Supreme art is
a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
The Fat Frog at Her Side
The destiny of a woman painter
Diego. Beginning
Diego. Builder
Diego, my child
Diego, my bridegroom
Diego. Painter
Diego, my lover
Diego, my husband
Diego, my friend
Diego, my father
Diego, my mother
Diego, my son
Diego. I
Diego. Universe.
Diversity in unity.
Why do I call him my Diego?
He never was, nor will he ever be, mine.
He is his own.
Frida Kahlo, from a diary entry
The Mexican painter
Diego Rivera
was working on a mural when a
gifted young painter came by to show him some of her work. The
twenty-one-year-old
Frieda Kahlo (who later changed the spelling of her
name to Frida) was of multicultural descent, with a German father and a
Mexican mother. She wanted to know what
Rivera thought of her work. A
friend of
Pablo Picasso's,
Rivera had lived in Paris (1911—192т) and later
returned to Mexico, becoming one the most important artists of the Social
Realist movement. He told Kahlo that he found her work to be expressive,
sensuous and of a style distinctly her own.
Rivera later said that it was
immediately obvious to him that this woman was exceptionally talented. He
advised her to continue painting and visited her frequently. They fell in
love. In 1929
Kahlo married
Rivera, who was twenty-one years her senior.
The "delicate dove and fat frog" were now a pair although their life
together was tempestuous. The first strains of their marriage became
apparent during a three-year stay in the United States.
Rivera was
fascinated by the country and its people but Kahlo soon had enough of the
Americans. After their return to Mexico,
Rivera engaged in several
extramarital affairs. In 1935 he fell in love with Kahlo's sister
Cristina, who had been his model for two murals. Deeply hurt, Kahlo left Rivera, revenging herself on him by having affairs of her own with men
and women. In 1939
Kahlo and
Rivera divorced. However, they were still
drawn to each other and remarried a year later in San Francisco.
The way Kahlo remembered her first wedding
is captured in Frieda and Diego Rivera. All her paintings similarly reflect the events
of her stormy life, which was overshadowed not only by her unhappy
marriage.
Kahlo was dogged by ill health all her life. In 1913 polio left her with a
crippled right foot which later had to be amputated. In 1925 fate struck
again when she was riding a bus that collided with a tram and Kahlo
sustained serious injuries to her lower abdomen and spine, forcing her to
wear a corrective corset. These illnesses and misfortunes wore heavily upon
her and she made her own psychological and physical pain the subject of
many of her works. Stylistically she was influenced by Mexican folk art,
particularly votive paintings. While she was a professor at the La
Esmeralda Art School, she talked more about personal feelings than about
art with her students. With her health declining rapidly, she wanted to
commit suicide — "only Diego keeps me from doing it". Kahlo died a week
after her forty-seventh birthday and her last diary entry reads: "I await
the end joyfully. And I hope never to return."
see also:
Frida Kahlo"Frida -
The Life in Self-Portraits"
