Frida Kahlo
"A ribbon around a bomb."
Andre Breton on Kahlo's art
"I have suffered two big accidents in my life, one
in which a streetcar ran over me. The other was Diego,"
Frida Kahlo
"Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden
springs of the social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish
to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a
little closer, and you will see clearly enough gashes and spots made by
vandals: Catholics and other reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists.
These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You have before
you not simply a 'painting,' an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but
a living part of the class struggle. And it is at the same time a
masterpiece!"
Leon Trotsky
There is a lot to commend in this visually stunning and serious three-part
series on the life and politics of Frida Kahlo. I say serious because previous documentaries
or books about Kahlo have been
pretentious and flippant. The complex nature of Kahlo's life deserves a serious
approach. But having said that, there are several serious political weaknesses
in the programs.
The first of a three-part series on the legendary Mexican
painter, The Making and Breaking, manages to squeeze so much information into
one episode that it nearly ruins the next two parts. Despite much being known
about Kahlo and her work selling for obscene amounts( (Her 1949 painting Diego
Y Yo sold for almost $35m in 2021), the program still manages to inform and
enlighten.
There is no single narrator. There are interviews with biographers, art
historians from Mexico and the US, and miraculously surviving family members.
Kahlo's great-niece Cristina Kahlo and Diego Rivera's grandson.
She was an exceptional child born in 1907. Kahlo contracted polio
in 1912. She later told people she was born in 1910 to ally herself with the
new, post-revolution Mexico. She was born at The Blue House in Coyoacán on the
outskirts of Mexico City. Kahlo was a fervent socialist at an early age, and in
1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party, where she met Diego Rivera.
Rivera supported the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution
and the Trotskyist Fourth International for some time. You would not have known
the latter watching this program. Also, when historical figures such as Tina
Modotti are mentioned, they are treated largely superficially. The Italian
photographer Tina Modotti was a fellow radical along with Kahlo. Her lover was the
notorious GPU assassin Vittorio Vidali, alias Carlos Contreras. Another lover
was the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. Both had connections to Stalinism, and
their murderous gangsterism was never mentioned. The BBC film ignores that Siqueiros
played a central role in the unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life in May
1940.
Jesse Olsen points out in his article, "Modotti is an
example of how the Mexican and Russian revolutions inspired young artists.
However, she is also a tragic example of the many artists who came under the
sway of Stalinism and paid a terrible price. Modotti worked for Stalin's KGB
(the Soviet secret service) from the mid-1930s and was associated with the
Italian Stalinist functionary Vittorio Vidali, who, as early as 1927, had been
a Stalinist operative in the Mexican party. Together with the muralist
Siqueiros, he tried to murder Trotsky in 1940. Siqueiros, the former communist, and artist—like the Communist Party of Mexico itself—had become part of
Stalin's apparatus."[1]
While Kahlo is the program's central figure, her long-time lover
and fellow artist Diego Rivera looms large in the films(no pun intended). Their
relationship was stormy, but they both understood the beauty and importance of
their artistic work. Kahlo described Rivera as "an
architect in his paintings, in his thinking process, and in his passionate
desire to build a functional, solid and harmonious society... He fights at
every moment to overcome mankind's fear and stupidity." Rivera spoke highly
and perceptively of Kahlo, saying, "It is not tragedy that rules Frida's
work... The darkness of her pain is just a velvet background for the marvellous
light of her physical strength, her delicate sensibility, her bright
intelligence, and her invincible strength as she struggles to live and show her
fellow humans how to resist hostile forces and come out triumphant."
As mentioned in the film Rivera came under sustained attack(primarily
from the Stalinists) for taking commissions from American capitalists. The Communist Party
smeared Rivera as an "agent of North American imperialism and the
millionaire, Morrow".
Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party after receiving
several commissions from the government and accepting an assignment from the US
ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, to paint a mural in the former Cortéz
Palace of Cuernavaca. In 1933 Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural entitled
Man at the Crossroads by John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller objected when Rivera
added the great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the mural, and Rockefeller
had the mural destroyed.[2]
Rivera defended the mural saying the portrait of Lenin was
"the only correct painting to be made in the building [as] an exact and
concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at present,
and an indication of the road that man must follow to liquidate hunger,
oppression, disorder and war."
Kahlo and Rivera came around the Trotskyist movement and briefly
had a close relationship with Trotsky. In 1938, Rivera collaborated with
Trotsky and Andre Breton in writing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary
Art[3] , which
called for "a complete and radical
reconstruction of society."
For a while Trotsky held Rivera in very high regard, saying, "Do
you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution?
Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is
like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a little closer, and you will see
clearly enough gashes and spots made by vandals: Catholics and other
reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give
even greater life to the frescoes. You have before you not simply a 'painting,'
an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class
struggle. And it is, at the same time, a masterpiece! In the field of painting,
the October Revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but
in faraway Mexico… Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all
epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his
genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted
him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense,
above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without
October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression
and insurrection would never have attained such breadth and profundity."[4]
Despite Trotsky's glowing tribute, he was aware of the political
inadequacies of both Kahlo and Rivera. As Joanne Laurier perceptively writes, "It
seems safe to suggest that neither Rivera nor Kahlo—remarkable artists and not
first and foremost political thinkers—ever understood the essence of Trotsky's
struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy, including the theory of permanent
revolution, and remained to one extent or another under the influence of
Mexican nationalism and that primarily
accounts for both of them ending up, chastened and demoralized, in the camp of
Stalinism."[5]
While this three-part documentary has much to like and commend,
there are some serious political flaws. For instance, trying to cram the last
and most important fifteen years of Kahlo's life into 15 minutes is madness and
politically unforgivable. There is also a tendency to concentrate on Kahlo's
feelings without putting them in a wider political context. That context is the
world-historical struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism. The fact that this
struggle was at the center of Kahlo's and Rivera's lives is deliberately
missing from the film.
The film is too preoccupied with Rivera's infidelities and
Kahlo's "bisexuality", which is an adaptation to the current
intellectual environment. The #MeToo movement has adopted Kahlo as one of their
own. These layers of the so-called intelligentsia have become affluent and have
moved far to the right. They ignore Kahlo's revolutionary politics and are
hostile to the working class. Despite this, the films are worth seeing.
Further reading
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography by Diego Rivera (Author)
[1] Frida Kahlo retrospective
in Berlin—Part 2: Frida Kahlo and communism-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/09/kah2-s11.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_at_the_Crossroads
[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/x01/towards-progressive-art.pdf
[4] Art and Politics in Our
Epoch-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm
[5] What made Frida Kahlo remarkable?- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/11/kahl-n07.html
