nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. FRIDA IN AMERICAThe Creative Awakening of a Great ArtistBy Celia Stahr It’s said that Frida Kahlo’s status in popular culture resembles a cross between a cult and a brand. At a time when oven mitts stamped with her likeness are found in museum gift shops, and her prosthetic leg is displayed like a saint’s relic in exhibitions, it’s hard to imagine Kahlo as an unknown artist at the start of her career. During the Depression, when she began to invent the flamboyant forms of identification with the Indigenous Mexicanidad for which she became famous, one could not have foreseen the current extent of Fridamania — our fascination with her carefully constructed personal mythos.
(At some point she even changed her birth date from 1907 to 1910, the start of the Mexican Revolution, and elided the “e” in “Frieda” to make her name more authentically Mexican. ) It’s intriguing to encounter an artist in the act of becoming herself, and in “Frida in America,” Celia Stahr aims to do just that, returning us to Kahlo’s early days in San Francisco, New York and Detroit in the 1930s, when she and her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, were newlyweds. While Rivera was absorbed in painting large-scale social realist tableaus, Kahlo began fashioning modes of self-presentation in implicit opposition to the capitalist values of their host country, then painting canvases in the same style, marking major steps in her “creative awakening. ” Stahr, who teaches art history at the University of San Francisco, bases her narrative on the diary of Lucienne Bloch, a woman who became Kahlo’s confidante in the United States, as well as on correspondence between Kahlo and her family back in Mexico, beginning her book with the artist’s arrival with Rivera in San Francisco in 1930.
There, Frida came to see her mixed heritage (she had a German father and a Mexican mother) as a source of distinction and started to develop the image of the mestiza in her appearance and work as an icon of Mexican national identity. She did this first in her dress, emphasizing her “outsider status” to distinguish herself from Americans, who incurred her ongoing hostility. (Letters to her mother made an exception for San Francisco’s Chinese: They too were outsiders, their costumes and festivities “simpáticos. ”) In a work from this period, “Portrait of Eva Frederick,” Kahlo painted her African-American subject as both “an independent ‘New Woman’” and a “New Negro,” Stahr writes.
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Moreover, she had Frederick dress in a “Mexican-looking” garment, suggesting that Kahlo saw something of herself in her model. Her 1931 canvas “Frieda and Diego Rivera,” often called a wedding portrait, depicts the artist as a diminutive but proud campesina — “a nationalist image,” Stahr notes, intended for an American audience — next to her imposingly large husband. Presenting herself in her painting as the wife of a famous artist, the 23-year-old Kahlo had begun confronting head-on “the complexity of being a stranger in a strange land. ” The complexities of the Riveras’ relations with America intensified when they moved to New York, where the Museum of Modern Art wanted to host a retrospective of Diego’s work.
The contrast between the high society with whom they often socialized and the ordinary citizens suffering the effects of the Depression shocked Frida. She complained in a letter to her mother of “the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food or home,” adding, of Diego, “Unfortunately, he has to work for these filthy rich asses. ” In New York, the couple were lionized by artists and photographers.
“As Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston had done in San Francisco, Carl Van Vechten photographed Frida in Tehuana garb, depicting her with a touch of the “noble savage.”
” She played an important part in these sessions through her choice of costumes: “Whether they involved men’s clothing or the Indigenous styles of Mexico, she was bringing out an aspect of her complicated self. ” Stahr addresses Kahlo’s bisexuality in a speculative account of her acquaintance with Georgia O’Keeffe. Rivera watched with amusement as Kahlo flirted with O’Keeffe in the presence of her photographer husband, Alfred Stieglitz, then the most influential gallerist in New York. Kahlo boasted that she had done more than flirt with O’Keeffe — at the time perhaps the most successful American woman artist, and for this reason, Stahr argues, a role model.
But while Kahlo clearly desired O’Keeffe’s support, there is little evidence to suggest that O’Keeffe responded to her flattery. Stahr asserts that Kahlo’s infatuation “spilled over into a creative confluence, as the younger, more inexperienced Frida took on subjects that the older and more established Georgia had boldly painted. ” This hypothesis prompts her to interpret one of Kahlo’s New York drawings as “a peek into her private dreams and desires” — discerning in it a profile of O’Keeffe, an interpretive gambit that seems far-fetched. The Riveras’ New York visit concluded in 1932 with their move to Detroit, where Diego had been commissioned to paint another large-scale mural.
Interviewed by a reporter, Frida declared that she too was an artist, “the greatest in the world. ” (The reporter allowed, “She does paint with great charm. ”) From then on, she asserted her originality while adopting a wry stance as the genius’s wife, a situation further complicated by a pregnancy. The self-portraits Kahlo produced in Detroit dramatize her unflinching response to the miscarriage that ensued after a period of doubt about her fitness for motherhood.
Looking at “Henry Ford Hospital (Flying Bed),” a portrait of the artist lying naked in her own blood, Stahr writes, “viewers, particularly those steeped in the Catholic imagery of a crucified Christ,” would have known that Kahlo “was referencing this image of suffering” in her disquieting version of a retablo painting, set against a frieze of Detroit’s factories. This canvas was followed by similar portraits, including a provocative image of a woman giving birth — titled “My Birth,” it is now owned by Madonna — painted after the death of Kahlo’s mother. Stahr suggests that Kahlo’s raw, unrelenting vision during this period culminated in her “Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States” (1932), a faux-naïf portrait of the artist dressed in traditional garb and holding a Mexican flag. With this image, Kahlo positioned herself in a symbolic landscape — a Ford factory on one side, Mexican ruins on the other — that is also a confrontational perspective on the American scene.
She left Detroit in 1933 confident that she was an artist in her own right, having found her subject matter in her ambivalent reactions to the United States. Stahr intersperses chapters on Kahlo’s years in the three American cities with flashbacks to her childhood and accounts of trips to Mexico and of her return to New York in 1933, emboldened by the creation of what Stahr considers her best work. That year, “she left Gringolandia a different person than when she’d arrived. … It was the place where her creative spirit broke through to new heights.
” From then on, Kahlo would turn her uncompromising gaze on a number of subjects, chiefly herself but also us, as we stare, riveted by her wild, brave aesthetic performances. Stahr’s chronicle of Kahlo’s breakthrough includes vivid descriptions of the scenes that inspired her, along with many pages in which the narrative is suspended while she details her subject’s use of Mexican motifs, fantastic imagery and arcane formulas. Comparisons of Kahlo’s suffering to that of John the Baptist or Jesus may strike those other than Frida fans as something of a reach. For the broader dimensions of her traumatic life and fierce courage, readers might turn to Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography, “Frida,” published before Fridamania attained its current frenzy — a phenomenon owing in no small part to her art’s congruence with current ideas about gender politics and cultural identity.
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