During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was overshadowed as an artist by the provocative, heroic, fiercely left-wing and hugely controversial work of her husband, Diego Rivera. But now the tables are turned. Rivera’s epic Mexican murals have lost their polemical sting, whereas Kahlo’s small-scale paintings are increasingly admired. Her exhibition at Tate Modern next month will be a revelation to many. And Kahlo’s achievement becomes even more astonishing when we realise how hard she battled against the fragility of her own broken body.
Her childhood was blighted by the onset of polio, permanently afflicting her right leg. But a far greater ordeal began when, at the age of 18, she sustained serious injuries in a traffic accident. The year was 1925, and a street car collided with Kahlo’s school bus. For the rest of her life she struggled to sustain a body made desperately frail by extensive fractures in her spine, a shattered pelvis and a broken foot that was eventually amputated. Her parlous state of health could hardly have been further removed from the robust wholeness of the nude women painted by Rivera in his frescoes.
Kahlo once wryly commented that “I hold the record for operations”, and in 1932 she suffered a dangerous miscarriage in Detroit. At the time, her tireless husband was engaged on a mural scheme for the city’s Institute of Arts, filling the walls of the garden court with images of activity in factories and Ford automobile assembly plants. Kahlo was confined to a bed at the Henry Ford Hospital, and she soon gave its name to a poignant little painting of her travail.
Executed in a blend of Surrealism and Mexican folk art that she made her own, the panel shows the weeping Kahlo holding her still-swollen stomach. The industrialised world of Detroit is relegated to a skyline, but its uninhabited sterility contributes to the mood of a picture filled with references to loneliness and loss. The bereaved woman confronts her predicament in solitude, while the ghost of the doomed foetus hangs in space above a hospital bed.
Between 1925 and her death almost three decades later, Kahlo endured about 30 operations. Many of her paintings were executed in hospital, focusing on images of her agony, and dreams about miraculous recovery. In some respects, painting was an intense form of therapy, enabling her to triumph over suffering that might have become unendurable. Until the Surrealist leader André Breton encouraged her to exhibit these images, Kahlo worked for herself. She was fortified not only by the satisfaction they gave her, but also by her love of the popular ex-voto paintings that Mexicans hung in church as a thank-offering for surviving mishap or serious illness.
Kahlo collected these ex-voto images, executed on tin in great quantities during the 19th century especially, and displayed them in her native home, the distinctive “Blue House”. They offered her immense consolation, and a painting of her own called Marxism Can Cure the Sick adopted the ex-voto format. In place of the saint, god or virgin found at the top of the traditional thank-offering picture, Kahlo placed the bearded face of Karl Marx. Below, the centre of the picture is dominated by the artist casting her crutches aside.
Such hopeful images are rare in Kahlo’s confessional, fear-haunted art. The “weeping virgin” picture hanging above the bed in a tragic little painting called Childbirth cannot save the mother and baby, who both appear to have died on the blood-stained sheet. The woman, resembling Kahlo, who sleeps in a picture called The Dream, is obsessed by the skeletal apparition reclining on top of her bed, festooned with explosives that might at any instant blow himself and the artist to oblivion. Kahlo was preoccupied with the feeling that her existence might be threatened by imminent collapse.
She conveyed this presentiment with the greatest intensity in a harrowing image called The Broken Column. Here, the bands encircling the artist’s torso have not prevented a wide fissure from splitting her body from neck to navel. The darkness within contains a solitary classical column, propping up her proud head with an ionic order just beneath her chin. The column is cracked in several places, however. Kahlo’s feeling that the fundamental structure of her being was fatally undermined is here given unforgettable expression. Tears spatter her cheeks as she struggles to withstand the agony inflicted by the shattered spinal column and the harsh nails piercing her flesh, like reminders of Christ’s mortification on the Cross.
Kahlo’s dependence on her doctor’s advice, and on medical advances that might help in the battle against pain, was a central reality in her life. By 1950, her health had declined so severely that she was obliged, after discovering four toes on her right foot were black on the ends, to spend a year at the English Hospital in Mexico City. Here she underwent a traumatic sequence of seven operations on her spine. The anguish she endured, especially when advised to submit to amputation, was harrowing. “They are driving me crazy and making me desperate,” she wrote to her friend and medical adviser, Dr Eloesser. “What should I do? It is as if I am being turned into an idiot and I am very tired of this f****** foot and I would like to be painting and not worrying about so many problems. But, it can’t be helped, I have to be miserable until the situation is resolved.”
On the whole, Kahlo kept the misery to herself. Matilde, her sister, described how “she has been through a real Calvary”, especially when her spine developed an abscess after an operation. Matilde reported that, after “they operated for a second time”, her corset became “as dirty as a pigsty since she is secreting through her back; it smells like a dead dog and these ‘senores’ say that the wound is not closing”. Kahlo, however, was admired by the nurses for her gaiety. “She never complained,” wrote Dr Velasco y Polo. “She stood it all a little bit à la Mexicana, suffering, but without protesting.” When Kahlo felt well enough, she staged exuberant puppet shows with her feet. Visiting relatives and friends would be invited to peer through a hole in her plaster cast at the festering wound. She once showed her defiance by announcing, after the arrival of a bone taken from a corpse, that “I feel like shooting my way out of this hospital and starting my own revolution”.
Above all, Kahlo retained her sanity by transforming her hospital room into an artist’s haven. Festooned with coloured candelabra symbolising the tree of life, and wax doves with paper wings heralding the advent of peace, her surroundings were instrumental in helping to raise her spirits. She laughed at death by decorating the room with skulls made of candy; a photograph shows her clutching a sugar skull with her name inscribed on it. She ensured that pots of paint and brushes in a jar sat expectantly on her bedside table. When doctors insisted her paints were taken away, Kahlo resorted to decorating her plaster corset with lipstick and iodine. She encouraged visitors to festoon the grim surfaces of other corsets with life-affirming photographs, feathers, pebbles and mirrors.
Kahlo was indomitable. Even after enduring six operations, she felt energetic enough to ask the doctors’ permission for an easel to be fixed to her hospital bed. With its help, she discovered how to paint in a sustained manner for several hours a day. Juan Guzman took a moving photograph of her at work on an ambitious, formal painting called The Kahlo Family Portrait. Commenced several years before and left incomplete, it assembles the artist’s relatives in a region divided between earth and sky. Portraying these solemn ranks of siblings, parents and remote forebears must have given her consolation at a time when she knew that her own health was disintegrating irrevocably. The ability to work sustained her, and she succeeded in adding her sisters, niece and nephew to the pictorial ensemble. “When I leave the hospital two months from now,” Kahlo declared, “there are three things I want to do: paint, paint, paint.”
Before going home, however, she insisted on dispensing hilarity and irreverence to everyone who came across her. Noticing one day that Dr Velasco y Polo was accompanied by an attractive young woman, Kahlo exclaimed: “Lend her to me! I’ll smoke that one myself!” Recalling with affection the artist’s feistiness, the same doctor described how Kahlo “liked to talk about medicine, politics, her father, Diego, sex, free love, the evils of Catholicism”. Above all, visitors cherished her willingness to empathise with them. Even when emerging from anaesthesia after an operation, she delighted in the company of friends and asked them about their own afflictions.
Sometimes Kahlo would cry when people told her their problems. “She did not concentrate on herself,” remembered Fanny Rabel. “One did not feel her miseries and conflicts when one was with her. She was full of interest in others and in the outside world. She would say, ‘Tell me things. Tell me about your childhood.’” Young visitors fascinated Kahlo. She allowed an Indian boy called Vidal Nicolas to stand and watch her paint. Although he was only nine, Kahlo became convinced that the boy would become an outstanding artist. “He has great talent,” she said, “and I am going to pay for all his education and send him to the San Carlos Academy.”
Sadly, she did not live long enough to discover if her prediction was correct. But in 1951, three years before her death at the age of 47, Kahlo managed to paint a tribute to the man who had carried out these operations. Dr Juan Farill was among the most outstanding Mexican surgeons of his period. He combined orthopaedic expertise with a concern for impoverished children. If their parents could not afford the treatment at the special hospital he had founded, Dr Farill would waive their fees. Kahlo trusted him completely, calling him “chulito” (cutie) and always obeying his instructions.
She conveyed the full extent of her regard for his care in Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Dr Farill. Convalescing at home after a sequence of bone grafts on her spinal column, the artist is confined to a wheelchair and clutches a bundle of brushes dripping blood on to her white smock. Dr Farill is not personally present in the bare room. Kahlo appears reserved, but her dependence on Dr Farill is apparent, largely through the strange disparity in scale between her tiny head and his larger features in the portrait on the easel.
Filling this canvas with the grandeur of a political leader’s face displayed on a building, Farill exudes a calm authority. He could almost be a holy presence, and Kahlo may have thought of this painting as an ex-voto offering to her saviour. Although her manner may seem distant, an affection for the doctor is announced by the heart-shaped palette held in her fingers. The form of a real heart is painted on the palette’s surface in all its anatomical detail. As well as suggesting that Kahlo paints “from the heart”, this disquieting image seems to be reminding Dr Farill that her survival depends on the care and expertise he bestowed on her.
“Dr Farill saved me,” Kahlo wrote in her diary. “He gave me back the joy of life. I am still in a wheelchair and I do not know if soon I will be able to walk again. I have a plaster cast, which, in spite of being a frightful bore, helps my spine feel better. I do not have pains. Only a weariness… and as is natural, often desperation. A desperation that no words can describe. Nevertheless, I want to live.” Not even Farill could enable Kahlo to reach her half-century. But the paintings remain, testifying to the courage, resolve and originality of a woman whose true stature is recognised at last.
Frida Kahlo, sponsored by HSBC with support from the Mexico Tourism Board, is at Tate Modern from June 9 to September 9. Four paperbacks of Richard Cork’s writings on modern art are published by Yale.
