Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration Author(S): Sharyn R

Woman's Art Inc. Frida Kahlo's Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration Author(s): Sharyn R. Udall Reviewed work(s): Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Autumn, 2003 - Winter, 2004), pp. 10-14 Published by: Woman's Art Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358781 . Accessed: 05/06/2012 18:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Woman's Art Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Woman's Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org FRIDA KAHLO S MEXICANBODY History, Identity, and ArtisticAspiration By Sharyn R. Udall F rida Kahlo (1907-54),whose body and biographywere her (1652) belongs to a traditionof court paintingthat reachesback to chief subjects, mythologized them into a revealing life Titianand forwardto Goya. Queen Marianamemorializes a royal epic. Her paintingstell stories-intimate, engaging, terri- dynasty,the Spanish Hapsburgs, who represent (besides much fying,and tragicones. Togetherwith her writings,they explorethe else) a significant part of Mexico's own colonial past. In many toughness and vulnerability of the human body. When Kahlo forms, the ruling dynasty provided an enduring fascination for looked into death's dark mirror, she saw herself. In the act of generations of Mexican artists, among them the 20th-century painting and in the resulting canvases,she documented her own painter Alberto Gironella, who borrowed elements from Las attempts to survivepain, to make sense of it, to act out through Meninasand other works by Velazquez.More specifically,Queen images layeredwith fantasy,irony, and allegory.Her work is sear- Mariana is a remembered prototype and a key to the multiple ingly candid, overlaidwith the unrealityof an endless nightmare. meaningswithin TimesFlies. When she abandonedhope in her dailylife, Kahloembedded her Two immediate similaritiesto the Velazquezpainting are the despairwithin paintings,which, by virtue of their very existence, queen'sformalized, static pose and the massive,tie-back draperies. act as the artist'senvoys in searchof salvation,or somethinglike it. The more criticalformal and symbolicelement in both paintingsis At times archaizingand romantic,at times brutallyimmediate, a clock, an unmistakableallusion to the concept of time. In each Kahlo'ssubjects impose stasis on history,freezing together the an- case the clock is located to the sitter'sleft and behind her. The cient past with livingmemories. When she used time as a referent, Velazquezgold clock, as Baddeleyand Fraserpoint out, is a "rare, it was with ambivalence;she refused time's linearityand its arbi- expensiveand ornate"object.4 It would have been a status symbol trarydivisions. "Heute ist immer noch" (Todaystill goes on), she in 17th-centurySpain, or perhaps an updated, secularizedrefer- wrote beneathher signatureon the backof Self Portraitwith a Vel- ence to the transienceof life formerlysuggested by an hourglassin vet Dress (1926; P1. 5).1 In that revealing statement the artist moralizingvanitas paintings. In any case, the hour is not visible; demonstratedearly on that in her mind the present is living, con- seemingly,Velazquez used the clock to make an oblique reference tinuouswith a past of historyand of art. By followingKahlo's lead, to his own modernity,to timelinessin a paintingwhose immobility by thinkingabout time as a threadconnecting the episodicwith the places it otherwise entirely outside time. Kahlo'suse of the clock eternal,we canbegin to understandher work in new andtelling ways. seems to place TimeFlies specificallywithin time. Hers is a cheap, This early work echoes several art-historicalprecedents: Kahlo modernalarm clock, strictlyutilitarian, with large blackhands and admiredBronzino's famous mannerist portraits, especially A Young numeralsdeclaring that it is 2:52, perhapsan oblique reference to Womanand her Little Boy (c. 1540), and praisedthe refined grace the date of the Velazquezpainting, 1652. of Botticelli, whom she mentioned several times in letters. After There are several ironies involved in Kahlo's invocation of she gave the self-portraitto AlejandroG6mez Arias,her first love, Velazquez. She appropriateselements from an Old World, Old painterand portraitbecame one in her mind. She wrote Alejandro Masterpainting in the New World;she is neither old, nor (being that "your[Botticelli]...remembers you always."2It is here, per- female) a "master,"nor is she clear at this point in her life about haps, that Kahlo'sability to transcendboth time and inheritediden- her own artisticheritage. She is tryingon identities,both personal tity begins; in many future paintings she exchanges and merges and artistic:from the melancholyaristocrat of her first self-por- personaewith painted selves, with animals,plants, and mythicbe- trait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her own ings. It is a practiceas much shamanicas artistic,one relatedto the mixed Euro-Americanand Indianheritage. concept of Aztec dualityand addressedin other termsas well. Other aspects of Kahlo'sclock compel notice:placed exactlyat Time and specificallythe oppositionof the modem and antimod- Kahlo's eye level, the wide oblique angle of the hands on the em in her work figure prominentlyin her next self-portrait,Time clock'sface forms a shape that mimics her own dense eyebrows- Flies (1929; P1. 6). Painted the year of Kahlo'smarriage to Diego joined like dark bird wings above her nose. The clock face thus Rivera,this severelyfrontal, well-lit portrait appears far less mysteri- rhymeswith her own; and like it, she becomes an instrumentthat ous and romanticthan the one she made for Alejandro.The clock measures time-that mediates between past and present. It also and airplaneground it in the modem era. Yet the paintingis far forecasts the way Kahlo would paint other faces to mimic her more complex,far less direct than it first appears.Beneath its sur- own-on coconuts,her pet monkeys,and on a varietyof other ob- face franknesslie multipletemporal clues, pullingthe here and now jects, animate and inanimate.For example, in Tearsof the Coco- into a web of art-historical,narrative, and allegoricalreferents. nut (WeepingCoconuts, Coconut Tears)(c. 1950) a hairycoconut Spanish painting, particularlythat of Velazquez, has always is given prominenteyes from which tears drop onto the surround- been a powerfulpresence in Mexicanart. As OrianaBaddeley and ing fruit in a still-life arrangement.Kahlo also used clocks in a ValerieFraser have written,"Velazquez is centralto any considera- number of other drawingsand even as a design in the rock-en- tion of the impact of the European artistic heritage on that of crusted ceiling of her home.5The little alarm clock, or a similar Latin America."3Young Frida Kahlo, enamored of Renaissance, one, remainstoday on a bedside table at her home in Coyoacan. Mannerist,and later Europeanpainting, certainly knew the work In TimeFlies the clock rests on a carvedwooden column,whose of Spain'sgreatest Baroque master. Velazquez'sQueen Mariana spiral shaft rises exactlythe length of Kahlo'sown spinal column, 0 WOMAN'S ARTJOURNAL furtherreinforcing the interpretationof the clock and its pedestal which Rivera and Kahlo as some kind of mechanical alter-ego, looking over her shoulder lived in the Morrows'home and markingtime. But it has an ancient resonanceas well. We are while the Americanswere in reminded in the visual pairing of "columns"of the ways pre- Europe. While Rivera was Columbianpeoples in Mexicoanthropomorphized objects, such as painting the saga of the the Zapotecterracotta polychromed vase in the form of a vertebral Spanishconquest, Kahlo had column, from Monte Alban, Oaxaca(Fig. 1). Kahlo, whose own time to think about the prox- shatteredspinal column suppliedonly fragilesupport, could rely on imity of past and present in these other columnsfor metaphoricalsupport. In her famous 1944 Cuernavaca, where Cortes self-portraitThe Broken Column(P1. 7), she invoked still another had spent his lastyears. kind of column-a Greek fluted one-as interior support. It is a Wingedflight, symbolized crackedIonic column,the "I"and its traditionalassociation with fe- by Lindbergh, seemed to male proportionsperhaps a punningreference to herself. hold endless promise for the Anothertime reference in TimeFlies is the necklace she wears future,though it held signifi- of heavy,hand-carved jade beads, relics of Mexico'spre-Cortesian cant dangersas well. In 1928, past. The center stone is inscribedwith the Aztec glyph for move- a young Mexican aviator, f .^ . a ment, with connotations of "beginnings" or "nowness." Such Emilio Carranza, made a _c- mr meaningwould not have been lost on Kahlo,whose sophisticated flight to the United States to ... ....... knowledgeof the pre-Columbianpast fueled her art and her own reciprocateLindbergh's Mex- eventual mythification.6It is also an appropriatesymbol for a per- ico visit the previous year. Fig. 1. Vase in the Formof a Vertebral sonalbeginning: her marriageto Riverathat year.7 Forgottentoday in the Unit- Column(200 B.C.-200A.D.), Time and history rise along Kahlo's body,

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