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Saint Frida

Mexican icon of suffering Frida Kahlo revealed her thoughts in pictures and words

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The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
Introduction by Carlos Fuentes; essay and commentaries by Sara M. Lowe
Abrams; 296 pages; $39.95


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Reviewed by Tai Moses

Over the past decade, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has become a virtual cottage industry. Admirers of her explicitly autobiographical paintings have made her into something of an idol: Saint Frida of the Afflicted. Most have no trouble reciting the particulars of the painter's life: her childhood bout with polio; the near-fatal bus accident at age 18; her tempestuous marriage to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera; her love affairs; her many surgeries--nearly 30 all told--and finally her death, a possible suicide, in 1954.

Of the roughly 200 paintings Kahlo left behind, nearly a third are self-portraits. Everyone, by now, is familiar with the image: that stony stare beneath the dark eyebrow, a gaze that seems to challenge the viewer. It's an expression that remains essentially unchanged in picture after picture.

As a yardstick of the artist's meteoric rise, her painting Self-Portrait With Monkey and Parrot fetched $3.2 million on the auction block--the highest price ever paid for a Latin American work of art and the second-highest ever for a female artist.

Now adding to the scores of biographies and monographs on the painter is The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. In a full-page ad in a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review, the publisher trumpeted the book's release with all the subtlety of a carnival barker: "Artist ... lover ... icon. ... Her most private thoughts and images published for the first time."

The claim is only partially true. The diary does contain Kahlo's "private thoughts and images"; "for the first time" is arguable. Despite a nickname of which she was fond--the Ancient Concealer--Frida Kahlo was not known as a keeper of secrets. She held little back in her art.

Nearly everything revealed in the diary is already to be found in her paintings, which function as a visual record of her obsessions. Happily, even to those who are saturated with Kahlo's well-tended myth, her diary, which is a kind of exploratory palette for the blend of Surrealism and folk art that constitute her paintings, may prove interesting as a glimpse inside the creative process.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo consists of the full-color facsimile edition of Kahlo's original 170-page journal, which comes attractively sandwiched between an elegiac essay by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and commentaries and English translation by art historian Sara Lowe.

Kahlo reportedly kept the diary over the last 10 years of her life, although, since she was notoriously capricious with dates, that claim is difficult to substantiate. The entries are rarely chronological, Kahlo's sense of time being, as Fuentes observes, "interior time, a subjective experience of night and day, summer and fall."

It was, at any rate, a trying time for Kahlo; she was in physical decline and was forced to spend months bedridden, becoming a semi-invalid addicted to pain-killing drugs and doctors. After the amputation of her right leg, a year before her death, she became deeply depressed.

She was not interested in recording daily events and observations; neither did she attempt to keep an account of the times in which she lived. Instead, she used her diary as a repository for spontaneous images and thoughts, a stream-of-consciousness pictograph that formed the pure expression of a highly imaginative inner life.

The facsimilie begins with text and erupts into color. Contained within are whimsical doodlings, fragments of letters never sent, symbols and puns, pre-Columbian imagery, dreams, myths, poems--an entire private cosmography.

To those who know her only through her paintings, it comes as a surprise to find that Kahlo was as verbal as she was visual. In fact, she had an extraordinary vocabulary. The diary is a cryptic tangle of language, sprinkled with words in Russian, German, Nahuatl--the Aztec language--and even Sanskrit. Like a poet, she collected list of words that are beautiful to look at and hypnotic to recite.

Fuentes elegantly compares Kahlo's fractured self to the schisms and disjunctions, the wars and succession of empires, the turbulence that existed within each epoch of Mexico. While Rivera's murals depicted Mexico's external political and social upheavals, Kahlo's diminutive canvases captured her personal dramas, the sufferings of the psyche and the body. Taken as a whole, her paintings comprise an unfolding history of her many resurrections.

Her great subject, of course, was pain. Kahlo's twin afflictions were Diego Rivera and her own wounded body, and she made the most of both themes in her art and her journal. Among the handful of other motifs the diary returns to is politics--Kahlo was an ardent Communist who became enamored of Stalin toward the end of her life. Her last unfinished painting is a portrait of herself posed with the Soviet tyrant.

But the diary is not all misery. Despite her pervasive health problems, Kahlo had a flamboyant sense of humor. She loved the film comedians of her time, and her prankster spirit--the anarchic sense of fun that inspired her to make her life into theater, a costume epic, a slapstick tragedy that would live on and on--is evident in abundance.

In her introductory essay, Lowe says that Kahlo never intended her diary for public scrutiny. But to the artist, who sought to put not only her image but the details of her personal life squarely into public view, the publication of her journal might constitute a triumph.

The genius of the facsimile is that it attempts--and nearly succeeds--to duplicate the experience of leafing through the actual document (which is displayed under glass at the Museo Frida Kahlo). Although the diary is an echo of the real thing, it is an artful echo. With a little imagination it is not hard to conjure the texture of aged leather, embossed in gold with the initials FK; the smell of dried ink; the fragile old paper. The faithfully reproduced jagged edges of ripped-out pages and the stray drops of spilled ink that Kahlo teased into Rorschach-like shapes serve to create an eerie sense of voyeuristic immediacy.

Lowe's attempts at interpreting Kahlo's enigmatic ramblings and esoteric glyphs are less successful. Her commentaries sometimes obfuscate the lyrical quality of Kahlo's visual metaphors. Psychological speculations about art are often a shot in the dark; a diarist's private lexicon may have meaning only for the author. One can almost imagine Kahlo having a hearty laugh at Lowe's earnest interpretations of her random doodles.

With the publication of her diary, there is little left of Kahlo's life that has not been exhibited, revealed, analyzed or appropriated. Her lifelong home in the old neighborhood of Coyoacan in Mexico City is now a shrine of sorts: the Museo Frida Kahlo, which admits 10,000 visitors a month. To accommodate their insatiable appetites, a recent renovation added a gift shop, which offers books, prints, calendars, T-shirts and videocassettes of the Mexican film Frida.

In the museum gift shop of the New York Metropolitan Museum recently, I counted displays of coffee mugs, key chains, puzzles, mouse pads, cards, neckties and dozens of other products stamped with the likenesses of famous works of art, Kahlo's prominently included. While the mass reproduction of her work is an indication that Frida Kahlo has made it to the big time, the numbing overexposure is the price she's paying for beatification. The sad irony to the viewer in the presence of an original Frida Kahlo is that instead of being moved by the intensity of the artist's accomplishment he or she may only be reminded of a coffee cup.

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