Frida Kahlo’s Politics

“I am only a cell in the complex revolutionary mechanism of the peoples for peace in the new nations … united in blood to me.”

Though Mexican painter and reconstructionist Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, she insisted on listing July 7, 1910, as her birth date — the start of the Mexican revolution — so that her life would parallel the birth of modern Mexico. But how, exactly, did the iconic artist arrive at her strong political convictions? The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library) — the same magnificent volume that gave us her passionate hand-written love letters to Diego Rivera and her poignant meditation on how we are all connected in our pain — offers a fascinating glimpse of the evolution of Kahlo’s political beliefs, which were heavily inspired by Marxist ideology but still reflective of the underlying ethos of her art, a profound celebration of our shared existence and the connectedness of the universe.

1st. I’m convinced of my disagreement with the counterrevolution — imperialism — fascism — religions — stupidity — capitalism — and the whole gamut of bourgeois tricks — I wish to cooperate with the Revolution in transforming the world into a class-less one so that we can attain a better rhythm for the oppressed classes

2nd. a timely moment to clarify who are the allies of the Revolution

Read Lenin — Stalin — Learn that I am nothing but a “small damned” part of a revolutionary movement.

Always revolutionary, never dead, never useless

From a handful of pages dated 1950–1951, which follow a lapse in her diary after seven grueling surgeries on her spinal column, and open with her gratitude for Doctor Farill, the surgeon whom Kahlo believes saved her, she offers this meditation on the urgency she feels to find a political utility for her art:

A despair which no words can describe. I’m still eager to live. I’ve started to paint again. A little picture to give to Dr Farill on which I’m working with all my love.

I feel uneasy about my painting. Above all I want to transform it into something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement, since up to now I have only painted the earnest portrayal of myself, but I’m very far from work that could serve the Party. I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the revolution. The only true reason to live for.

Frida Kahlo, reconstructionist

A five-page entry dated November 4, 1952, marks a turning point for Kahlo’s work as she begins to see her painting not merely as the subjective, inward-turned reflection on her inner world but as a Marxist interpretation of reality, which she terms “Revolutionary Realism”:

Today I’m in better company than for 20 years) I am a self and a Communist.

I know
I have read methodically
that the main origins are wrapped in ancient roots. I have read the History of my country and of nearly all nations. I know their class struggles and their economic conflicts. I understand quite clearly the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse. I love them as pillars of the new Communist world. Since Trotsky came to Mexico I have understood his error. I was never a Trotskyist. But in those days 1940 — my only alliance was with Diego (personally)

Political fervor. But one has to make allowances for the fact that I had been sick since I was six years old and for really very short periods of my life have I enjoyed truly good HEALTH and I was of no use to the Party. Now in 1953. After 22 surgical interventions I feel better and now and then I will be able to help my Communist Party. Although I’m not a worker, but a craftswoman — And an unconditional ally of the Communist revolutionary movement.

For the first time in my life my painting is trying to help in the line set down by the Party: REVOLUTIONARY REALISM

Before it was my earliest experience — I am only a cell in the complex revolutionary mechanism of the peoples for peace in the new nations, Soviets — Chinese — Czechoslovakians — Poles — united in blood to me. And to the Mexican Indian. Among those great multitudes of Asian people there will always be the faces of my own — Mexicans — with dark skin and beautiful form, with limitless grace. The black people would also be freed, so beautiful and so brave. (Mexicans and negroes are subjugated for now by capitalist countries above all North America — U.S. and England.) xxxxxxxxxxxx

Complement the altogether delicious Diary of Frida Kahlo with a lovely children’s book about Kahlo’s life and the beloved painter’s compassionate letter to bedridden Georgia O’Keeffe.

Illustration by Lisa Congdon for The Reconstructionists project

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Frida Kahlo’s DIY Paint Recipe

How to emulate artistic genius via a home-cooked emulsion.

Mexican painter and reconstructionist Frida Kahlo, true to her penchant for native crafts and her methodically inquisitive mind, was intensely interested in artists’ guidelines — a meta-genre of art that holds equal fascination today. From The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library), which also gave us her passionate hand-written love letters to Diego Rivera and her poignant meditation on how we are all connected in our pain, comes Kahlo’s recipe for a paint medium using damar gum — a resin harvested from trees native to the Pacific — to which pigment would be added to produce the final paint product:

FOR THE OLD CONCEALER FISITA*. Distemper together 4 equal parts of egg yolks raw linseed oil

egg yolk = raw linseed oil = compound of damar gum blended in turpentine = water

damar gum dissolved in turpentine and distilled water. with disinfectant take = concentrated aldehyde alcohol. ½ gram. to a liter of water.

crushed damar inside of lemon [suspended in] turpentine for 8 to 10 days.

remove all the white from the yolk.

1. Make an emulsion of the ingredients
2. Grind the colors into the emulsion
3. If a glossy texture is desired, increase the amount of damar, up to two parts.
4. If an overall matte finish is desired increase the water up to three parts

* Diego Rivera’s nickname for Kahlo

Complement this with Hans Ulrich Obrist’s compendium of 20 years of famous artists’ irreverent instructionals and the ever-delightful Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait remains beautiful and fascinating in its entirety — a rare glimpse of one of modern history’s most outwardly celebrated inner worlds.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

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Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Hand-Written Love Letters to Diego Rivera

“Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”

Mexican painter and reconstructionist Frida Kahlo is among the most remarkable figures of contemporary culture. At a young age, she contracted polio, which left her right leg underdeveloped — an imperfection she’d later come to disguise with her famous colorful skirts. A decade later, as one of only thirty-five female students at Mexico’s prestigious Preparatoria school, she was in a serious traffic accident, which resulted in multiple body fractures and internal lesions inflicted by an iron rod that had pierced her stomach and uterus. It took her three months in full-body cast to recover and though she eventually willed her way to walking again, she spent the rest of her life battling frequent relapses of extreme pain and enduring frequent hospital visits, including more than thirty operations. As a way of occupying herself while bedridden, Kahlo made her first strides in painting — then went on to become one of the most influential painters in modern art.

Two years after the accident, in 1927, she met the painter Diego Rivera, whose work she’d come to admire and who became her mentor. In 1929, despite the vocal protestations of Kahlo’s mother, Frida and Diego were wedded and one of art history’s most notoriously tumultuous marriages commenced. Both had multiple affairs, the most notable of which for bisexual Kahlo were with French singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker and Russian Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky. And yet her bond with Diego was one of transcendental passion and immense love.

Kahlo’s love letters to Rivera, found in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library) and stretching across the twenty-seven-year span of their relationship, bespeak the profound and abiding connection the two shared, brimming with the seething cauldron of emotion with which all fully inhabited love is filled: elation, anguish, devotion, desire, longing, joy. In their breathless intensity, they soar in the same stratosphere of love letters as those exchanged between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or listen, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, outside time and magic, within your own fear, and your great anguish, and within the very beating of your heart. All this madness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only confusion. I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.

F.

Diego:

Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Auxochrome — Chromophore. Diego.

She who wears the color.
He who sees the color.
Since the year 1922.

Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the “golden section.” There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny.

My Diego:

Mirror of the night

Your eyes green swords inside my flesh. waves between our hands.

All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light. You were called AUXOCHROME the one who captures color. I CHROMOPHORE — the one who gives color.

You are all the combinations of numbers. life. My wish is to understand lines form shades movement. You fulfill and I receive. Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.

Auxochrome — Chromophore

It was the thirst of many years restrained in our body. Chained words which we could not say except on the lips of dreams. Everything was surrounded by the green miracle of the landscape of your body. Upon your form, the lashes of the flowers responded to my touch, the murmur of streams. There was all manner of fruits in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate, the horizon of the mammee and the purified pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Smell of oak essence, memories of walnut, green breath of ash tree. Horizon and landscapes = I traced them with a kiss. Oblivion of words will form the exact language for understanding the glances of our closed eyes. = You are here, intangible and you are all the universe which I shape into the space of my room. Your absence springs trembling in the ticking of the clock, in the pulse of light; you breathe through the mirror. From you to my hands, I caress your entire body, and I am with you for a minute and I am with myself for a moment. And my blood is the miracle which runs in the vessels of the air from my heart to yours.

The green miracle of the landscape of my body becomes in your the whole of nature. I fly through it to caress the rounded hills with my fingertips, my hands sink into the shadowy valleys in an urge to possess and I’m enveloped in the embrace of gentle branches, green and cool. I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, her heat chars me and my entire body is rubbed by the freshness of the tender leaves. Their dew is the sweat of an ever-new lover.

It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found what I saw it in your hands, in your month and in your breasts. I have the taste of almonds from your lips in my mouth. Our worlds have never gone outside. Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

Your presence floats for a moment or two as if wrapping my whole being in an anxious wait for the morning. I notice that I’m with you. At that instant still full of sensations, my hands are sunk in oranges, and my body feels surrounded by your arms.

For my Diego

the silent life giver of worlds, what is most important is the nonillusion. morning breaks, the friendly reds, the big blues, hands full of leaves, noisy birds, fingers in the hair, pigeons’ nests a rare understanding of human struggle simplicity of the senseless song the folly of the wind in my heart = don’t let them rhyme girl = sweet xocolatl [chocolate] of ancient Mexico, storm in the blood that comes in through the mouth — convulsion, omen, laughter and sheer teeth needles of pearl, for some gift on a seventh of July, I ask for it, I get it, I sing, sang, I’ll sing from now on our magic — love.

Pair The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait with more exquisite love letters by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Balzac, Rilke, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.