Frida Kahlo: life of the week

Childhood and the Mexican Revolution

0:00The arresting gaze, the stark monobrow, the intricate ribbons woven through the dark hair. Frida Kahlo's unmistakable image is recognised throughout the world today. Yet the woman behind the vivid self-portraits was far more complex than the icon she became. In this Life of the Week episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird speaks to historian Patience Schell, exploring how

0:30trauma, politics, and extraordinary artistic vision transformed Kahlo into one of the most influential cultural figures of the modern age. Patience, thank you so much for joining us on the History Extra podcast to discuss the life, times, and legacy of Frida Kahlo. Thank you. Now, Kahlo was born in 1907, just before the Mexican Revolution, which transformed the country. In order to understand Frida Kahlo, how important is it to understand the Mexico that she was born into? Oh, it's absolutely essential. She was such an artist of Mexico and Mexico of the Revolution

1:03and post-revolutionary period. She actually, as a teenager, started saying she was born in 1910, which was the year the Revolution started as a way of allying herself with the Revolution. And she was a woman of the left who supported communism. Not that the Mexican Revolution was communist, but it was a socially progressive revolution which sought to change Mexico. Land reform, for instance, workers' rights, a full separation of church and state, including, you know, restricting all sorts of public displays of religiosity. So quite a social revolution that really sought to remake

1:37Mexico. And it was coming out of a period which was much more conservative, much more culturally oriented towards Europe, especially France. And the Mexican Revolution really said, what about Mexico? What about Mexican culture? Let's celebrate what we have. So she's born into this extremely volatile period of time in Mexican history. There's a lot happening and changing. And of course, her own family dynamic is rather unusual in the sense that she is the daughter of a middle class immigrant to Mexico, isn't she? But also a mother who is from the country. Could you explain a little bit about her family background, who her parents were and what

2:11they did? Yes. Her dad, Guillermo Kahlo, was an immigrant. He was of German and Hungarian background. He arrived in Mexico when he was a young adult and he made his living as a photographer. And he became quite a successful photographer under the old regime, that is the pre-revolutionary regime of Porfirio Diaz. He was married before. He married Frida's mom. And sadly, that wife died, but he had two surviving daughters from that relationship. And then he married Matilda Calderón, who was from the

2:43state of Oaxaca. And she was mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry and quite a strong Catholic woman as well. And so was this a context in which Kahlo herself was raised to be a Catholic? Yes. Yes, she was. And Catholicism was quite important to her culturally, but it was also a source of some ambiguity is not quite the right word. It was not something she followed as a religious believer as she grew older, because it was too restrictive in terms of social expectations. And she was much more counter-cultural and experimental and taboo-breaking. But in terms

3:17of iconography, in terms of the symbols, in terms of the cultural aspects of Catholicism, they were very important to her. So she clearly has an innate instinct to rebel against tradition. Yes, definitely. Where do you think that came from? Was that just completely the circumstances of the time she was growing up in? Or was that something much deeper and primordial about Frida Kahlo herself, do you think? She seems the most rebellious of the siblings, of the daughters. Her father certainly encouraged that. She got polio when she was a child, about seven years old, and she was hospitalised for about

3:50nine months. And her father, to help her recover, encouraged her to do sports like wrestling and swimming, which were not necessarily traditional sports for a young girl at that time. But she'd been a tomboy even before then. And she, yeah, she was a bit of a prankster and a trickster and a bit of a rebel. Do you think the experience of polio left a big influence on her in the sense that she was treated as somebody who was slightly different and therefore she acted out against that? Yeah, and I think she wanted to prove herself. I mean, she really did focus on the physical

4:22rehabilitation, the physical activities, really pushing herself and trying to prove that she could do things physically. Now, I understand as well that she dreamt of growing up to become a doctor. And I just wanted to ask you, do you know where that came from and what actually ultimately happened in the sense of that ambition? Where did that ambition go? Was that something she always had, or was it something very much sort of like a childhood fantasy which fell away? No, it was more than a childhood fantasy. She attended the prestigious Escuela Preparatoria Nacional in Mexico City, which was the most prestigious high school in Mexico City. Bear in mind that her

4:56family lived in Coyacan, which is now part of Mexico City. It's in southern Mexico City, but at the time it was a different town. So it was a big deal to go from Coyacan to Mexico City to study. And she was planning at that point on being a doctor. And we do see some of the influence of that medical interest and medical training in some of her paintings and the precision of some of the anatomy that appears in some of her paintings. And hopefully we can go on and discuss some of her paintings as we progress through this podcast later on. But I just want to return now slightly to her youth, because obviously this is not the

The Tram Accident and Recovery

5:29beginning or the end really of her medical misfortunes, because in 1925, she suffers a horrific accident where a tram collides with the bus that she's on in Mexico City. And this left her with lifelong injuries and chronic pain. How much do you think that moment created the Frida Kahlo that we know today, not just physically, but also psychologically and artistically? I think it's absolutely pivotal. It's a huge turning point. And your question about when it became clear she couldn't be a doctor, that was the moment when she couldn't continue her

6:00education. She couldn't be a doctor. And it was when her parents encouraged her to turn to painting was when she was recovering. So she was still bed bound and her mother and father rigged up kind of an easel and a mirror above the bed so that she could see herself. She could see things and she could start doing some painting. She'd already as well, because her father was a photographer, you know, the family had that, shall we say, artistic eye. So her parents were extremely supportive of this pursual of her artistic proclivity.

6:30Yes. Fantastic. And can you tell me a little bit about her recovery period? Because I understand it went on for quite some time. She must have been extremely bored and frustrated and presumably left to her own imagination. Yes. Yes. And that's, again, where the painting becomes, you know, that's where you really start to see her exploring her artistic side. You know, previously she'd been, despite the polio, a very active child. And now she was someone who was bed bound and really confined in some ways to her imagination. And the painting gave the opportunity for the imagination to flourish and

7:01that sort of a challenge. But yes, it was a number of years before she was fully recovered after the accident. Before I go on to that, I do want to backpedal a little bit, sorry, and ask you more about her recovery period and the fact that, you know, she has endured this absolutely horrendous accident. Could you tell me a little bit about what that accident actually entailed and how severe these injuries were? Yes. The accident, as you say, she was riding in a bus which collided with a trolley car. There were only about five people who survived the accident. So it was really catastrophic in terms of the damage done. And she was pierced in her lower abdomen by one of the railings. So she

7:39actually had these horrific injuries. Her pelvis was fractured. She actually had fractured vertebrae as well. So it was really just devastating to her torso.

Meeting Diego Rivera

7:51And of course, one of the major moments of her life during this time is that she meets Diego Rivera. And she doesn't just enter into marriage. She enters into the center of Mexico's artistic and political elite through Diego Rivera. Who exactly is Diego Rivera? What do we need to know about him? Diego Rivera is one of those larger than life characters. He was, I mean, I think the best way to describe him at the time is he's like a rock star. So she ends up marrying a national treasure, but a national treasure who was a big macho, carried a gun around, was painting these representations of

8:23the Mexican Revolution, even though he had been in Paris studying art during the Mexican Revolution, but he could paint it really well. And so he was one of the big three Mexican muralists who were supported by the government to really create a visual representation of Mexican history and celebrate Mexican culture in these murals, public murals, murals in government buildings. And that's actually how they met for the first time because he was painting a mural in her high school. And she at that point was a kid and she was watching and there were some tricks going on. It was nothing romantic, but that's

8:56how they initially had contact. And then they remet when she was a young adult. And she, at that point, we've already, we've discussed the fact that she realized she couldn't go on to study medicine and she wanted to make a contribution to her family's finances and she wanted to do it through painting. So she went to Dio Rivera initially with some of her best paintings, hoping that he would be a mentor to her. So as you've pointed out, he was a bit of a national hero and globally, he was one of the most famous artists in the world at that point, wasn't he? And I just wonder, what was it like

9:28for somebody like Frieda, who was obviously extremely young, an unknown artist at this stage, to find herself suddenly in the orbit of somebody of that stature? Yeah. And I think we have to really bear in mind the age difference because there's 20 plus years age difference between the two of them. So he is heading for peak fame, national hero, national bad boy, womanizer, reputation with marrying some of them, not marrying others of them, having children, moving on. So he really is a bad boy in all sorts of different respects.

9:59And I think what's remarkable is that Frida Kahlo in her early 20s was able to meet him as an equal, you know, considering that he was so, as I say, larger than life rock star, that she was able for him, that she was able to, you know, challenge him intellectually. And I think that was part of the foundation of their relationship was this meeting of artistic minds. I mean, obviously there was more to it than that, but there was a real respect between the two of them for each other as artists. And it seems to me that as their lives together developed, they obviously rubbed up against the

10:34shoulders with some pretty extraordinary figures themselves from politicians, revolutionaries, writers, and other artists. How unusual was it for somebody like Frida Kahlo, a young woman from Mexico City, to find herself in rooms with people like Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky later on, André Breton, and even figures connected to American capitalism like the Rockefellers. What was it about that time which enabled this to be happening? What we started off is thinking about the Mexican Revolution and that wider context. So Mexico in the 1920s, if you were an artist, an intellectual, a political thinker, if you were on the left and

11:07you wanted to be part of big change, Mexico City would be one of the places you went. So in some ways, it's not unusual to think of someone like Frida Kahlo rubbing shoulders with all these people, meeting all these people, because that was the artistic milieu. You know, that was the artistic environment of Mexico in the 1920s. There was Tina Modati, the Italian photographer who helped Frida and Diego remeet. Sergei Eisenstein was there in the 1930s, the Russian filmmaker, Edward Weston,

11:38the U.S. photographer. So the list, you've already mentioned Breton, Anita Bremner, the writer. So the list just goes on and on of these kind of cultural luminaries from that early 20th century period who went to Mexico looking for both what they could do and also kind of that creative food for themselves.

12:02Of course, today we know Frida Kahlo as a larger than life personality, but do you think that early exposure to these larger than life personalities around her in her 20s helped her to develop that later public persona? Yeah, I think that's part of it. And I think it's also the recovery from the accident that, you know, as you say, she was someone who ended up dealing with chronic pain, who was having to reinvent herself, who had significant period of rehabilitation and being bedbound. And she really developed the audacious, trickster, witty life of the party side of herself.

12:39So she really made herself, started making herself into a persona. And that even predates the getting to know Diego Rivera and marrying him. So I think she was on that path already as becoming this personality. And then she ended up in an environment in which I suppose you had to be a big personality to get your say. Absolutely. And I'd like to pursue that path a little bit further now, because

San Francisco and American Modernity

13:01in 1930, Frida travels to the United States for the first time and arrives in San Francisco with Diego Rivera. And this seems like a crucial moment where she begins to define herself not only visually, but culturally. And she enters a city where I believe segregation and discrimination against Mexicans is actually very visible. And I just wondered, I think there is an observation that Frida actually felt more Mexican when she was in the United States. And I just wondered what was happening? Would you agree with that analysis? And do you think the experience of being north of the

13:32border actually did lead to her kind of embracing more of a Mexican identity? I do think that's part of it because it's the juxtaposition. And I think many of us have had that experience is when you are out of your culture, you suddenly feel more of your culture. It's like you're rubbing up against that difference and that becomes more evident. I also think, you know, you've asked what it was like for her to be married to this rock star artist. And part of the way she created space for herself was by making herself visually interesting. I mean,

14:02she was wearing Mexican traditional dressed, folkloric costume of indigenous people in Mexico in San Francisco in 1930. This was not something most people saw when they were walking down the street, a woman in Mexican sandals with the jewellery and the ruffles. So she did not want to blend in. She wanted to stand out. She wanted to kind of cause a scene and have a wake behind her through who she was. So this is when that unmistakable Frida Kahlo iconography really begins to take root, isn't it? You know, the, is it the Tijuana clothing, the flowers in her hair, the jewellery?

14:36Yes. When she and Diego got married, rather than wearing a traditional wedding dress, she borrowed some of the clothing from one of the housemates. So she wore more rural, peasant, you know, folkloric clothes to the wedding as well. So long dress, long skirt, lovely blouse and a shawl, a Serape, traditional Mexican shawl. So she's cultivating this image. And I have mentioned that she comes up against bigotry, essentially in the United States, against Mexico, against Mexicans. At the same time,

15:06though, she is generating a lot of interest, isn't she? American photographers are fascinated by her. And do you think Frida was consciously creating that image, playing into it? Or do you think it was a bit of both? Do you think it was the American photographers and Frida herself kind of sparring off of each other? That's an interesting question. I suspect there is a bit of both, but I suspect she was really building on it and using it as much as she can. I mean, she was appalled by some of the things she saw in the United States. And it wasn't just the racial discrimination, it was the economic

15:37discrimination. Bear in mind, this period was just after the fall of the stock market in 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression. And she was really, as a person, you know, a very strong person of the left who was a member of the Communist Party, really offended by seeing the wealth going on oblivious to the suffering around it. So there were things about the United States she just found morally challenging. And I think would not back down from that and wanted to kind of push back and make things more evident.

16:09And as you said, she arrived in the United States just when the Great Depression is beginning to bite. And she moves from San Francisco to New York City. How did these experiences of these very different American cities, these art scenes, influence her during that time? Because I understand that Diego Rivera is invited to the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. So they're there for that opening of that now very illustrious institution, but at the time, obviously groundbreaking. How did she feel being in one of the great centres of global capitalism as a communist?

16:45She didn't want to stay in the US as long as Diego Rivera did. Let's put it that way. They ended up staying about three years. And then later on in her life, there's a fair bit of back and forth with the US, but it was not a comfortable place for her. It never felt like home. It was never a place she enjoyed being. It was not comfortable. I think one of the most apparent moments of that discomfort is when they venture to Detroit.

Detroit and Personal Tragedy

17:05after being commissioned by Henry Ford to create a mural. And that's very much a moment of personal tragedy for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera themselves. And I was just wondering if you could go into a little bit of the context behind that arrival in Detroit, because I understand it comes in the wake of a very violent crackdown. Yes. And Frida Kahlo was, again, seeking to provoke. So there are stories of her asking Henry Ford, who was known to be terribly anti-Semitic, if he was Jewish or in front of staunchly Catholic

17:41women deliberately saying provocative things about the Catholic Church. But also she was good at pretending she didn't speak English very well and then throwing swear words in. But then there's plausible deniability. Oh, I didn't mean to say that. So lots of just kind of needling the powerful and trying to show up hypocrisy. And as I mentioned, this is a moment where she suffers a very severe miscarriage. I think the pregnancy was about four months in. And she ends up in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

18:15And this is the subject of probably one of her most devastating paintings. And I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about what that painting is depicting. And whether you think her experience in Detroit and the fact that, you know, she's very much identifying this moment of personal tragedy with the fact she's in the Henry Ford Hospital. This is one of the bleakest moments of her life. Do you think that experience of being in that city at that time was a major turning point for her as an artist and as a person? Certainly, that is a huge kind of artistic development, that painting. So it's a painting

18:48of a naked Frida Kahlo in a spare hospital bed, metal framed hospital bed, miscarrying. So we see her bleeding. And it's in a kind of open landscape with some skyscrapers in the background, but it's a very bleak and open space. And then attached to her, there is a fetus, there is a snail, there is a kind of anatomical model of a woman's kind of lower torso and reproductive organs, which is when we mentioned

19:19earlier her interest in being a doctor. This is where we start to see some of that knowledge and way of thinking about bodies. We see some of that in some of these, some of her paintings. But yeah, it's a it's a painting of grief, of sorrow, of pain, and she takes you in a lot of different directions with it. And it is often seen really as lamenting her inability to have children. Although I think it's probably more complicated than that, because she's a woman who also had several abortions and

19:50had concerns about being a mother, both for herself physically and in terms of what it would mean for her relationship with Diego Rivera, who did not have a good track record of staying with the women who had his children. And it was also a period where her mother was ill when she was painting this and her mother died. So I think there's a lot of different forms of very complicated grief in that painting. But as I say, it's kind of this, this stark spare landscape, which really makes you focus on the bleeding naked Frida. And the subjects she painted really were taboo breaking in so many ways,

20:27you know, first of all, to be a woman artist with the profile she started to get, but a woman artist painting about a miscarriage, you know, painting about these, these very intense moments from the female gaze. It's really revolutionary. Absolutely. And this is in 1932. This is obviously a very profound period in her life where, you know, she's gone through this horrendous incident where she's lost a child, her own mother dies. And it must have focused her mind on motherhood itself, you know, her own relationship

21:01with her mother, her own destiny as a mother herself, if you like. Do you think there was a lot of soul searching going on at this point in her life in terms of her future direction as a creative personality? That's a really interesting question. I think she was ready to get back to Mexico to imagine going through that kind of a trauma also so far from home in a country that felt really alien. So, yeah, I can't say that I, you know, see it as this, this kind of profound shift for her artistically beyond what we've already talked about in terms of the Henry Ford Hospital painting

21:35itself. The question about Frida Kahlo and maternity is one that has been discussed quite a bit by scholars. And as I mentioned, I think that there's, there's more ambiguity to it than is sometimes recognized because she was told by some doctors she couldn't carry to term that it would be too dangerous. Others suggested she might be able to carry to term if she had a C-section and possibly had bed rest. So it's, it's not quite as clear cut as someone who a hundred percent could not have children. And I think there's, there's a lot of ambiguity and complex feelings for her

22:10around maternity and not being a mother. Another thing to say about this period is Mexican women didn't get the national vote until 1953. And in this period, women's space as political actors, a lot of it was predicated on their role of mothers. So there's a way in which being a mother was kind of part of being a justification for having some kind of a public role. So if a woman who's not a mother, what, what does that say about her publicly? I think it's quite telling as well that I believe the original title for Henry Ford Hospital, that painting was The Lost Desire. So this is, this is

22:46clearly a moment of profound introspection for Frida Kahlo as a woman, an artist and everything else that's going on in her life. But you did also reference the fact that her husband, Diego Rivera, was a notorious womanizer and a serial adulterer. Do you think there's a tendency to almost see Frida Kahlo as a victim of Diego? Do you think that narrative is overplayed? Because where I'm getting at with that question is Frida had relationships herself with both men and women, and she was far more

23:17open about that sexuality than many people of her era. What do you think that says about her as a free woman of the 1930s, that she's willing to basically live that life so openly and have

Rebellion and Marriage Dynamics

23:29those affairs with both women and men? I think for both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, they were not bound by conventional morality. These are things that they said about themselves and each other. Obviously, well, I shouldn't say obviously, but in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, a man having an affair was not all that surprising, but a woman having an affair and a woman having relationships with other women was certainly more taboo breaking. And one of the suggestions about one of the reasons Frida Kahlo ended up somewhat distancing herself from her Catholic upbringing is precisely because she

24:02wanted a more open sexual life and an open sexual life where she was unashamed of her desire and she wasn't fitting into conventional morality. His affairs definitely hurt her. So, you know, I think there's a balance to be struck. You know, she was not someone who was happy with his sleeping around and it particularly hurt her when he slept with her younger sister. I think people will fully understand why that one particularly crossed a boundary. So, it's not to say that she was

24:32completely expecting an open marriage, shall we say. But at the same time, she saw Diego Rivera as an amazing artist and part of her role as his wife was to support him. And she just did not think he could be bound by conventional morality. And she was not bound by conventional morality either. So, Frida Kahlo as a victim, I think we have to look at the world she was living in, the time she was living in. And she lived quite a rebellious and bohemian life for a woman of the 20s, 30s, 40s and early 50s.

25:03Yeah, because I think, as you've mentioned, she was clearly very deeply in love and committed to her marriage with Rivera, even though he did repeatedly hurt her. And I just, I wonder how much of that relationship and its destructive aspects aided her creativity as an artist. And also looking at the fact, you know, she is dealing with chronic pain. She almost seems like the quintessential tortured artist. Do you think that's overplaying it slightly? I do think it's overplaying it. I think there's a tendency when looking at Frida Kahlo to equate

25:37her biography with her painting and really make a direct line between her biography and her painting. And I don't think it's as simple as that. But at the same time, we do see that when there are shifts in her marriage, her painting sometimes shifts too. So, I think that her emotional state is coming through in some of these paintings, but it's not so simple as this is, for instance, the painting of the two Fridas, which is her double portrait that's huge. It's almost life-size of the two Fridas connected by arteries. You know, that's referred to as the divorce painting,

26:13because she and Diego Rivera were briefly divorced. I think there's probably more to it than that. Well, I think, is it that painting where she's also clasping a tiny cameo of Diego as a child? Yes. And, you know, what is that saying about their relationship, I suppose? Well, that's an interesting point. There are moments where she talks about she wished she could have been his mother. And there's a painting where she is kind of Mother Earth cradling a giant baby Diego. I mean, that's the thing. I think their relationship, it has lots and lots of elements

26:45beyond what we would consider sort of traditional marital roles. They were friends. They respected each other as artists. They supported each other as artists. She saw taking care of him as really important. So, there's a lot going on there. And you referenced, of course, that he notoriously had an affair with her younger sister, her beloved sister, Christina. What did that do to her relationship with both of them? Well, that was the trigger for the separation and divorce. I mean, the divorce itself,

27:15which lasted a couple of years. But yeah, no, it was terrible. She and Christina, and obviously Diego, eventually everybody reconciled. But it was a terrible, terrible betrayal. Because I think, in a way, it was as if Diego was having an affair with Christina because she was Frida Kahlo's sister and because there were elements of Christina that sort of reminded him of Frida. I think it was that similarity which made it so hard. I believe it's around this time that she also paints an extremely graphically violent painting

27:48called A Few Small Nips. Yes. Which was inspired by an actual murder case. And I understand that Frida's justification for painting that was that she herself felt like she had been murdered by life. And you've said that there is a tendency to maybe overdo or overemphasize the emotional impact of her lived experience in her artworks. But do you think that's a rare exception where she is kind of trying to communicate the inner turmoil? I think it can be more than one thing at once. I mean, I think there's definitely, we should say what the painting is. The painting was inspired by the femicide of a woman by her

28:24partner on the excuse that she had cheated on him. And he stabbed her many, many, many times. And so the painting is of this woman's body with all the wounds visible and the perpetrator is still there. And there's blood all over, including on the frame. She's painted it out of the painting and into the frame. It's horrifying. It's absolutely horrifying. And it's called A Few Small Nips because that was what the perpetrator said about how he had murdered this woman. He's just a few

28:54small stab wounds. So I think we can also take it on face value that this is Frida Kahlo calling out the hypocrisy and the misogyny that would allow someone to commit this heinous crime and attempt to justify it both on the grounds of the woman's infidelity and also, well, it was just a little bit of violence. But yes, she was definitely in a place where she was angry and she was hurt and she felt betrayed by the people who were so important to her and closest to her, really.

Leon Trotsky in Mexico

29:22Now, of course, if there's anything that people do know about Frida Kahlo, it's her affair with Leon Trotsky. And I wondered if you could talk us through a bit of the backstory in terms of how Trotsky came to be in Mexico in Frida's orbit. Yes. I've already mentioned a few times that Frida Kahlo was a communist, Diego Rivera as well. He was a bit in and out of the party because of various ideological splits within the Communist Party at the time, but they were both lifelong communists. And so Leon Trotsky had been exiled from the Soviet Union

29:55and was seeking safe haven and had already gone through multiple countries. And so Frida and Diego, they interceded with President Lázaro Cárdenas to see if Cárdenas would offer Trotsky exile in Mexico. And Cárdenas was convinced to do this. And so Leon Trotsky and his wife came to Mexico and they were housed initially for the first two years of their time in Mexico in Frida's house, the Casa Azul,

30:26the blue house in Coyoacán. Now, there is a suggestion that because Trotsky was such an idol for Diego Rivera, that Frida took it upon herself to initiate this affair with Trotsky as an act of vengeance for Rivera's affair with her younger sister. Do you buy that? Um, I wouldn't put it past her. I mean, but, but, you know, I'm sure Trotsky was also quite appealing in his own right, you know, because I think both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were attracted

30:57to singular people with incredible talent, with incredible charisma. And Leon Trotsky, I mean, Leon Trotsky staying in her house, this incredible political leader. So, you know, if there was an element of it was nice to get a little bit of her own back, I suspect there was a lot more to it than that. Absolutely. I spoke to Josh Ireland a couple of months ago about his book, The Death of Trotsky, in which I posed the question of the affair between Trotsky and Frida Kahlo to him. He suggested it was more an act of desperation on Trotsky's part that, you know, he was in such a vulnerable and

31:31powerless state that it was almost a release for him to have this romantic dalliance of this exotic Mexican artist. Do you think that was the case for Frida Kahlo in the sense that she was a bit starstruck by him? Or do you think there was genuine affection there? I think there was genuine affection there. I mean, there was a long relationship, you know, as I say, they stayed in Frida's house for two years. So there was, there's genuine support. There were photographs of them going on tourist trips in Mexico. This just kind of, you see these photographs like, oh my goodness, what a tourist party. I'm taking Leon Trotsky to see the sights

32:05in Mexico being led by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. But, you know, they traveled together. They did spend time together socially. They were very close friends. So I, I mean, all of these things can be true at the same time, but I think there was genuine attraction and affection. Now, I do want to return slightly to her status as an artist, because although she was fairly well known in her own lifetime, it's only very later on after her death that she does become this global superstar. But just to go back to the immediacy of her life, how connected was Frida Kahlo

32:38to the massive artistic and political movements of the 20th century that were taking place? Things like surrealism, Cubism, because, you know, she is becoming a painter during the 1930s. This is a very intense period where people like Picasso are working, Dali. And as we've mentioned, Andre Breton, who turns up in Mexico during the same period. Yeah, I guess, how aware was she of the international artistic movements of her day? Well, she grew up in a very cosmopolitan household with artistic influences. She had, as I mentioned, an education at one of Mexico's really at its premier high school. She was married to

33:13a man who had been artistically educated in Paris. So this is a woman who was aware of the currents going along, but she did not identify herself as a surrealist. She talked about painting her reality. But yes, she was very aware of what was going on artistically. And when she was in Paris, she was part of an exhibition of Mexican art and artifacts. Picasso thought she was fabulous. One of her paintings was bought by the French government. So she was seen as really important at the time by some of these really big figures.

33:45So she's rejecting the label of surrealism. She does not identify as a surrealist, but says, you know, she's painting her own reality. Do you think there's also a resistance as a Mexican artist fighting against that sort of European legacy in a way? Yes, I think so. And especially considering that part of the rejection of the Porfirio Diaz period, the pre-revolutionary period, was a rejection of the supremacy of French culture. I mean, the previous period that the revolution overthrew, they served the national banquet for

34:16the centenary of Mexico's independence. They served French food. So this real sense of kind of France as the epitome of global culture. And Frida Kahlo was very much a Mexican artist celebrating and finding inspiration in Mexico. And just in terms of her status as a Mexican artist, what kind of stars was she drawing upon? She was drawing on popular traditions. The Henry Ford Hospital, she painted on tin, which comes from a Mexican tradition of ex-voto paintings of retablos, where people

34:49would commission a painting to thank a saint or the Virgin Mary for interceding in a particular situation and saving their life. Her mother actually had one commissioned after her accident. So, you know, painting on tin, having the little banners on some of the paintings, that also comes from that tradition where there's like, as we mentioned, with a few small nips, there's a banner with that caption. So definitely the retablos, lots of pre-Columbian symbolism and objects in her paintings. She was also drawing on a tradition of Mexican 19th century portraiture. So if you look at

35:25Mexican portraits of the paintings, painted portraits of the 19th century, some of that sort of the way her face is set, some of that you can see kind of inspired there and 19th century photography as well. And there's a suggestion that her direct gaze to camera, her really determined and self-assured gaze at the viewer was her father's training as a photographer about how to look at the camera. When you look at photographs of her, she clearly has this ability just to immediately

35:57affect a pose and she has a very striking facial expression. Yes, she does. She clearly knew how to compose herself. May I make a small interjection on that one? Yeah, of course, please do. There is a doodle from when she was in high school where a bunch of friends basically signed, you know, little kid graffiti, teenage graffiti on a school object. And her doodle is the Frida Kahlo face with the monobrow. And, you know, she's a teenager at this point, but she's already got that Frida Kahlo face with the

36:28monobrow. Yeah. So she clearly had a very strong sense of herself from a very early age. She knew

Later Surgery and Torment

36:33who she was. Let's move on to the 1940s and the latter period of Frida Kahlo's life. What was she doing as an artist at that point? And how was her health bearing up? Her health was getting worse over the years. She was having further surgical interventions. I've seen different counts of how many surgeries she had over her lifetime, up to 32 I've seen, but lots and lots of surgeries. And she ended up getting part of her, the leg that had been affected by the polio amputated later in life.

37:05But she also had spinal surgery as well that she went to New York for, and it was quite traumatic. And she was unhappy with how the surgeons had performed. So later in life, she was dealing with more medical issues, which were long-term consequences of the accident when she was 18. And she was also relying more and more on medication and alcohol to deal with the pain. So it was a very, very challenging time for her. Do you think that torment is reflected in her paintings from this period? Are they taking on

37:37a different style, a different tone, or are they quite consistent with earlier artworks by Frida Kahlo? One of the consequences of the spinal surgery was she had to wear a corset, a sort of frame to keep herself steady for, I think it was eight months. And so she painted herself again in a desolate, barren, kind of dry earth background with part of the corset. And she's naked from the waist up and she's kind of cut open. And you can see that she literally has a broken column rather than

38:09a spine. And she's pierced with all sorts of nails. And she has tears coming down her face. So, you know, we can think about her trying to cope with the ongoing medical challenges she was facing and this sense of her limitations, the frustration of the pain and the physical limitations she was living with. I believe towards the end of her life, she became so frustrated by this agony that she lived with on a constant basis. That she famously wrote, I joyfully await the exit and I hope never to

38:41return. And I believe there's also been some suggestion that Frida Kahlo either took her own life or that she was assisted in that by Diego Rivera. Do we know much about the circumstances of those last days? Could you talk us through what happened to Frida at the end?

Final Days and State Funeral

38:56Yes, I've seen both of those suggestions. She certainly, if you look at the documentation, she anticipated her death. Let's put it that way. So for instance, she gave Diego Rivera, it was their wedding anniversary was about two weeks after she died. She gave him her present ahead of time because she felt like the end was coming. She has notations in her diary, something along the lines of, I hope the end is coming and the exit will be joyful. And the last entry in her diary is a painting of, when I say diary, it's not a dear diary today I did. It is an artistic kind of,

39:32a place she recorded fragmentary thoughts, poems, images, so all sorts of things over time. But the very last entry is a winged figure kind of going off into the distance. So yes, it certainly seems like she anticipated her death. And she also, you know, she had told many people how much pain she was in and how she wanted it to end. And do we know what the reaction to her death was in Mexico and more widely? Well, she lay in state at the Palace of Fine Arts in the centre of Mexico City for, I want to say

40:0836 hours. And a flag with a hammer and sickle was draped over her casket, which was a big scandal at the time. Maybe it was that Diego sat with her for 36 hours and she lay in state for two days. But in case she lay in state in this national monument and Diego sat with her overnight and mourners filed by, including really important political figures, presidents, past presidents, and then a crowd took her to be cremated. So she was sent off in grand and dramatic style and very much as a national treasure.

40:43You know, Mexico had lost a national treasure. I think it's also important to mention her last public appearance was protesting the US-backed overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arvind. So she was on a protest, she was carrying a placard, she was being wheeled by Diego Rivera. So her last public appearance was as a woman of the left protesting what she saw as the US's anti-democratic action.

Legacy and Mexicanness

41:11Then of course, following her death, she almost gets lost to history. But in decades following, she is subsequently rediscovered. And now Frida Kahlo's image seems everywhere in our modern culture. She is ubiquitous. Why do you think that is? What has happened where we've almost rediscovered Frida Kahlo and embraced her as this iconic figure of the last century, as one of the most important artists indeed of the history of art itself? She was never fully forgotten in Mexico. So art historians were quite interested in her and

41:41work was done on her. And in the 70s, there was a retrospective in 1973, 20 years after her death, an exhibition about her. Diego Rivera also donated the Casa Azul to the nation to be a museum dedicated to her. So she was never fully forgotten in Mexico, although popular culture continued to refer to her as Diego Rivera's wife. So there's that tension between Frida Kahlo, the artist, who the art historians were really focusing on. But kind of more widely, there were plays and, you know,

42:14articles would refer to her often as Diego Rivera's wife still. In the 1960s and 1970s, there started to be academic interest in her. The first biography written just about her, published in the 1970s in Mexico. She also became an icon for the Chicano art movement in the United States. The Mexican-American civil rights movement spawned a Mexican-American art movement, and she became one of the heroines. And she was also taken up by feminists, seen as this feminist icon in the 70s. And then one of the big

42:50moments, kind of the beginning of Freedomania, was the publication of Hayden Herrera's biography. So in 1983, Hayden Herrera published this kind of blockbuster biography of Frida Kahlo, which was translated and went around the world and really kind of dramatized her work and her art and her marriage. And it's a very kind of trying to understand her art through her personal life. And I think that's part of what appeals to people, is this sense of knowing the artist through her

43:21personal life. And I think that perhaps encourages that sense of equating the paintings quite simply to her biographical moments. I definitely think you've touched on something there, because there is an interesting contrast in the sense that Diego Rivera, who was obviously extremely well known in his day and age, his work, his murals tend to focus very much on a collectivist, massive, grand scale style, which appeals to mass audiences. Whereas Frida's work was obviously very intensely personal and almost tailor-made,

43:53I guess, for our more hyper-individualistic 21st century sensibilities in many respects. Maybe that's why she speaks to us today, do you think? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it also depends on the work, you know, because we've talked about some really challenging and difficult paintings she did, really challenging. And those are not the ones that end up on the tote bags. So the Frida Kahlo direct gaze, monobrow, little bit of a mustache, amazing hair, amazing jewelry, maybe a monkey on her shoulder. That, I think in some ways it's easier to get to grips with than some of her other paintings, her paintings about

44:27miscarriage, birth, suicide, death, you know. So I suppose what I'm getting at is that Frida Mania, I think sometimes looks at only a particular part of her art and we forget the breadth and complexity, including paintings that have a very nationalistic theme. I mean, we've talked a bit about how she didn't like the United States and there are some really interesting paintings juxtaposing the United States and Mexico and showing some of her discomfort with the United States. Yeah, I wondered actually, before we wrap up, whether you'd be comfortable talking about

44:57the inspiration or maybe the meaning behind her painting. Is it called Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States? I love that one. She does quite a few paintings where they're kind of half and half. So there's a contrast one side of the other. So in this painting, it is Frida Kahlo in the middle in this lovely pink, long, ruffly dress with three-quarter length gloves, smoking a cigarette, well, she's not smoking a cigarette, but she has a lit cigarette in her fingers, which also gives us a nice sense of Frida's transgressiveness. You know, still at this point for women, smoking

45:29was a bit transgressive. So she looks very demure, except for the cigarette. And then on the left side of the canvas, as you look at it, is Mexico, but it's pre-Columbian Mexico. It's dark, earthy tones. It's a pyramid. It's pre-Columbian artifacts. And it's vegetation growing into the ground. And we see the roots. She does this in a few paintings as well, where we see above and below ground together. So in this one, we see the roots of these plants. And if you follow them underground, they're connected. They become wires when they move to

46:02the other half of the painting, which is the United States. So the roots turn into wires. And then on the U.S. side, it's industrial, it's smokestacks, it's buildings, it's soulless. So she really sets Mexico up as ancient and timeless and literally rooted, and the United States as nothing but technology. If you think about Diego Rivera, who was painting the revolution onto walls, painting Mexican history onto walls, and kind of trying to create this sweep of narrative

46:37of Mexico visually, and make everything kind of fit together into who we are now in Mexican nationality. And Frida Kahlo not engaging to the same degree with kind of the Mexico around her, if that makes sense. So I've been struck by, you know, the way we talked about how she juxtaposes the United States and Mexico. But she could have painted industrialisation in Mexico. You know, she could have made that choice, and she doesn't. And I think that's interesting. We could analyse this painting to death, but it is fascinating. And I think, yeah,

47:10her visual language does feel, it does feel surreal. It's folkloric, and it's almost like she's branding. Do you think she anticipated that modern celebrity imagery, you know, that we now have today from fashion to album covers, and the idea that the artist's identity almost becomes part of the artwork itself? Yeah, I think so, in the way she cultivated her image. And we see her even when she was a teenager, kind of cultivating her image. I already mentioned that she did the little doodle, which anybody, you just show it to anybody, they'd know immediately that was a Frida Kahlo doodle. But there's a famous portrait of her family when she was about 18, and she was dressed in a man's suit.

47:46You know, everybody's looking very sort of traditional gender roles. And there she is in a man's suit, already starting to play around with identity and androgyny and, you know, challenging expectations and norms. And then we talked a bit about her time in the United States. But when she was in the United States, she was a source of kind of interest and inspiration to quite a few prominent photographers. And she appeared in Vogue. She was on the cover of Vogue in her lifetime. She appeared in Vogue in Mexico, in France, in the United States. So her personal image that she created

48:23was also something that was in circulation. You know, an image that we would recognise as Frida Kahlo was already in circulation in her lifetime. That leads me nicely on to my last question to you, Patience, which is when we separate the icon Frida Kahlo from the person, what do you think is the most important thing to understand about her life and her legacy? Her Mexicanness. I think, I mean, because we see her as this global icon. And of course, she is. But I think it's really important to recognise how much she was someone who was brought up and cared about the ideals of the

48:58Mexican Revolution and political causes, and wanted to further those political causes through some of her art. And that we have to recognise that the artistic language she spoke was so much rooted in Mexican traditions, artistic traditions, symbols. And yeah, I think sometimes we lose track of her as a Mexican artist. That was Professor Patience Schell speaking to Danny Bird. Patience is Chair of Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

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