerica(Berkeley:
University
148.
TheCeramicIn22. JanetC. Berlo,"Artistic
Specializationat Teotihuac6n:
ArtHistory:Selectin AlanaCordy-Collins,
cense Burner,"
ed., Pre-Columbian
ed Readings(PaloAlto,Calif.:PeekPublications,
1977), 99.
23. CarlosFuentes,intro.,in SarahM. Lowe,ed., TheDiaryof FridaKahlo:
An Intimate
Self-Portrait
(NewYork:Abrams,1995), 10. Forreproductions
and reviewby SalomonGrimberg,see WAJ(F97/W98), 42-43.
24. AnitaBrenner,
IdolsBehindAltars(New York:Payson&Clarke,1929),
38. Brenner's
maytakelibertieswiththe parrot'snamein the
interpretation
withnagual,or "guardian
Aztec(Nahuatl)language,usingit interchangeably
beast."
25. Markman
and Markman,
Masksof theSpirit,144.
26. Ibid.
27. Amongthecountlesspoetsand painterswho have usedthe Icaruslegend in theirworkare HendrikGoltzius,Baudelaire,and, morerecently,Henri
Matisse,W. H. Auden,and WilliamCarlosWilliams.Mythanksto BillGarrison fordirectingme to thosereferences.
28. Kahlo's1932 lithographFridaand theMiscarriage(reproduced
in Herrera,FridaKahlo:ThePaintings,77) showsan umbilicalcordwrapped
aroundherrightleg connectinga foetusinsideherbodywitha largerfoetus
outsideherbody.
29. Diarypage 139, July1953.
Sharyn Udall, author of Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own
(2000), is an art historian and independent curator.
WOMAN'S ARTJOURNAL
-~
PI. 5. FridaKahlo, Self-Portraitwith VelvetDress (1926),
oil on canvas, 31" x 23". PrivateCollection.
la,
,
I
~~~~~~~~~~
"
'
....
..u.
P1.7. FridaKahlo, TheBrokenColumn(1944), oil on canvas mountedon
masonite, 153/4"x 12". Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino,Mexico City.
PI.6. FridaKahlo, Self-Portrait
[TimeFlies] (1929), oil on masonite,
313/4"x 271/2". PrivateCollection.
If
t
I
\1
U
PI.8. FridaKahlo, Self-Portrait(1940), oil on canvas, 24'/2" x 181/4".
IconographyCollection, HarryRansomHumanitiesResearchCenter,
Universityof Texas, Austin. Photo:CourtesySalomon Grimberg.