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CHAPTER 1
Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico
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FRIDA KAHLO'S BIOGRAPHY describes her attitude toward marriage to Diego Rivera as progressing from blissfully bourgeois, to vengefully dishonest, and ultimately to comradely complacent. The chronology of her marriage coincides significantly with her development as an artist. When she was considered an adoring wife, her painting was presumed to be a hobby; disillusioned by marital infidelity, her creative work became a career; and concurrent with accepting the particularities of her relationship with Rivera, her painted production came to be considered a commemoration of their personal and political partnership. Kahlo's self-portraits generally are treated as autobiography, with the artist as author who "wrote" her life story with paint and brush. Thus some paintings are interpreted as shedding light on the emotional development of her marriage and the progression of her professional career. In this chapter, I assert that in postrevolutionary Mexico the social category of artist generally was a masculine one and that Kahlo crossed a gendered boundary between wife and artist. Interpretations of her paintings thereby inscribe gendered social prescriptions. The point of my analysis is not to contest biographic readings of Kahlo's paintings or to dispute the evolution of her marriage to Rivera but rather to examine how her autobiographical self-portraits offer a vehicle for critical insight into social/historical contexts in which Kahlo negotiated a role between the categories of wife and artist. I demonstrate where paradigmatic gendered boundaries alternately have been inscribed, resisted, and transgressed in interpretations of the paintings. And I consider the ways in which Kahlo's creative productions signify complex social mediations at the point of production as well as interpretation.
Frida and Diego Rivera (figure 1), produced in 1931 after two years of marriage, generally has been interpreted as a wedding portrait showing that Kahlo embraced the role of a nurturing wife who set up the household, cooked, and delivered Rivera's meals while he worked, sometimes around the clock, on large-scale commissioned mural paintings. Robin Richmond asserts that Kahlo painted infrequently just after the marriage because, as she traveled with Rivera, she focused on "being his decorative consort and learning how to cook." In her view, "Diego is the huge untameable [sic] bear of a painter, while she sees herself as the tiny-footed, docile dove, hardly able to contain his massive energy in her little hand." Rivera's "massive energy" can be considered literally to refer to his passionate drive to paint murals. Or it can be considered metaphorically to corroborate Hayden Herrera's contention that the double portrait foreshadows the nature of their relationship as Kahlo first grew intolerant of, then later assented to, his infidelity. Analyses of the composition presume to identify Kahlo's thoughts and propose that the artist intended to document her private emotions.
In her discussion of the 1931 painting, Herrera cites a statement that Kahlo made in a 1950 interview: "I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody's husband and never will be." Herrera suggests that the quotation is relevant to the painting in that Kahlo suspected Rivera's philanderous nature early in their marriage and accordingly portrayed the couple's hands "in the lightest possible grasp" to signify that Rivera was "unpossessable." Herrera proceeds, in her description of the painting, to compose character analyses of both husband and wife, arguing that because Kahlo placed the couple's hands in "the exact center of her wedding portrait," the painting indicates that the "pivot of Frida Kahlo's life was the marriage bond." Herrera thereby infers that the painting illustrates Kahlo's feelings toward Rivera and her marriage and that she narrowed her identity to a strictly domestic persona. Conversely, Herrera describes Rivera in association with his painting career, a significant public role: "As firmly planted as an oak, Rivera looks immense next to his bride. Turning away from her, he brandishes his palette and brushes — he is the great maestro. Frida ... cocks her head and reaches toward her monumental mate. She plays the role she liked best: the genius's adoring wife." Herrera's interpretation emphasizes the distinction between husband and wife. Rivera is active; he not merely holds but "brandishes" his palette and brushes. Kahlo is comparatively passive, her movement tentative or incomplete — she "cocks her head" and "reaches toward" rather than firmly looking and grabbing hold. Herrera's interpretation is saturated with gender stereotypes. Rivera is "the great maestro"; Kahlo is "the genius's adoring wife." Herrera also suggests that Kahlo "has given the general outline of herself and Diego the same shape as the initial carved on Diego's belt buckle — the letter D," insinuating that Kahlo metaphorically surrendered her individuality to sustain his. Herrera applies a masculine stereotype to characterize Rivera's self-promoted, exaggerated machismo in terms of both his profession and his libido, and she uses a feminine stereotype to ascribe a domestic role for Kahlo. However, in so doing, she contradicts her own account of Kahlo's overt challenges to prescribed feminine behavior.
Beginning in 1922, Rivera aggressively sought Mexican government commissions to execute large-scale murals. The mural program was initiated by minister of education José Vasconcelos, who championed having Mexico's history painted on the walls of public buildings as a means to teach an illiterate, uneducated labor force in urban Mexico. At first, numerous artists were employed; eighteen muralists secured commissions, and they, in turn, hired assistant painters and craftspeople. But the government program soon abated during the 1923–24 presidential campaign as politicians explicitly disassociated themselves from the communist philosophies that many muralists promoted. After the election, only Rivera continued to receive commissions. He became internationally acclaimed and was a veritable tourist attraction from 1923 to 1927, as he worked on the three-story patio walls of the Ministry of Public Education Building. Although political and critical debate over the artistic merit and content of his murals consistently grew, his commission was endorsed financially until the murals were completed. Word of his long work days and large-scale projects fed his mythic status as a powerful artist who literally devoted himself to producing art that championed national unity. He incorporated the precolonial past and indigenous peoples into a pictorial narrative of Mexico's history without backing down to political criticisms of his work. In addition to his artistic virility and political conviction, Rivera's reputation was based on his ruthless temper, competitive drive, and renowned womanizing. In short, he appeared to epitomize the stereotypes of masculine artist and Mexican machismo by being professionally ambitious, sexually aggressive, and politically outspoken. The binary relationship of husband and wife assigns women the opposite qualities, seeing them as passive, faithfully submissive, and domestic.
By Herrera's account, Kahlo did not embrace these feminine qualities. She was fiercely independent before her marriage to Rivera and had consciously resisted professional and sexual restrictions imposed on middle-class women by social prescription in Mexico. From 1922 to 1925, Kahlo was one of thirty-five women among the two thousand students enrolled in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and had plans to enter medical school at a time when women doctors were an anomaly. Martha Zamora reports, "Frida enjoyed flouting the rules, whether by a small transgression like wearing bobby socks, prohibited by the school dress code, or by a deviation as extreme as a sexual adventure with an older woman." According to accounts of the artist's adolescence, Kahlo had little concern for overarching middle-class social mores. As one of the Cachuchas, a small circle of serious students who gathered to debate academic and political issues, she demonstrated a "masculine" interest in national politics. And as an unmarried seventeen-year-old, she was intimately involved with the Cachuchas leader, Alejandro Gómez Arias. But her relationship and her academic pursuits were dramatically cut short in 1925 when she was critically injured in a near-fatal bus and trolley car collision. Her recuperation, slowed by misdiagnosis, began with nine bed-ridden months that foreclosed her scholastic opportunities as medical treatment for her injuries put the family in serious financial debt. While recovering she painted small portraits of friends and family members, some of which she showed to Rivera in 1928, seeking his advice. By then, Rivera was the sole government-sponsored muralist, and Kahlo's initial conversation with him was an inquiry as to whether, in his opinion, she had sufficient talent to become a successful artist. While the scale and subject of the paintings that Kahlo showed to Rivera were the antithesis of the muralist's enormous compositions depicting historical, political events, it was well known that Rivera employed several painters to assist in various aspects of his mural production. So Kahlo's skill might have gotten her a job that would have helped diminish the family's debt incurred by her medical treatment. Rivera did not hire Kahlo, but he did help her to secure a teaching job. Their relationship quickly became intimate, and they married the following year.
Herrera's interpretation of Frida and Diego Rivera implies that Kahlo's marriage profoundly affected her character, causing her to abandon professional aspirations and restricting herself to the repressive social expectations of a devoted wife. Indeed, her marriage unquestionably curtailed a teaching career, and her entire family was economically obligated to Rivera. After their 1929 marriage, Rivera paid Kahlo's outstanding medical bills and the mortgage her parents had taken on their house in order to pay their daughter's initial hospital costs. The following year, Kahlo urged her father, "feel free to let me know if you need some money." Thus Rivera's professional success was crucial for sustaining the middle-class lifestyle of Kahlo's entire family. While his mural commissions continued steadily, the salary offered by the Mexican government did not compare to proposals that Rivera began to receive from patrons in the United States. So within four months after their marriage, Rivera and Kahlo moved to Cuernavaca where Rivera produced murals for the Palacio de Cortés through a contract with the U.S. ambassador, Dwight Morrow. Rivera subsequently secured commissions from the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. The couple lived in California for seven months until June 1931 when they returned to Mexico. After their six months in Mexico, Rivera received commissions in Detroit and then New York. They finally returned to live in Mexico in 1933. Clearly, in the first years of their marriage, Kahlo did not pursue employment opportunities as she accompanied Rivera from one mural site to another. She postponed and ultimately declined a teaching appointment by the Department of Fine Arts in Mexico City. This does not necessarily mean that she abandoned professional aspirations in favor of domestic endeavors, but, as numerous interpretation of Frida and Diego Rivera indicate, the double portrait does appear to support Claudia Schaefer's assessment of women's presumed artistic roles in postrevolutionary Mexico:
[W]omen were expected to maintain their artistic interests at the level of a trivial, private hobby or to dedicate themselves to the 'contemptible' objects of popular culture. Art as a professional occupation and a medium of exchange value was for men; women were relegated to art (craft?) as a domestic pastime. Perfect subjects for women to portray were, of course, what they 'know best': children and the home.
According to Andrea Kettenmann's assessment of the painting, if Kahlo aspired to a painting profession, she "clearly did not yet have the courage to portray her own self as an artist." In other words, Kettenmann's interpretation of Kahlo's painting epitomizes the social context Schaefer described by implying that her role as wife subsumed the artistic endeavors initiated before her marriage. Based on published descriptions of the painting, Kahlo's marital status, and Schaefer's characterization of women's art, it is reasonable to conclude that Kahlo registered prescribed gender roles. But that is not to say that she restricted herself to them. In their study of women writers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar investigate ways in which women authors (or artists) use a double code — one that abides by the dominant social order and one that uses the same language but subverts social prescription. Women authors, they argue, "both express and camouflage" strategies in which "surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning." Considering Kahlo's social rebelliousness before her marriage, her academic goals cut off by injury, and her professional pursuits precluded by her husband's career, the painting, suspiciously, seems to abide by repressive principles. It is extreme in how thoroughly it portrays binary masculine and feminine character traits, suggesting that the subject of the painting is not "Frida and Diego Rivera" (indeed Kahlo did not even call herself Frida Rivera). Rather the painting depicts the artist and her husband in order to produce a painting about binary definition of gendered social positions.
The inscription on the ribbon along the top of the composition begins with a seemingly benign identification, "Aqui nos veis, a mi Frieda Kahlo, junto con mi amado esposo" (Here you see us, me Frieda Kahlo, with my beloved husband Diego Rivera), which prompts reading the painting as a marriage. But the subsequent statement, beginning with "pinté estos retratos" ("I painted these portraits"), emphasizes Kahlo as producer, clarifying that while "here you see us," it is "me Frida Kahlo" who has created this double portrait. Contrary to Kettenmann's suggestion that Kahlo did not yet have the self-confidence to present herself as an artist, Kahlo stresses in words rather than visual illustration that she is an artist and that she created this portrait of herself with her husband. The text continues: "pinté estos retratos en la bella ciudad de San Francisco para nuestro amigo Mr. Albert Bender, y fué en el mes de abril del año 1931"(I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco California for our friend Mr. Albert Bender, and it was in the month of April in the year 1931). Naming Albert Bender, an art collector, transforms the painting from merely a domestic portrait to a commissioned work of art, implicitly classifying Kahlo as a professional, paid artist rather than a housewife dallying away her time with a trivial hobby. She may indeed portray "what she knows best"; however, it is not the bliss of domesticity but the binary distinction between masculinity and femininity that assumes women's omission from professional occupations.
The self-proclamation of the ribbon's inscription corresponds with visual features alluding to entrenched gender stereotypes. Thus the painting exemplifies Gilbert and Gubar's argument that women use dominant language illustrating social prescription at the same time that they critique or subvert it. Rivera's brushes and palette allude to his activities outside the composition and thus outside the marriage. In contrast, Kahlo bears no accoutrements that refer to a social role outside of the composition. But her red shawl stands out, in distinct color contrast to the rest of the painting, which shows an ambiguous interior with light green backdrop and dark, olive green floor. Kahlo's dress, hair ribbons, necklace, and shoes are also green, linking her with the interior. Rivera's blue suit and shirt are similar in tone and value and blend into the backdrop. In terms of palette, Kahlo's bright red shawl, the small red flowers on her shoes, and the minute red dots on the ribbon in her hair deviate from the overall blue-green hues. As a complementary color, her shawl and the accents on her ribbon and shoes are defined by their contrasting color in the same way that the classic male/female dichotomy defines one gender by what it is not. On one hand, her role as woman (wife) is defined by its contrast to the role of man (artist). Hue, tone and accoutrements thereby emphasize that while Rivera is designated by his active, social role outside of his relationship to Kahlo, she is distinguished only by her marital association, the male/female relationship that reserves a creative, public role for the husband. However, because her red shawl distinguishes Kahlo from the rest of the composition, it delineates an ambiguous category apart from her domestic identity as wife to Diego Rivera. And in this enigmatic place, Kahlo proclaims herself a professional artist. Thus her painting is not merely a biographic illustration but also is a social/historical marker indicating the context in which she tacitly proclaimed "I am a painter and I am married to Diego Rivera." The restrictive characterization "Frida, wife of Diego Rivera," is implicit in interpretations of the painting and alludes to an unspoken resistance against classifying any woman as a professional artist, an active, virile, masculine role in Mexican as well as the European art history canons. The depicted personae of Frida and Diego Rivera reflect this restriction, but the painting also incorporates personal, historical information relevant to her complex, contradictory roles of wife and artist.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Devouring Frida"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Margaret A. Lindauer.
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