Visiting The Diego and Frida Life Chronicles at Gallery G
Recently, I visited a photography exhibit at Gallery G hosted by Sandeep Maini, Honorary Consul for Mexico in Bengaluru and the Sandeep & Gitanjali Maini Foundation.
Chronologically ordered, the stark black-and-white images depicted Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera through various phases in their life, including the steep ups and plunging downs of their rollercoaster marriage. The legendary Mexican artist couple whose murals and paintings animate city and museum walls across many parts of the world, were brought to life on curated reprints. One could almost picturize the photographers whose clicks and whirs were performing a critical role: of documenting not just artists-in-action or a couple-in-love, but of history-in-the-making.
The exhibit spurred me to dip into a book, The Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera, that had been calling out from my bookshelf, but was steadily overlooked in lieu of other reads. Here are some insights I gleaned about a painter who has always fascinated many:
A Painter of Many “Selfies”
Frida Kahlo, died at the age of 47, in 1953. She herself was the subject of many of her paintings. Nearly 200 of her paintings were self-portraits. She was an intensely private person but also enjoyed public spectacles.
A Childhood Bout With Polio
She was struck by polio at the age of 6, during which time she had to spend nine months in confinement. Inside her solitary room, she roamed the plains of Mexico with an imaginary friend. The friend always exuded gaiety and was privy to all her secrets.
When she emerged from her confinement, she became a “tomboy” and engaged in outdoorsy, boyish sports like swimming, boxing, cycling, soccer.
Of course, one leg was deformed and thinner than the other one. Because of this, she was often teased and treated like an outcast. In many later paintings, she depicts the loneliness of her childhood.
A Sprightly Mischief Maker At School
In 1922, she entered the National Preparatory School in Mexico, where some of the country’s “ablest minds” were teaching students. This was also a time when a very progressive and post-scientific education minister was in charge of education, and he wanted to reclaim pride in Mexican heritage and usher imaginative reforms into rural schools. He ensured that Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Goethe’s Faust and Plato’s Dialogues were published at very reasonable prices, so that lower-income students could access such works. He built libraries, playgrounds and open-air art schools.
There was thus an activist ardor in the air when Frida entered school, and Kahlo herself was infused with the zealous spirit that pervaded the place. At 14, Frida was a “fragile adolescent” – her eyes intense under the thick, connected eyebrows. She was filled with a mixture of “tenderness” and “willful spunk.”
At school, Frida hardly hung about with most girls; she found them petty and full of gossip. Her real friends constituted the Cachuchas – famous “for their brains and their mischief.” This was a band of seven boys and two girls, who became her close friends. Rather than sharing a particular activity, they shared “an attitude of irreverence.”
While they generally subscribed to a socialist romanticism, they also engaged in pranks or mischievous activities – like riding a donkey through the school’s hallways, tying firecrackers to a dog and then watching it scamper around with a sparking tail.
Hanging Out With Argumentative Readers
One of the favorite places where the Cachuchas often hung out was the Ibero American Library. “Here they argued, flirted, fought, wrote papers, drew pictures and read books.” They read Russian classics (by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol), Spanish works, Mexican fiction.
Kahlo herself learned to read in three languages: English, German and Spanish. One of her favorite stories was the imaginary life of the 15th Century Florentine painter, Paolo Uccello, from a translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives. She liked this story so much, she actually learned it by-heart.
Though Frida was an avid reader, she wasn’t a “dedicated student.” She enjoyed Biology, Literature and Art, but wasn’t keen on other subjects.
Unabashed In Her Self-Expression
She used a lot of slang in her English. In Spanish, she intentionally used “foul language” to shock her audience. “In either language, she enjoyed the effect on her audience, an effect enhanced by the fact that the gutter vocabulary issued from such a feminine-looking creature, one who held her head high on her lock neck as nobly as a queen.”
An Early Encounter With Diego Rivera
Besides hanging about the library, the Cachuchas also liked watching painters who had been commissioned to paint a mural in 1921-22. Among the painters, was the “world famous and fantastically-fat” Diego Rivera. Diego was not only charismatic, but also talkative, hence drew interested spectators to his work-in-progress.
Stories surrounding Kahlo include the notion that Frida fell in love with Diego, even at that early stage. According to reports, she is supposed to have blurted out, while at an ice-cream shop with friends, that she plans to have a baby with Rivera someday. She also added that Diego had no knowledge yet about her plans. In his own biography, Rivera recalls the intense manner in which Frida gazed at him and his work, while he painted, her eyes unflinching even when a fellow-artist taunted her.
A Ghastly Accident
The Gallery G exhibit featured a picture of Frida, one year after a horrendous accident.
The accident occurred on September 17th, 1925, when Kahlo was only 18 years old. She was traveling in a bus that collided with an electric train, and a hand rail pierced through Kahlo’s body, “the way a sword pierces a bull.”
Strangely, she had become unclothed during the incident, and a painter who had been carrying some gold powder spilled his gilded powder over her. She was hence draped in red and gold, like a dancer or a performance artist.
The accident had several devastating physical consequences for her. Besides the rod that had pierced her, she bore fractures across her body – on her spine, her ribs, her collar bone, her leg, her foot. She wasn’t expected to survive when she arrived at the hospital. For a person who had always been full of spritely movement, to be completely locked into many plaster casts must have been numbing.
Painting With Chronic Pain
As a result of her childhood polio, and her subsequent accident, she lived with pain and illness all her life. She allowed these images to seep into her paintings, into pictures of “herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open…” She even made snarky jokes about Death, hovering over her like a shadowy companion.
Earlier, to overcome the limitations imposed by polio, she had tried to exercise as much as possible. Now she had to accept the opposite – periods of forced immobility – to survive. She turned to painting as a reprieve.
Her mother had an easel custom made for her, for when she couldn’t sit up. The easel helped her paint in bed.
Expressing Her Tempestuous Feelings
She painted her loneliness. She painted her torment. She painted her abidance with the fact that many of her earlier dreams would remain unfulfilled.
But she also stayed generous, lively, witty, involved in social issues. In one of the Gallery G pictures, Frida is shown protesting on a wheelchair, many years after the accident. She was to die eleven days after that event.
Often, she pretended to be happier than she was. While her paintings show her body being naked, wounded or bleeding, her face is often a mask.
A Tumultuous Marriage
Frida was 20 years younger than the famed Rivera. While they both shared a fierce love for art and social revolutions, they were to passionately love, fight, separate, divorce and even remarry each other in a relationship that never lacked drama. They consorted with a host of politicians, artists, writers, intellectuals, activists – their home turning into a bedlam of broken promises, renewed vows or protestor slogans.
Mexico in India
While Mexico gained its Independence more than century before India did, exhibits like this reveal how the two countries have much in common: layered histories, diverse populations and contentious relationships with modernity. And also, as Amartya Sen observes in The Argumentative Indian, colorful, sparring voices that have chiseled our identities into projects that are ever-in-the-making.
References
Diego and Frida Life Chronicles at Gallery G, Lavelle Road, Bengaluru From 11th Sept to 10th October 2022
Hayden Herrera, The Biography of Frida Kahlo, Bloomsbury, 1989
Thank you dearest Brinda