When they married, her family described it bitterly as the union of "an elephant and a dove". At the end, he held her hand and sang her lullabies. In between, he was the merciless husband whose childishness, untidiness, uncouth habits and jealous rages pushed her close to madness, even while he remained her greatest champion and supporter.
Diego Rivera said it best in his autobiography: "If I ever loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait."
More than a decade after my last visit to Mexico, I was still struggling to make sense of their love. For years, my partner had been inspired by Frida Kahlo’s style above all others. She wanted to discover how Kahlo’s Indian peasant chic look had been formed, and to understand Rivera’s influence on her art.
To discover what made the couple persevere when they spent so much of the time tearing each other apart, and to find out where those dresses came from, we headed to Mexico. We weren’t looking for relationship advice, but hoped to uncover some sense behind the suffering.
We traced Kahlo and Rivera’s twisted love through the Mexico City locations that defined their lives. The haunting Casa Azul in Coyoacan, where Frida was born and died; their shared home and studio in San Angel, where Diego committed many of his affairs and died alone and heartbroken; plus Anahuacalli, the megalomaniacal monument to art and love where he hoped to entomb them both.
Who was Frida Kahlo? How much of her identity did she shape, and how much was shaped by her overbearing husband? She never considered herself a public painter in her lifetime, but since the 1980s, and particularly since the huge success of the 2002 Salma Hayek-starring biopic, Frida, she has emerged as Mexico’s best-known artist, her status far outstripping Rivera’s, whose appeal has dwindled as audiences digest his monstrous reputation as a compulsive womaniser.
A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP
Theirs was a peculiar love that gave birth to some of the 20th century’s most powerful, memorable art, but no children. One of the great creative partnerships of all time, their relationship juxtaposed passion, pain, obsession, jealously, betrayal, marriage, divorce and remarriage. Rivera treated Kahlo disgustingly, cheating on her throughout their life together, most horribly with her own sister. Eventually she returned the favour with a string of affairs, most famously with the èmigrè Soviet communist Leon Trotsky. They shared at least four lovers. Kahlo, physically fragile after a childhood brush with polio and a terrible teenage bus accident, found her psyche under continual attack by her domineering, self-obsessed husband, and she attempted suicide several times. Revisiting the scenes of these events decades later, the air fizzes with tension.
The beautiful blue house at the corner of Calles de Londres and Allende is the focal point of any Kahlo-focused Mexico pilgrimage. Behind cobalt walls painted to ward off misfortune, the lush, verdant interior garden of the Casa Azul remains as tranquilo as it was when Kahlo picked flowers to braid her hair; the noisy chatter of pet spider monkeys and hairless itzcuintli dogs replaced by the hushed whispers of reverential devotees. The interior is a shrine to Kahlo’s suffering, with wheelchairs, casts, corsets and a huge collection of medical books revealing her perverse pride in her own pain. We share the corridors with aficionados, drawn here by a desire to connect with a spirit that still lingers in the rooms where Kahlo spent so much of her life.
Behind a dusty cactus fence in nearby San Angel, two functional studio cubes – sky blue for Kahlo and blood red for Rivera – reveal little of the pain and anguish acted out within their walls, although the flight of connecting steps suspended in mid-air is a metaphor for the fragility of their relationship. There are few other visitors here. The windows are sealed; the heat and mood oppressive.
Born in Guanajuato on December 8, 1886, Diego Rivera was already an accomplished, internationally recognised artist when he first met Kahlo, 20 years his junior. He had lived for a decade in Europe, had been married twice and had sired three children. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderûn was born on July 6, 1907, the daughter of a German-Jewish father and a Spanish-Mexican mother. Breastfed by an Indian wet-nurse, she was left partly crippled by childhood polio and became a target for playground bullying.
Kahlo and Rivera married on August 21, 1929. He was 42, she just 22. In the gaily posed wedding photographs on the walls of the Casa Azul, his attraction is obvious and easily explainable: Kahlo is full of joie de vivre and youthful vigour. She may have been pregnant, too; she soon had the first of many tragic abortions. Kahlo was doomed to a life with a baby 100 kilograms heavier than she, the gigantic husband her old school friends had dubbed "the pot-bellied, filthy old man". As our fellow visitors mocked Diego’s outlandish wedding Stetson, I sense a spark of Kahlo’s affection.
CREATING A NEW IDENTITY
Was Kahlo’s iconic image her own invention? Certainly Rivera bought her Indian dresses and she wore them to please him, although reluctantly at first. But what started as fancy dress soon became an integral part of her identity. Inspired by Rivera’s metamorphosis into political painter while working on a powerful anti-colonial mural at the Palace of Cortes, Kahlo began for the first time to wear the dress of the matriarchal Tehuana Indians as a celebration of her Mexican heritage.
Disappointingly, nowhere do we uncover any deeper insight into her motivations. If anything, Mexico seems embarrassed by the international profile of its most famous daughter. Rivera’s works outnumber hers in every museum we visit, and in several the Kahlo rooms are closed. Is her fierce feminine identity a source of national pride? Or embarrassment?
In November 1930, Kahlo and Rivera headed for San Francisco. They spent the next three years in the country Kahlo dubbed ‘Gringolandia’. Rivera loved California; Kahlo, still grieving for her lost child and struggling with a sore back and foot, was less settled. Rivera began an open affair with the tennis champion Helen Wills Moody, who drove him around town perched in her tiny open-top sports car. Kahlo sought solace with the dashing Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, whose stunningly intimate series of Kahlo portraits betray his infatuation. She was careful to keep her affairs secret.
From San Francisco, the couple moved to Detroit via New York. In Motor City, Rivera spent a month in the Ford plant sketching and researching, then took to painting through the night. Kahlo had an agonising miscarriage, then sketched her dead foetus, a study for the most painful self-portrait she ever painted: Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed). Inspired by her pain, she began to develop the fiercely confrontational style of self-portraiture that would thrust her to international attention. Today, the sketches draw audible gasps, shudders and tears in the Casa Azul: these are among the most brutally revelatory of works by the 20th century’s most excruciatingly honest of artists.
In the aftermath of the debacle that followed Diego’s dismissal from the fresco he was painting at the Rockefeller Center – he had refused to remove an unauthorised depiction of Lenin – the couple’s relationship deteriorated sharply because of Kahlo’s intense desire to return to Mexico.
Everything worsened on their return. Moving into the pair of houses he commissioned for them in San Angel, Rivera became depressed and sought comfort in the arms of Kahlo’s sister Cristina, an unforgivable betrayal. Once she recovered from the brutal shock, Kahlo decided she too would enjoy the same sexual licence as her husband. She discarded her Indian attire, cut her hair short and began affairs with painter Ignacio Aguirre and Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Rivera threatened to kill Noguchi, at one point chasing him over the roof of the Casa Azul.
The Riveras put on a show of hosting notable communist Leon Trotsky, who fell in love with Kahlo. Rivera, discovering this affair, was apocalyptic. Shortly afterwards, they divorced. Kahlo gradually rebuilt her life through painting. My Grandparents, My Parents and I, a portrait of the artist and her immediate ancestors, shows her standing within the security of the Casa Azul’s garden, the beloved house of her childhood. There are no monsters here, no Rivera.
TOGETHER AGAIN
Over time, the wounds healed and the couple reached such a rapprochement that they remarried. Rivera built his pre-Columbian folly Anahuacalli, planning to inter himself, Frida and their collection of Aztec idols. As we enter the oppressive mausoleum-like edifice, the immense black volcanic rock structure feels as if it could close up at any moment. But after Kahlo died, in November 1954, Rivera was denied his wish to bury her ashes. When his heart failed after a stroke in November 1957, the Mexican political establishment gave him a state funeral and interred him in the national Rotunda of Illustrious Men.
Towards the end of their lives, Kahlo’s sense of a shared, common imagination with Rivera came to dominate her work. She painted a series of self-portraits featuring him, one as a monstrous baby, another with his face imprinted on her forehead. He wrote that she "crystallises in herself... everything that there is in the world, that interests me, that I love, and that gives any sense of why I live and struggle". She expressed the same, differently: "Diego, my child. Diego, my mother. Diego, my father. Diego, I."
She painted her own reality; the tortured body, lost babies, steel corsets, endless hospital visits and marital agony. Pain and suffering, occasional happiness and joy, all on view in Mexico City today if you decide to retrace the brutal, fragile footsteps of the elephant and the dove.
FIVE MUST-SEES
1. Museo Frida Kahlo, Londres 247, Coyoacan.
Open 10-6, Tue-Sun.
Strolling through the jacaranda-lined streets, elegantly clad hipsters shoot conspiratorial nods. We are heading to the same altar at the church of Frida Kahlo, the Casa Azul. Once inside, we are awed into silence. Here is the room where Kahlo was born. Here is the bed where she died. Here is the portrait of Stalin she left, unfinished, on the easel. Here are the mirrors on the ceiling she gazed at as she bared her agonies to the world. Outside again, the sun feels duller.
2. Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, Av Altavista, San Angel.
Open 10-6, Tue-Sun.
It seems incredible a man as immense as Rivera could have lived in this minimalist structure. His section of the house is topped with a studio, crammed with canvases, brushes and collectables. Kahlo’s adjoining wing, reached via a precarious, handrail-free outside staircase, is more prison than studio, which may have been the way Rivera liked it. Only on the roof do we find escape from the sense that terrible things happened here.
3. Anahuacalli, Calle del Museo, Coyoacan.
Open 10-6, Tue-Sun.
So far off the beaten track the staff are surprised to see us, Rivera’s zany folly is a wildly conceived monument to eternal love that the fates decreed he was never allowed to enjoy. Inside the ghostly Aztec-temple-inspired interior, thousands of pre-Hispanic figurines reveal all aspects of pre-contact life: sex, sacrifice, ceremony, death. In the cavernous interior, we find ourselves spooked to be alone with the work of so many ancient hands. Kahlo hated it here. She had a lucky escape.
4. Mexico Through the Centuries, Palacio Nacional, Plaza de la Constitucion.
Open 9-5, take ID.
Few art historians question Rivera’s status as the greatest muralist since Michelangelo. Climbing the staircase of the Palacio Nacional, we are greeted by Rivera’s vast portrait of Mexico’s complex history. Outside, the Zocalo is packed with mothers lamenting the loss of their sons to the guerra de las drogas (war on drugs). Look out for Kahlo, relegated behind her sister and her sister’s children. Even here
Rivera assumes control.
5. Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, Museo Mural
Diego Rivera, Calle Balderas.
Open 10-6, Tue-Sun.
We visit on a Sunday, with the Alameda gardens outside thronged with gaily carousing families and spectators huddled around chess matches. Inside, Rivera’s vast masterpiece depicts a Mexico not dissimilar from the one we have stepped from. He is at the centre as a small boy, trustingly holding the hand of a caricature of Death, with Kahlo’s protective hand on his shoulder. Did he deserve such love?
FRIDA’S FASHION
Although it was Diego Rivera who first encouraged Frida Kahlo to dress in traditional Mexican attire, Kahlo came to embrace these bright garments as part of her indigenous identity. Kahlo was often seen in huipiles made by the fiercely independent Zapotec women from South Mexico. The labour-intensive tunics are woven on backstrap looms and extravagantly embroidered. According to the book Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress, huipiles often incorporate ‘astral and cosmic symbols intermixed with the myths of creation.. placing the woman at the centre of the universe as a transmitter of history and a fertility emblem’. Kahlo didn’t confine herself to Zapotec attire; her wardrobe drew from a diverse mix of Mexican and Guatemalan ethnic groups. Interestingly, Kahlo’s long, flowing skirts were worn as much for practical reasons as for fashion – enabling her
to cover, as she called it, her ‘sick’ right leg.
