LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out: Who was Frida Kahlo? |
by Paula Martinac |
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo received little recognition during her life-except as the wife of the famous muralist Diego Rivera. Today, however, the surreal self-portraits of the openly bisexual, cross-dressing Kahlo bring millions of dollars at auction, and her brief, often painful life is the subject of two upcoming movies. From early on, Kahlo (who was of mixed German, Jewish, and Mexican ancestry) had a queer side. As a girl, she had often "dressed like a boy, with shaved hair, pants, boots, and a leather jacket," she later recalled. In one photograph of her at 19, Kahlo posed wearing a three-piece suit and tie and assuming the confident stance of a young man. Kahlo's young life was also marked by intense physical suffering. As a small child, she contracted polio, which deformed her left leg. At 18, she was in a near-fatal accident in which the bus she was riding collided with a trolley. She spent many months in a body cast and had to undergo numerous operations to try to alleviate her pain. During her long recuperation, she taught herself to paint. Her mother hired a carpenter to make a special easel for Kahlo's bed and fit the canopy with a mirror so she could paint herself. Thus began her long career in self-portraiture; as she later said, "I painted my own reality." After a recovery that lasted several years, Kahlo began consorting with a group of progressive intellectuals and artists, including Diego Rivera, who was 20 years her senior. What began as a mentoring relationship quickly developed into a personal one, and the two were married in 1929. Although they supported and complemented each other artistically, the marriage brought Kahlo emotional anguish on top of physical pain, reflected in the violent themes of her paintings from this time. Very shortly after they married, Rivera began having affairs with other women, including Kahlo's younger sister. Kahlo and Rivera were estranged several times, and she eventually began having extramarital relationships, too. Although Kahlo didn't keep her bisexuality a secret, the names of her female lovers are now more conjecture than a matter of record. She most likely had an affair with Mexican-born actress Dolores Del Rio, star of Flying Down to Rio and other popular Hollywood films. Kahlo presented one of her paintings, Two Nudes in the Forest (1939), a tender depiction of two female lovers, as a gift to Del Rio. Other women linked romantically to Kahlo are Mexican actress Maria Felix and American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Although her greatest paintings were produced in the '30s and '40s, Kahlo received very little recognition during her lifetime, perhaps because her often violent and disturbing themes were atypical of women's work. She did not get a show of her own until 1953 in Mexico City. Because of her health problems, she arrived at the show in an ambulance and was carried into the gallery on a stretcher. Kahlo died the following year at 47 in the same house where she was born (now the Museo Frida Kahlo) in a suburb of Mexico City. The official cause was a clot in one of the arteries leading to her heart, but some scholars have conjectured from reading her diary and studying her last drawings that she intentionally overdosed. In 1984, after she had become an international feminist icon, the Mexican government officially recognized her as one of that country's greatest artists. Paula Martinac is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites. She can be reached care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at POcolumn@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 12, No. 08, June 28, 2002. |