Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera
On July 23, 1935, from her hotel in New York City, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo wrote to her husband, the great mural painter, Diego Rivera. The letter, extracted here, was one of the most direct and realistic letters of her life, penned during one of the many separations that peppered their tempestuous marriage. What drove her away this time was her discovery that Rivera had had an affair with her younger sister, Christina. Frida's resentment waned, however. In its wake, she seems to have decided that there was a context of mutual love in which she could understand, or at least forgive, his frequent philandering.
July 23, 1935
[I know now that] all those letters, liaisons with petticoats, lady teachers of "English", gypsy models, assistants with "good intentions", "plenipotentiary emissaries from distant places", only represent flirtations, and that at bottom you and I love each other dearly, and thus go through adventures without number, beatings on doors, imprecations, insults, international claims--yet we will always love each other...
All these things have been repeated throughout the seven years that we have lived together, and all the ranges I have gone through have served only to make me understand in the end that I love you more than my own skin, and that, though you may not love me in the same way, still you love me somewhat. Isn't that so?...I shall always hoe that that continues, and with that I am content.
In appearance, Frida and Diego made an unlikely couple: she, physically petite and darkly beautiful; he, corpulent and ugly. Together, their lives were pure theater: written about in the press and watched with fascination by the bohemian art circles of the time.
Frida's deep obsession wit Rivera began at an early age. According to one account, the 15 year old Frida first saw him--then 36 years old, a Communist, and a world-famous artist--when he was painting murals at her preparatory school in the heart of Mexico City. She told startled friends,
"My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera. And I'm going to tell him so some day."
By the time she met Rivera on more adult terms, she was 21 and a painter herself. He encouraged her art, but courted her as well, attracted by her quick intelligence, her hatred of bourgeois convention, and her direct, often ironic, sense of humor. While painting Frida's portrait as a communist militant for a mural, he joked:
"You have a dog face"
to which Frida lovingly retorted:
"And you have the face of a frog!"
In 1929 Frida and Diego married, she for the first time, he for the third. She could not fulfill her adolescent dream of bearing him a child, because of injuries sustained in a bus accident that occurred when she was 18. But Frida was a loyal wife, defending him from critics, worrying about his health, and traveling with him wherever commissions took him, whether to San Francisco, Detroit, or New York.
Frida knew from the outset that Diego could not be possessed, that art was his first passion, followed by Mexico, Marxism, and "the people". She wrote:
"Diego is beyond all limited and precise personal relations. He does not have friends, he has allies: he is very affectionate, but he never surrenders himself."
To some extent this suited Frida, allowing her to forge her own career and social life. The home Rivera built for them reflected their relationship: two houses, linked by a bridge. Frida had lovers (male and female), including such luminaries as the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, and Leon Totsky. The men she kept secret to avoid Rivera's murderous jealousy.
By the midsummer of 1939, ten years after their marriage and after a trip to Paris where Frida was hailed by the Surrealists, she and Rivera had begun divorce proceedings. Frida wrote:
"I see him very often but he doesn't want to live in the same house with me anymore because he likes to be alone...Well anyway I take care of him the best I can from the distance...and I will love him all my life even if he wouldn't want me to."
Their divorce lasted about a year. Neither could stand the separation. Rivera told a friend,
"I'm going to marry her because she really needs me."
But Rivera also need Frida, and was prepared to accept several key conditions that she laid down for remarriage, among them that she would support herself financially from her painting, and that there would be no lovemaking. Rivera explained that,
"with the images of all my other women flashing through her mind...a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances."
Married to each other for the second time in December 1940, their lives continued in much the same as before. They took pride in each other's work, fought, reconciled, and pursued others. Throughout, Rivera remained central to Frida's life. In an entry in her journal in the late 1940's she wrote:
"Diego: Nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes...My fingertips touch your blood."
When his infidelities became too much, she would adopt a maternal role, grumbling about his untidiness,
"Oh that boy, already he has spoiled his shirt,"
or bathing and cleaning him as if he were a child.
By the late 1940's Frida and Rivera were Olympian figures in the Mexican art world. Perhaps Frida's greatest triumph was her first solo exhibition in Mexico City, in 1953. She was so ill that she had to be carried into the gallery on a stretcher and laid on a four-poster bed. Diego supported her as much as he could through her illness, putting up with her unpredictable behavior. She never lost her desire for him and confided to a friend shortly before her death:
"I only want three things in life; to live with Diego, to continue painting and to belong to the Communist party."
Such hopes were short-lived. After a bout of pneumonia, Frida died two weeks later on July 13, 1954
fridakahlo.it
diegorivera.com (Make sure you visit the galery) |
