Portraits and Self-Portraits by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo1
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PERFormiNG THE SELF AND THE OTHER: PorTraiTS AND SELF-PorTraiTS BY DiEGO RIVEra AND FriDA KahLO1 Ellen G. Landau "The Strange Couple from the Land Like Nefertiti and, of course, Frida of the Dot and the Line": although Kahlo herself, Neferisis has thick con- Frida Kahlo used this inscription on spicuous eyebrows. Ojo único, unlike one page of her journal to identify an Akhenaton, has a full fleshy look; so imaginary Egyptian couple she depict- too his child and baby Moses. All ed in accompanying drawings, there is three, in fact, more or less share the little doubt that she intended it to facial qualities of Diego Rivera, Frida have a personal double meaning.2 Kahlo’s husband (whom she actu- Playing both visually and linguis- tically on Amarna ruler Akhenaton 1 This essay was written as a lecture for and his famous consort, Kahlo no the international symposium Diego Rivera: A Transcultural Dialogue, held at the Cleveland doubt generated her fictional charac- Museum of Art (CMA) in February 1999 in ters, Ojo único, Neferisis, and their little conjunction with the opening of Diego Rivera: son, through a multi-layered process Art and Revolution, co-organized by INBA and CMA. I am indebted to William H. Robinson, of psychic associations. Indeed, flanking CMA Associate Curator of Modern Art, for the central fetus, the real historical inviting me to speak on this topic at the sym- spouses face each other in Kahlo’s posium. I would also like to thank Irene Herner, Moses, or Nucleus of Creation, a can- Debby Tenenbaum, and Amy Reed Frederick, as well as Bertha Cea of the American Embassy vas painted in 1945 (probably around in Mexico City, for helping to make this essay the time of her undated diary entry); possible, and Leticia López Orozco for inviting and a contemporaneous statement me to publish it in Crónicas. 2 All quotes from Kahlo’s diary are taken clarifies Kahlo’s interest in this pair: "I from the 1995 Abrams English edition. The imagine", Kahlo mused, "that besides pages referenced in this essay are discussed having been extraordinarily beautiful, by Lowe, 213-15, 220, 235. 3 [Nefertiti] must have been ‘a wild one’ Herrera, Frida, 326 and 482, quoting an informal lecture by Kahlo on Freud’s Moses and a most intelligent collaborator to and Monotheism given in 1945 at the home of her husband".3 Domingo Lavin. ally married twice, in 1928 and, after Diego my mother a brief divorce, in 1940). Moreover, Diego my father her word-picture of Nefertiti rather Diego my son deftly encapsulates Frida’s own auto- Diego = me biography. A few pages earlier, Kahlo used Once again, she concludes with a different set of artistic binaries meaningful wordplay: to metaphorize her relationship Diego Universo to Rivera. Here she called herself Diversidad en la unidad. ‘Auxocromo’ and him ‘Cromoforo’: Without a doubt, the diversity She who wears the color and He between Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo who sees the color. was patently obvious to all; indeed, their Since the year 1922. very visible physical discrepancies led Until always and forever. Now in Kahlo’s parents to complain she was 1944. After all the contracting a ludicrous marriage "bet- hours lived through. ween an elephant and a dove".4 Also apparent were the conspicuous distinc- In an annotation clearly meant tions between their oeuvres: the much for Rivera to read, Kahlo assigned her more famous Rivera was primarily a role in their marriage as subordinate, muralist with grand social and political but complementary; "You fulfill", she intentions. By contrast, Kahlo, influenced proclaims, "I receive". by primitive retablos, created small, But was their union really so con- intensely introspective works. But was ventionally gender-specific? In a later there a unity of intention and ethos that diary entry, Kahlo specifically enunci- transcended or linked their opposing ates each and every role she believed personal and artistic characteristics? that Rivera played in her life. Not all I will focus in this essay on of these are typically masculine. Her addressing this question by examin- list reads like a mantra: ing their shared practice of making self-portraits and mutual depictions. Diego beginning Through these, Rivera and Kahlo Diego builder Diego my child 4 Bambi, “Frida es una Mitad”, Excélsior Diego my boyfriend (México City), June 13, 1954, 6; quoted in Diego painter Hayden Herrera, “Beaty to his Beast: Frida Diego my lover Kahlo and Diego Rivera”, in Witney Chad- wick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., Signifi- Diego "my husband" cant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. 16 Diego my friend (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 119. Reprografía, Frida y sus hermanas Adriana y Cristina, su prima Carmen y el niño Carlos Veraza, 1926. Foto: Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint/IIE. often portrayed their deepest fee- R i v e r a ’ s v a u n t e d a b i l - lings for their beloved Mexico and ity to embroider the truth was a trait betrayed the complexity of their noticed early, and it took on more personal emotions. of his own gargantuan proportions Imbricated within an admit- throughout his life. In his largely fanciful tedly fractious alliance, their affinities ‘autobiography’, told to Gladys March and polarities –so closely tied to the between 1944 and 1957, he describes strengths and weaknesses of their his first ‘apparition’ of Frida, their 1922 nation– often played out at a level of meeting on the scaffold while he, aged highest intensity when they looked 37, was painting Creation, a mural at inward and at each other. I will exam- the National Preparatory School in ine in particular the performative Mexico City, and she was a 15-year aspects of these portraits analyzing old pre-medical student. "She had them as visual texts, in which Rivera unusual dignity," Diego recalled, "and and Kahlo invent meanings with both self-assurance, and there was a strange individual and national importance. fire in her eyes. Her beauty was that 17 Frida Kahlo, Autorretrato en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, 1932, Óleo y collage sobre masonite. Foto: Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint/IIE. of a child, yet her breasts were well- ity as seen in her incarnation as The developed".5 Liberated Earth, at the Autonomous This event (which prompted University of Chapingo. Frida to tell friends her new ambi- In a particularly evocative passage tion was to have the great painter’s in the March book, Rivera also tells of baby) supposedly took place only his first glimpse of Lupe. Whereas a few days after Rivera began living Kahlo was tiny and doll-like, Marin with Guadalupe Marin, who would was "a strange and marvelous-looking soon become his first wedded wife creature, nearly six feet tall". and would remain his most impor- 18 tant model of voluptuous feminin- 5 March, 75. [Lupe] was black-haired, yet her this remark in a telling way. Hers was hair looked more like that of a not, he pointed out, "an ordinary and chestnut mare than a woman’s. regular beauty", but "the exceptional Her green eyes were so transpa- and characteristic beauty of what she rent she seemed to be blind. Her produces". Reckoning her "a vital force", face was an Indian’s, the mouth Rivera lauded Kahlo’s sincerity (which with its full, powerful lips open, he termed "both tender and cruel"), the corners drooping like those giving a Marxist assessment of "her exac- of a tiger. The teeth showed spar- titude and intensity" as "always reaching kling and regular: animal teeth a universal plane and extension and set in coral such as one sees in playing a social role we would dare to old idols. Held at her breast, her call poetically didactic and rigorously extraordinary hands had the dialectic". Additionally, Rivera acclaimed beauty of tree roots or eagle tal- Kahlo’s "velocity", "absolute frankness", ons. She was round-shouldered, "fantastic logic", and "constant power yet slim and strong and taper- to penetrate the ideas, intentions, and ing, with long, muscular legs that feelings of others". In short, he seems made me think of the legs of a most attracted by her "great possibili- wild filly.6 ties of imaginative creation".8 Notably, Rivera mentions to Although he had certainly taken Tibol his wife’s "ability to stand pain immediate notice of Frida’s budding far beyond the normal". Kahlo had chest, Rivera apparently did not feel polio as a child which withered one of similarly moved to rhapsodize either her legs, a physical characteristic she verbally or visually about the sexual shared with the Aztec God of War. nature of her physical characteristics, In September 1925, while a student except to admire her mustache and at the Preparatory School, she was her eyebrows. The latter seemed to impaled by a rod in a bizarre collision him "like the wings of a blackbird, between a tram and a bus. According their black arches framing two extra- ordinary brown eyes". (Frida, on the 6 Ibíd., 74. other hand, fixated –in her diary and 7 For Diego’s description of Frida, see in humorous drawings– on what she March, 102; for Frida’s of Diego, Abrams edi- considered Diego’s most erotic body tion of her diary, 17, commentary by Lowe, 213. parts: his breasts and "flower-foun- 8 See Rivera, "Frida Kahlo and Mexican tain", her petname for his penis!).7 Art", Boletin del Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, Diego did describe Frida to Raquel v. 1 (oct., 1943) and Raquel Tibol, "Frida Kahlo, artista de genio", La Prensa (Buenos Aires, Tibol in 1953 as "an extraordinarily Argentina, July 12, 1953), excerpts reprinted in handsome woman," but he qualified Tibol, "An Exchange of Looks", 65-66.