1. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, 1932 . New York, Manuel Reyero(Christie's). 22 CULTURE, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY IN THE PAINTINGS OF FRIDA KAHLO JANICE HELLAND Frida Kahlo used the often traumatic and harrow- public protest opposed to American intervention ing iconography of her Mexican heritage to paint in Guatemala. On 14 July 1954, her body lay in herself and the pain which had become an integral state in the magnificent foyer of the Palace of part of her life after, at age eighteen, a streetcar Fine Arts in Mexico City. Much to the chagrin of accident left her crippled. From then on she un- Mexican officials, her coffin was draped with a derwent a series of operations and, because of her large flag bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle severely injured pelvis, a number of miscarriages superimposed upon a star. With her love of the and abortions. Her physical disability never inhib- unconventional and her talent for black humor, ited Kahlo's flair for theatrics, and this, combined Kahlo, in all likelihood, would have enjoyed the with a tempestuous relationship with her philan- uproar caused by this spectacle.' dering husband, the mural painter Diego Rivera, Kahlo, like many other educated young people established her as a tragically romantic and exotic during the tumultuous era between the world figure. As a result, Kahlo's works have been ex- wars, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. haustively psychoanalyzed and thereby white- In the early part of the century, the intellectual washed of their bloody, brutal, and overtly politi- atmosphere in Mexico was charged with cosmo- cal content. Kahlo's personal pain should not politan European ideologies, most prominently eclipse her commitment to Mexico and the Mexi- Marxism tempered with Mexican nationalism. can people. As she sought her own roots, she also Renewed interest in Mexico's culture and history voiced concern for her country as it struggled for began in the nineteenth century, and in the early an independent cultural identity. Her life and twentieth century, Mexican indigenista tenden- even her death were political. cies ranged from a violently anti-Spanish idealiza- Kahlo died eleven days after participating in a tion of Aztec Mexico to a more rational interest in the "Indian question" as the key to a truly Published as "Aztec Imagery in Frida Kahlo's Paintings," Mexican culture.z Woman's Art Journal 11 (Fall 1990/Winter 1991): 8-13. Mexican nationalism, with its anti-Spanish Copyright © by Janice Helland. Revised by the author for this edition. Reprinted by permission of the author and anti-imperialism, identified the Aztecs as the last Woman's Art Journal. independent rulers of an indigenous political unit. 398 JANICE HELLAND can intellectual and a leading supporter of Aztec eminence, was one of the first to describe as beau- tiful the awesome, fearful goddess figure Coatlicue [2], now on view in the Museo Nacional de An- tropologia in Mexico City. This serpent-skirted goddess, adorned with a necklace of skulls that rests upon her breasts and enhances her severed neck, is a favored motif in Kahlo's work. Although she seldom represents the deity in her complete sculpted form, she nevertheless repeatedly refers to the severed neck and skull necklace. In addition to Coatlicue imagery, Kahlo also uses images of the heart and the skeleton in her paintings. All three are important symbols in Aztec art as well as in Kahlo's Mexicanidad. In Kahlo's particular form of Mexicanidad, a romantic nationalism that focused upon tradi- tional art and artifacts uniting all indigenistas re- gardless of their political stances, she revered Aztec traditions above and beyond those of other pre-Spanish native cultures. She expressed her deeply felt nationalism by favoring in art the rep- resentation of the powerful and authoritarian pre- Columbian society that had united a large area of the Middle Americas through force and conquest . This emphasis upon the Aztecs, rather than the Mayan, Toltec, or other indigenous cultures, cor- responds to Kahlo's demand for a unified, nation- 2. Coatlicue, late fifteenth century . Mexico City, alistic, and independent Mexico. Unlike her hus- Museo Nacional de Antropologia (Ignacio Bernal). band, she disapproved of Trotsky's inter- nationalism. She was drawn, rather, to Stalin's nationalism, which she probably interpreted as a However, by the early twentieth century, the unifying force within his own country. Her anti- United States had replaced Spain as the intrusive imperialism had a distinctly anti-U.S. focus. foreign power. The threat became particularly evi- Her repeated use of often bloody Aztec imagery dent to the Mexican left when the United States is an intrinsic part of her social and political beliefs interfered in internal political struggles between nd derives much of its power from the depth of capital and labor. The most romantic of the anti- er convictions. Thus, the skeletons, hearts, and imperialists continued to idealize the self-control ,Coatlicue, images relating to the emanation of and governing power of the Aztecs, who, accord- light from darkness and life from death, speak not ing to some prominent late nineteenth-century only to Kahlo's personal struggle for health and intellectuals, could trace their roots to an early ,life but to a nation's struggle. It is this intense civilization based upon a combination of commu- interest in her homeland that is behind her trans- nism and labor leading to fraternity and virtue.3 formation into a mythological or cult figure by the Allegedly, from this early simplified society grew Mexican people.4 the complex structure of Aztec society. ; For a time, Frida Kahlo was also the "darling" Alfredo Chavero, a nineteenth-century Mexi- of New York and Paris art circles. She was courted CULTURE, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY : FRIDA KAHLO by the "pope of Surrealism," Andre Breton, who the kneeling death goddesses who wear skulls or in 1938 described her as a "ribbon around a hand trophy necklaces, and the temple in the bomb" in his glowing brochure for her exhibition upper left resembles the main temple area at Te- in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery.s How- nochtitlan.9 The temple, the blood-drenched sun, ever, Kahlo never saw herself as a Surrealist and and the moon, all suggesting the Aztec practice of became thoroughly disillusioned with the move- ritual sacrifice, are deliberately rendered in a ment and with Breton after a trip to Paris early in "primitive" or "naive folkloric style"lo similar to 1939. By the mid-1940s, Kahlo was rarely men- that found on retablos, the traditional Mexican tioned north of the border or in Europe, although paintings of miracles collected by Kahlo. The pre- her popularity and influence remained undimin- Columbian side of the painting, with its rich, lush ished in Mexico. border of vegetation deeply rooted in the earth, Only since the late 1970s, with the increased dramatically contrasts with the industrialized interest in women artists and feminist scholarship, United States, represented by skyscrapers, tech- has Kahlo re-emerged as an international figure. nology, and pollution. The Mexican skull, proba- Because of her large number of self-portraits, bly relating to the skulls that often lined the stone many of which reveal her physical and psychic walls of Aztec temples, is a life-sprouting-from- pains, her art is often subjected to psychological death metaphor that appropriately complements analysis. Harris and Nochlin write that "she the vegetation. The picture effectively contrasts turned to herself and her own peculiarly feminine Kahlo's Mexico with Western industrial civiliza- obsessions and dilemmas for subject matter."6 tion. Kahlo herself stands in the middle, holding Herrera believes that "Kahlo has become some- the Mexican flag and wearing a Coatlicue-like thing of a heroine to U.S. feminists who admire necklace with bones. For her, life and death were the devastating frankness with which she recorded as intimately related to the earth and the cosmos specifically female experiences-birth, miscar- as they were to her pre-Columbian ancestors. The riage, unhappiness in love."7 artist's temple, meant for sacrifice, and the sun Certainly, as the French theorists Helene Cix- dripping with sacrificial blood are included with- ous and Luce Irigaray have suggested, women out comment or apology: a concrete visual exam- must "speak" and "write" their own experiences,8 ple of Kahlo's idealization of the Aztec past. but the speaking must also be related to the con- In another painting from her United States so- text. Kahlo's "speaking" herself encompasses her journ, My Dress Hangs There, 1933 [3], Kahlo political self and her love for her country. For scourges the United States with representations of example, in Self-Portrait on the Border Between the accoutrements of a bourgeois life-style (a toi- Mexico and the United States, 1932 [1], Kahlo let, a telephone, and a sports trophy) and indicts stands on the border between the highly industri- its hypocrisy by wrapping a dollar sign around the alized, robotlike United States and agricultural, cross of a church. Her appropriated photographs pre-industrial Mexico. In this painting, as in other of Depression-era unemployment, which consti- works of hers, she evokes past cultures while, at tute the lower part of the picture, juxtapose "real- the same time, she comments on modernity; al- ity" with the "made-up" painting and thereby though she sometimes suggests modernization for highlight the vulgar display of American wealth Mexico, this is never at the expense of cultural and well-being as opposed to the poverty and suf- identity. The sculpture on the Mexican side of the fering of the lower classes.