Frida Kahlo (2020) - full transcript

"It's been such a long time since I've written

that I don't know where to start this letter.

I've never suffered so much,

and I did not think I could take so much pain.

I know it's going to take me years

to be able to get out of this mess that I have in my head.

That's why I've decided to tell you everything now."

Frida Kahlo was a genius.

She is in many ways a unique artist.

Her work transcends time.

She is iconic.



You feel like you know her.

I've met people who really don't like Frida Kahlo's paintings.

I think it is because they are so visceral, so personal.

She could say, through art, the unsayable,

the repressed, the taboo, and give it a voice.

That's why she is so important.

Whatever point people enter into thinking about Frida Kahlo,

whether it's the biography, whether it's the tragedy,

or whether it's the,

"What was this artist doing and who were they as an intellectual?"

there is a story there to be enjoyed

that is deeply immersive and captivating.

Frida Kahlo was born on the 6th of July 1907

in Coyoacán, a fashionable suburb of Mexico City.



She lived with her parents and three sisters in a house built by her father,

which became known as the Casa Azul – The Blue House.

Her mother was Mexican, of Indian and Spanish descent,

and Catholic, which is important,

because there's a lot of Catholic imagery in Frida Kahlo's paintings.

Her father was German and an immigrant to Mexico,

and Frida Kahlo had polio when she was a young child

and her father was the one that helped her get stronger afterward,

getting her to do all sorts of athletic things.

She was the child that he said, "Frida is the most like me"

and he almost treated her like a boy.

Mexico City was a very cosmopolitan city.

It had had a cultural life for several hundred years.

The Mexico City elite are very much emulating the high culture of Europe.

And that's something that might have been what motivated her father

to come to Mexico in the first place.

This sophisticated capital with economic opportunity and cultural opportunity.

Guillermo Kahlo, my great-grandfather

was from Pforzheim in Germany on the edge of the Black Forest

He arrived in Mexico aged 19 with a backpack

without speaking any Spanish

He was an avid reader

He painted accomplished watercolours

in a European tradition

He was a photographer

and that was the first contact Frida had with art

seeing her father take photographs

I'm sure that the way later on

Frida came to pose throughout her life

in a very natural way

originated from there

posing for her father Guillermo Kahlo.

She was a very active child

and rambunctious and mischievous and kind of fun.

She was one of the very few girls

accepted to the best school in Mexico City,

the National Preparatory School,

and there she became part of a group called Las Cachuchas.

They were all very brilliant

and they actually even became a little bit political.

writers, philosophers...

One of them was her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias.

And it's really important to understand

that Frida Kahlo was on a track to become a doctor,

so her schooling was in science.

It was a very macho society, very traditional.

She was very different from the beginning.

But one day in 1925 - September 17th, to be exact -

she and Alejandro Gómez Arias took a bus from Mexico City,

where their school was, to Coyoacán, where the Blue House is, and...

a tram slammed across and just completely devastated her.

It was a fatal crash. People died.

Kahlo was changed forever.

The accident fractured Kahlo's spine,

collarbone, ribs and right leg in eleven places.

Her right foot and left shoulder were dislocated,

and a metal handrail pierced her pelvis.

She spent months recovering.

Enforced confinement returned Kahlo

to her childhood interests in drawing and painting.

Although untutored, she had already shown artistic talent as a young girl.

"I began to paint after the accident.

Papa gave me a little box of paints

and a small book that told me how to prepare the canvases.

My boyfriend Gómez Arias bought me books on painters from Europe.

These were the first books on art that fell into my hands."

When we think about what happened,

she was hospitalised, she felt very lonely

she had to drop out of school,

she would never be a doctor,

people thought she would never walk again.

There was a mirror fixed inside the canopy of her bed,

and a wooden easel, and she started to paint.

And this painting she painted for Alejandro.

At that time she complained

that Alejandro didn't come to see her

His family decided to send him to Germany

so he didn't have to spend his life with an ill woman

He left her

This painting reflects her broad knowledge of the European art

that her father had taught her about

but also her great love that will never be forgotten

for Alejandro Gómez Arias.

Kahlo's Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress

is a very important early painting,

not the first painting but the first sort of formal self-portrait.

The portrait relates to the photograph that her father took of her,

where she is wearing a black silk dress and she is seated in a chair

and she's holding a book, not a brush, not a palette,

and her hair is short there as well.

So Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress

is Kahlo making a declarative statement to her boyfriend

for whom she painted that painting

that I am the alluring seductive emancipated young modern.

We see her with that intense gaze that will become her look.

When she wrote to Alejandro, she called it "Your Botticelli",

so she associated herself with Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

When you look at the way her hands are placed,

the gesture is a kind of awkward beginner's attempt

to show the Botticelli hand.

She has a very low-cut dress,

so she tries to accentuate her femininity

although she keeps her connected eyebrows

which, by the way, she often writes that she loves her eyebrows.

I think that's a kind of rebellion that speaks to me.

She knew she could adopt an alternative beauty.

It's a beautiful painting, partly for its emotional resonance, I think.

She was able to put into it that feeling of need

which is strong in all of Frida Kahlo's art,

of desperate need for somebody to love her.

Her earliest paintings, other than the self-portrait,

are almost all of family and friends.

They're very dark, and they're very European, sort of Renaissance.

And she clearly saw Italian Renaissance paintings.

I mean people in Mexico were extremely sophisticated

about what was going on in Europe.

It wasn't an isolated country.

Overwhelming medical bills forced Kahlo

to abandon her studies and her dreams of a medical career.

Instead she turned to politics.

In 1928 she joined the Communist Party

Diego Rivera.

Muralism.

The muralists formed in the wake of the 1910 Revolution -

a decade long civil war

that ended with the overthrowing of a 30-year dictatorship

and the birth of a new Mexico.

You have to remember that Mexico was a new country,

with a new government,

with a new social movement that was reflected in its art.

You had Diego painting murals in the public buildings.

And after the revolution,

Mexican society changed drastically.

Mexico became the centre of culture in America.

You had a great migration of painters, writers and intellectuals

coming to Mexico to experience this social revolution.

You cannot understand the muralists and their art

if you don't understand the revolution

The revolution changed Mexico

It brought about renewal and reform

It embraced both popular Mexican art and pre-Hispanic culture

and gave birth to a great number of major artists

who defined Mexico by saying "We are Mexican."

It was a renaissance that was political,

dismissing the colonial, dismissing the Spanish,

dismissing the bourgeois

and trying to adapt and adopt

the native, indigenous Mexican culture,

the pre-Hispanic culture.

Kahlo became very, very politically aware.

One of the earliest photographs of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera together

is she's wearing this pencil skirt

and she's marching with this huge Rivera,

and it's a Mayday parade

and it's for the workers that they're marching.

And so you have in Frida and Diego the perfect couple.

One was a revolutionary that was free-flying

and the other you have the very professional powerful painter

that painted the spirit of Mexico

and the spirit of the people of Mexico.

Rivera was also a larger-than-life celebrity,

notorious for his numerous and very public love affairs.

He was to change the direction of Kahlo's life,

artistically, politically and emotionally.

They married in 1929.

She apparently wore a servant's clothes.

In her wedding photograph she's smoking.

You can see her breaking all the proper modes of behaviour even then.

Her mother said, "It's like a marriage between an elephant and a dove."

Her father was not against it.

They had financial problems,

and he realised that Diego Rivera was going to be able to support her

and pay her medical bills,

that were going to be large for the rest of her life.

It was a tumultuous marriage.

But her first paintings after the marriage

are very different from the ones before it.

In 1930 Diego Rivera was commissioned

to paint a series of murals in the United States.

In November the couple arrived in San Francisco.

Kahlo's new married life in America

was marked by a change in her mode of dress,

and also her style of painting.

In San Francisco,

in opposition to what the American women are wearing,

she puts on the persona of the Tehuana,

the Mexican woman.

That's the first time she actually embraces that.

She was always interested in Mexicanidad

and devoted to all things Mexican for political reasons,

but here she kind of makes it her own,

that's where she really establishes her sartorial identity.

And she chooses especially costumes from Tehuantepec

where the women are known for their matriarchal society,

for their independence, beauty,

but also its a pre-Hispanic area where indigenous culture thrived

in spite of colonial culture.

So it's a very political statement.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera was painted in San Francisco.

The painting is intentionally naïve.

This is a style of painting in this context of revolutionary transformation.

So in a country where the elite had valued the high art of Europe

since the colonial period

they make a conscious choice to reject all of that

and to turn towards the local,

what we call in Spanish "arte popular"

which is folk art, the art of the people.

Against a green background, you have Frida Kahlo,

for the first time, showing herself as a Tehuana woman,

wearing a red rebozo and a green dress

and her hair braided in Tehuana style.

And next to her is her husband, the great Diego Rivera.

And right at the centre we see her placing her hand on his.

Her head is tilted towards him.

His head turns away and it is in the direction of his other hand,

a palette and brushes.

She shows herself as the demure little Mexican wife

and shows him as the great master painter.

You see her in the role of wife and in the role of "La Mexicana",

the paradigmatic Mexican woman.

Eventually we see her give up on the role of wife

but she never gives up on the role of the Mexican woman.

That becomes just a central part of her identity.

From 1926, where she painted her first portrait,

to this more Mexican painting of her with Rivera

in 1931,

is a great leap,

but what happened afterwards is an even greater leap.

So if we move from 1931 to 1932

we see her style, her painting, her art change dramatically.

This portrait representing Luther Burbank

is about a North American scientist

Frida didn't know him as such

but visited his house in Santa Rosa, California

during a trip taken with Diego Rivera

who had been invited to paint murals on various public buildings.

Burbank had died already

but Burbank was a celebrity horticulturalist.

His life's mission was to increase the world's food supply

by hybridising plants.

So Kahlo's painting is directly based on a photograph

that appeared in a magazine.

There perhaps the first evidence that Kahlo painted from photographs.

The Luther Burbank portrait is fascinating

because it is demonstrable evidence

that Kahlo had been exposed to some of the ideas of Surrealism.

The Surrealist manifestos were being read by Mexican intellectuals.

There are articles in the Mexico City newspapers debating what Surrealism is.

So I have no doubt in my mind

that Kahlo would have been reading the Mexico City newspaper.

A sketch of the painting survives

and she makes some changes to the composition.

So this is also evidence that Kahlo wasn't taking the blank canvas

and entirely creating the composition on the canvas.

She was sketching.

You can compare the sketch of Burbank with the painting

and there are some important differences.

She changes the foliate texture of the leaves.

She includes two trees in the final painting

that are a direct reference to Luther Burbank's hybridising plants.

In one the tree is a conventional looking citrus tree with leafy foliage

and in the other tree there's almost no foliage

and there are these gigantic yellow fruits.

In the final painting Burbank emerges from the trunk of a tree.

He's holding a philodendron,

the two citrus trees are in the background

and his feet have transformed into roots

that are anchored in a body buried in the ground.

That is based on Burbank's own story

because he had himself buried on his property.

So there are always artistic conversations in Kahlo's paintings.

I think in Frida's case

she identified with him in that she saw him

as a man that in a way experimented with life and death

It reminded her of how the pre-Hispanic world

perceived this cycle of life

where man finds sustenance to live on Earth

from the earth itself

But once dead we are buried back in the earth

So she represents him as a man-tree

We see him standing but his feet become the tree trunk

that is rooted in the earth

that is rooted in a corpse

which in fact is his own corpse

She allows herself to create this fantastic world

between Luther Burbank's reality

combined with the pre-Hispanic world

which was so important to her.

So it's a very important early mature painting

because then she spends the decade of the '30s

making these small format, small figure,

complex allegorical compositions.

In April 1932 Rivera and Kahlo travelled to Detroit

where Rivera was to paint a mural

on the theme of modern industry at the Institute of Arts.

Rivera was delighted to be in the heart of American industry.

Kahlo was less pleased.

"This city seems to me like a shabby old village.

I don't like it.

But I am happy because Diego is working very contentedly here,

and he has found a lot of material for his frescoes.

He is enchanted with the factories and the machines,

like a child with a new toy.

The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting,

the rest, as in all of the United States, is ugly and stupid.

The most important thing I want to consult with you about

is the fact I am two months pregnant.

Given my health I thought it would be better to have an abortion.

I want you to tell me what you think in all honesty

since I don't know what to do.

You know better than anyone else what kind of shape I am in.

First, because of the inheritance I carry in my blood,

I don't think the child will come out healthy.

Secondly, I am not strong

and the pregnancy would weaken me even more.

Here I don't have any relatives who could help me

during and after my pregnancy.

No matter how much poor Diego wants to help me he cannot,

since he has all that work and a thousand more things.

I don't think Diego is very interested in having a child

since what he is most concerned with is his work,

and he is more than right.

Children would come in third or fourth place."

She became pregnant in Detroit

and after two months she began bleeding

One month later she wrote again to her friend Dr Leo Eloesser

and she told him she had been bleeding

they had taken her to hospital

and she had lost the baby.

Henry Ford Hospital is one of the first works of art

that really made Frida Kahlo a radical, bold, unprecedented artist.

There is a whole tradition of how the naked woman in a bed is shown

but Kahlo completely dismantles that tradition.

She is showing her experience,

but the experience is one of miscarriage

which has never been displayed anywhere.

It wasn't worthy of art.

So showing a naked woman but not as an object of desire,

not as a sexualised object,

but as the subject of her own story.

She shows her body kind of twisted,

she shows her stomach bloated and she shows vaginal blood.

To the best of my knowledge

this the first time ever where vaginal blood is on display.

Surrounding her and linked to her with red strings

are different objects that she associated with her failed body.

She also has the unborn foetus which is what she lost.

In the background we see Henry Ford Factory

which is where Diego spent all of his time painting

so we have this tension between

the male, external, Diego Rivera focus of Detroit

and then this intimate female experience of loss.

The other thing that is radical here

is that we have a lot of visualisations of birth,

think of nativity scenes,

think of the birth of the Virgin,

but we never see birth visualised in such a way.

Here you have the naked body producing blood and no baby.

So it's an anti-nativity scene and that's why it's radical.

I also think it is a work that begins to take

devotional paintings in churches as a reference

These devotional paintings which tell a story.

These traditional Mexican devotional paintings

were known as retablos or ex-votos.

Small, naïve works painted on metal.

In times of distress you would relay your concerns to a retablos painter.

For a few pesos, they painted your story and wrote an inscription underneath.

You displayed the work in your local church or shrine

and asked for deliverance from the saint.

These retablos became a major influence on Kahlo's work.

When she discovered ex-votos

she fell in love with them so much that she started her own collection

She wasn't a Catholic

but she was very focused on its roots

its culture

It was a source of inspiration in many of her works

Possibly because of her illness

she was unable to paint on a canvas

or to go up scaffolding

She adopted small formats inspired by the ex-votos

with the technique of oil on wood or metal

They were painted on metal

because they would be hung on a wall

A wall where there is damp

and a canvas would rot

They were painted on sheets of copper, zinc or tin

This tin which was often used for storing tequila

when they transported tequila containers

Her smaller pieces are clearly based on an ex-voto

I call them 'little films' with a beginning and an end

where the story is told through the scene

and the text gives us the story that we want to tell

I think that it's true Mexican popular art

because you don't need to follow rules

or academic thinking to paint an ex-voto

You just need to have the heart and the faith

that you find in those things.

"Frida began to work on a series of masterpieces

which had no precedent in the history of art.

Paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance,

reality, cruelty, and suffering.

Never before had a woman put such agonised poetry on canvas

as Frida did in Detroit."

Diego Rivera.

She became an artist –

and we see that she intentionally knows that she became an artist –

in August of 1932, so it's like a month after she almost died.

She goes to a lithograph shop, a print shop,

and she makes the first and last lithograph in her life.

She painted on the litho, on the stone.

She painted like a fresco from one corner to the diagonal corner,

and here we have Frida Kahlo split in half.

One half of her we see the foetus.

We see cell division.

In utero you also see a foetus,

and there are different ages, so it's the story, the biography.

You see when she tried to abort the child

and then the age he would have been at the time of the miscarriage,

but that's the part of her that was not productive;

that she couldn't reproduce.

The other part of her,

there is a lot of the fertility of nature,

with a lot of shapes that echo the foetus,

but then she grows a third arm

and in her hand she holds the palette.

It's the same palette that Diego Rivera held before.

So a failed mother, no longer a wife,

she's on her own without him,

she holds the palette and it's the birth of an artist.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera returned to Mexico.

She hated Detroit.

He was furious at Frida for having made him go back.

They moved back, not into Coyoacán,

but back into some houses

that Juan O'Gormen a modern architect had built for them in San Angel.

These were two attached houses,

one for him and one for her,

with a bridge upstairs leading between the two.

When Frida was mad at Diego she could just close the door.

He would have to plead with her to let him across on that bridge.

It was a bad time for both of them,

and Diego Rivera took it out on Frida Kahlo

and he had an affair with her younger sister Cristina,

who was just a year younger than Frida

and was the person closest to Frida in the world.

They adored each other.

This was really hurtful so they separated.

It was to be the first of many separations in their relationship.

"You know better than anyone what Diego means to me.

She was the sister whom I loved the most

and whom I tried to help as much as I could,

that's why the situation became horribly complicated."

Depression gripped Kahlo,

who was hospitalised for an abortion and yet more bone surgery.

"It is getting worse every day.

I have been so sick that I could only paint after I left the hospital,

although without enthusiasm

and without getting anything out of my work either.

I have no friends here.

I am completely alone.

I trusted Diego would change but now I see that is impossible.

He wants total freedom.

He lives a full life without the emptiness of mine.

I have nothing because I don't have him."

She took an apartment in Mexico City for a period of time

and she stopped wearing her Tehuana dress.

She started wearing European clothes and she cut off her hair.

When she was being two-timed by Rivera her paintings got a lot bloodier.

She painted A Few Small Nips and it is one of her bloodiest paintings.

If you look closely, you'll see little places

where she stabbed the top of the frame.

That painting shows

probably a prostitute being stabbed by her boyfriend.

This comes from a newspaper article.

The man, according to the newspaper article, said,

"But I only gave her a few small nips."

She said that she had to paint it

because she herself felt murdered by life.

Kahlo found solace in drink and lovers.

"I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows

but the bastards have learnt to swim.

And now decency and good behaviour weary me."

Following a number of love affairs of her own,

Kahlo eventually reconciled with Rivera.

Their commitment to communism remained strong,

leading them to provide a sanctuary

to the exiled Marxist leader Leon Trotsky at the Blue House in 1937.

This arrangement also led to a secret and brief affair

between Kahlo and the Russian revolutionary.

They made light of each other's love affairs.

He thought it was perfectly permissible for him

to have as many affairs as he wanted.

He didn't totally approve of Frida Kahlo having affairs.

He didn't mind the affairs that she had with women.

But he minded the ones that she had with men and he said,

"I don't want to share my toothbrush with anybody."

My Nurse and I can be interpreted biographically,

culturally, socially and politically.

Kahlo said that when she was eleven months old

her sister Cristina was born

and her mother couldn't nurse them all.

So they sent her to a nana, to an indigenous wet nurse.

Her sister displaces her in her mother's breasts, in her mother's arms.

She's probably referencing

Diego Rivera's affair with her sister Cristina.

She says, "I always had to share love."

I think My nurse and I shows how meticulous she was

She learned this from her father

because she helped him retouch photographs

he took in his studio

We see the details

the carefully applied brushstrokes

They are not passionate or messy brushstrokes

Seldom do we see that in her art

It's always very small

very cared for, very detailed

We have to remember she was bedridden for long periods

both at home and in hospital

She had all the time in the world to paint these pictures.

Any Mexican looking at that painting,

they might not know anything about Frida Kahlo's biography

but they're going to know what the iconographic reference is.

Because that is a Madonna and child

and who is in the figure of Jesus Christ?

Frida Kahlo.

That is shocking too; to depict herself as the saviour.

Had an artist ever done that before?

And then the maternal source

is not the Virgin Mary of the Western Judeo-Christian heritage,

it is an indigenous woman, bare-breasted,

wearing an Olmec mask -

and the Olmecs are the mother culture of Mesoamerica.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera collected pre-Colombian art.

And both of them use pre-Colombian art in their paintings.

It's part of the whole thing of Mexicanidad,

of identifying with the Indian past of Mexico.

Pre-Hispanic art was present in Diego and Frida's house

Rivera was a visionary in the rescuing of pre-Hispanic art

People in Mexico didn't consider them important

But Rivera said "No, this is part of our culture...

...we have to recover this, we have to promote it...

...we have to conserve it."

Diego was passionate about this

These elements such as the pre-Hispanic pieces

gradually entered Frida's work

My Nurse and I was not only Frida's favourite painting

it was also Diego Rivera's

It's a very interesting picture

Very stark.

In April 1938 André Breton

founder of the Surrealist movement in France

came to Mexico to give lectures.

He became fascinated with Kahlo.

"My surprise and joy were unbounded

when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico,

that her work had blossomed forth

in her latest paintings in to pure surreality."

André Breton.

"They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn't,

I never painted dreams.

I painted my own reality.

I have never followed any school or anyone's influence.

I don't expect anything from my work

but the satisfaction that I gain from expressing

what I could not otherwise put into words."

When André Breton met Frida Kahlo

and saw the painting What the Water Gave Me

he labelled it as a Surrealist painting

When Surrealism began in 1920

when the first manifesto was published

following Freud's theories very closely

Freud said that there were four paths to projecting the unconscious

dreaming

drug use

delirium caused by an illness or a fever

and through art

The Surrealists wanted to combine the realms of dreaming and art

For example André Breton when he was going to bed

would put a notebook nearby

He would dream

then on waking would grab the notebook

and write down what came to him

Frida said, "I don't paint my dreams...

...I'm not a Surrealist...

...I paint my memories"

Frida Kahlo's work is what we call magical realism

All of the images are real

They can all be found in the real world

All that happens is that the elements are combined

or brought together in strange situations

Each of the elements is a memory

which she is seeing as though in a delirium

while she is in the bath so you can see her feet

Her right foot is injured

The foot that was affected when she had polio as a child

The foot that will be amputated towards the end of her life

It has a fantastic effect

So it is very close to Surrealism

but, as she said,

it's not surrealist.

Kahlo is a beautiful painter.

For somebody without a formal artistic education

she develops a real facility for handling the medium.

She painted as if she were painting a miniature mural.

She would sketch out the composition

and then she would start in one corner

and sort of paint by numbers, work her way across.

Then apparently she would paint with very, very fine brushes.

If you look at them closely

the surface is so beautifully finished

and it's tiny, tiny little brush marks.

She always had her brushes in a very, very specific order.

She kept them very neat. She loved sable brushes.

When she was at her prime you see the brushstrokes

but very, very delicate little brushstrokes.

People didn't understand how deliberate

and not instantaneous or spontaneous she was.

"I was feeling as lousy as hell when your letter arrived,

I've been having pains in my foot all week

and I'll probably need another operation."

I haven't changed very much since you saw me last.

I wear again my crazy Mexican dress,

and I am as skinny and lazy as always,

without enthusiasm for anything.

I think it's because I am sick

but of course that is only a very good pretext.

I have painted about 12 paintings,

all small and unimportant,

with the same personal subjects that only appeal to me and nobody else.

I sent four of them to a gallery here in Mexico,

the only one that admits any kind of stuff.

Four or five people told me they were swell,

the rest think they are too crazy.

To my surprise Julien Levy wrote me a letter

saying someone had talked to him about my paintings

and he was very interested in having an exhibition in his gallery.

So I accepted and if nothing happens in the meantime

I will go to New York in September."

Frida Kahlo had only two solo exhibitions during her lifetime.

The first one was in November 1st to 15th 1938,

at the Julien Levy Gallery on 57th Street in New York City.

And she showed 25 works.

She actually was happy to have those paintings shown,

but during her lifetime they were seen as esoteric, gruesome.

André Breton wrote, "They're like a ribbon around a bomb."

So that explosive nature is there but so is the ribbon,

the beautiful colours, the luminous technique

so there's an attraction/repulsion there.

The Julien Levy exhibition was actually a great success.

There were a lot of wonderful celebrities there.

A lot of the people were contacts of Rivera,

the bohemian art world -

interested in her persona and her sartorial appearance

a little bit more than in her artwork.

But some people actually were interested in her artwork and there were sales.

Buoyed by the recent success of New York,

Kahlo travelled to Paris

where her work was included in an exhibition of Mexican art.

"There were lots of congratulations for the chica,

among them a big hug from Miro,

and great praises from Kandinsky;

congratulations from Picasso, Tanguy

and from other big shots of Surrealism.

I think the whole thing turned out quite well."

It was then that Frida began to sell

to commercialise her work

In the exhibition she had in the Julien Levy Gallery

she sold around 12 paintings

Paris was the turning point

in terms of her actually having a career.

She did get a lot of praise for her paintings

from all these different famous artists in France.

And the Louvre bought one of her self-portraits.

But when Kahlo got back to Mexico from France

things did not go well with Diego Rivera

and he asked her for a divorce.

Some people say it's because he realised

that she'd had an affair with Trotsky in 1937.

It caused her enormous unhappiness.

"I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering.

And knowing how much I love Diego

you must understand that this trouble will never end in my life.

But after the last fight I had with him,

I understand that for him it is much better to leave me.

Now I feel so rotten and lonely

that it seems to me that nobody in the world

has to suffer the way I do."

In September 1939 Kahlo left the marital home in San Angel

and moved back to her childhood home in Coyoacán.

She also turned back to drink.

Health troubles plagued her.

Pains in her spine and infections in her hands.

Yet she continued to paint,

finishing her largest canvas just as she received her divorce papers.

"There have been two great accidents in my life.

One was the tram...

the other was Diego.

Diego was by far the worst."

The theme of this painting is her separation from Diego Rivera

of their divorce on November 8th 1939

The Frida dressed as a Tehuana

is the Frida who loved Diego Rivera

Diego is the one who asked her

to wear outfits from different regions of Mexico

This Frida is holding a cameo with the image of Diego Rivera

From the cameo emerges a vein

which runs through the heart of Frida in love

of the Frida who loves Diego

to the Frida with a broken heart

And after the break-up

Frida is more European

with a Victorian dress that is very similar

to the one that her mother wore for her wedding in 1898

This painting was shown for the first time

in the International Exhibition of Surrealism

in Mexico in 1940

Diego Rivera also exhibited in this exhibition

So the rumour, the legend

is that Frida is taking revenge for the separation from Diego

and Frida, in revenge, decides to make a big portrait

Here there is a change in the technique

in the impact that she wanted the picture to have

The sky is inspired by El Greco's View of Toledo

Frida knew of his work through books

and from 1938 onwards

in various paintings

we start to see these gloomy skies

these skies where it's just about to rain

In The Two Fridas

the element that gives us

the feeling of the suffering that Frida Kahlo is experiencing

is the sky.

Also the veins running through the picture

are a recurring motif in Frida Kahlo's work

With the veins she always ties together

people, animals

motifs that related to her life

She recreates her experiences

She reinterprets them magically, marvellously

At the same time

there is this dreamlike aspect which has a lot to do with fantasy

It's a painting that we can associate with magical realism

Frida's picture expresses it well

If you see the skirt

you see how the surgical scissors try to cut off the blood flow

and the blood nevertheless ends up becoming the flowers

which appear on the magical part of her dress

It is not entirely like Surrealism which breaks with reality

but reality is exalted in a moment of magic

For that reason I consider it

to be the most important picture in Mexican painting

of the first half of the 20th century.

Following her divorce

Frida Kahlo began a prolific period of self-portrait painting.

Of around 150 paintings in her lifetime,

a third of them were self-portraits.

"Since my subjects have always been my sensations,

my state of mind

and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me,

I have frequently objectified all of this in portraits of myself,

which is the most sincere and real thing

I could do to express how I felt."

So why did Kahlo hit upon this compositional format

in the 1940s of the sort of three-quarter self-portrait?

This is a period in her life where she is more homebound.

At this point she is living at the Casa Azul now, full-time.

But she's also having increased physical problems;

more surgeries, more pain and so forth.

So that limits her possibilities in terms of physical movement,

but I also think that the three-quarter self-portrait

must pose an artistic challenge for her.

Her letters also indicate

that she is intent on supporting herself as an artist,

so that would be a format

that would be appealing to possible art buyers.

Frida Kahlo the artist who paints to earn a living,

"What does she paint?" "She paints her self-portrait,"

"Here you can have a piece of me."

She knows her own image is a powerful one

and that this powerful image will sell

and allow her to evolve.

The expression is almost always the same

Seldom do we see her head on

She's always three-quarters on

It seems she likes this angle

This is a very studied pose learned at a young age

because being the daughter of a photographer

her father taught her

how to sit

how to pose

where to direct her eyes

Frida doesn't smile

seldom does she smile, even in photographs

What changes within this series of self-portraits?

The elements around her

The braided crowns

the ribbons, the flowers

the necklaces with hair that look like roots

that extend over her body

She is surrounded by her dogs

her spider monkeys

surrounded by vegetation, butterflies

the parrots that kept her company.

She had a menagerie of animals;

she does write about her pets as if they're her children,

so it could be that they became surrogate children

so she includes them in the portraits.

There is some frustration that seems to be expressed

as the kind of emotional register, the charge of those paintings.

And, again, it is the period where

she is spending more time in Coyoacán at the Casa Azul.

She and Rivera have reconciled

but apparently have an understanding

that their relationship will be platonic.

It's also just following the period where she had been in a relationship

with the colour photographer Nickolas Muray

who was a pioneer of colour advertising photography.

He took several beautiful portraits of Frida Kahlo in colour.

If you look at some of those portraits

and you compare them to the colour photographs by Nickolas Muray

there is reason to think that she is working from photographs.

I doubt very much that she's painting from the mirror.

In fact the Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Dead Hummingbird

was a gift for Nickolas Muray

and I believe that one is based on one of the photographs that he took of her.

There's always some emotional message going on there,

so in the Muray painting it's an image of self-sacrifice,

sacrificing our passion for the stability of remarrying Diego Rivera.

So maybe that's what the thorn necklace is.

Then the dead hummingbird is an amulet of love;

dead hummingbirds are available in traditional herbal markets in Mexico

as amulets of love.

So here it is hanging right in the centre of the painting.

When you see them you feel like the artist is there with you.

You feel like you know her.

You feel like you can read the pain etched in her features

or you can see something.

She's telling you something and it's very intimate.

I think that kind of connection is what she strove for.

But when you look at them closely,

you see that they're very different,

there are subtle differences between them,

and that each one of her portraits

it's the same woman but it's not the same woman.

For me, this was a key to thinking about her constructing different identities.

She wanted to be the beautiful Botticelli woman.

She wanted to be "La Mexicana."

In another self-portrait that she dedicated to Leo Eloesser

she shows herself wearing a crown of thorns around her neck,

like a necklace - obviously alluding to Christ

but instead of having it on her head,

like a crown of thorns, she has a necklace of thorns.

And instead of her colourful garb

she wears a brown dress of a religious nun.

She shows herself as a divided creature,

part of her denying her carnal self

and part of her very sensuous.

She's wearing a hand-shaped earring, and she has flowers in her hair.

You can almost smell the flowers.

In these later self-portraits, especially from the 1940s,

she also painted herself as an androgynous creature.

She sits and she's wearing a man's suit

and you see her transforming herself into a different self.

Of course, queer identities, gender bending,

all this was not something that was shown in art during her lifetime,

at least not a lot.

But she's showing things that are very contemporary, are very relevant today.

I wanted to read you a quote by Alejandro Gómez Arias.

If you remember the very first self-portrait

that she made for Alejandro Gómez Arias

who knew her, really, throughout her life and he wrote,

"Who was Frida Kahlo?

It is not possible to find an exact answer.

So contradictory and multiple was the personality of this woman

that it may be said that many 'Fridas' existed.

Perhaps none of them was the one that she wanted to be."

Aware that her spiralling health and alcoholism

were linked to distress about Rivera,

Kahlo's friend and doctor Leo Eloesser mediated a reconciliation.

In December 1940, one year after their divorce,

Kahlo and Rivera remarried.

Rivera continued to use San Angel House as his studio

so he was there a lot.

She moved in to the Coyoacán house

which Diego Rivera had bought from her father.

And they had a very social life.

Artists from all over the world came to the Blue House

because it was a place of bohemia

art, culture

intellectual conversations

Frida wanted to connect with people

She wanted to be loved.

She loved fiestas, she adored to dress up

and they had parties and drank a lot of tequila,

I mean she drank a lot of tequila.

"The remarriage functions well,

a small quantity of quarrels,

better mutual understanding on my part

and fewer investigations of the tedious kind

with respect to other women.

I have learnt that life is this way.

If I felt better health-wise...

I would say I am happy."

During the '40s she had a number of surgical operations.

I've always thought that she had a little bit of Munchausen Syndrome

and just wanted to have operations in order to get attention from Rivera,

and from everybody.

She wanted to be focused on

and having an operation is a good way to get focused on.

But she also painted the pain that resulted from these operations

and from having to have orthopaedic corsets,

which she said were a complete misery for her.

In The Broken Column

Frida shows us her bravery when facing pain

It's a self-portrait where on the one hand

she shows the pain represented by the nails all over her body

The spine completely fragmented, cracked

But it's not represented as a backbone

rather as an Ionic classical column used in construction

which should give support but seems not to

even though the top of the column supports the chin

This is where we see Frida's bravery when facing this pain

because even when her face is full of tears

her attitude towards the viewer is defiant

She doesn't cry with a pained expression

Tears come from her eyes, roll down her face

but the expression is not one of suffering

It's almost a challenge to the viewer

She paints these desert landscapes fragmented, cracked

that give us a sense of desperation

like there is nothing more

The colours are also important

In this case the horizon is green

Green for Frida is hope

So even though we see her in great pain

and imagine that the most important thing is the pain

at the same time Frida tells us that

behind this pain there is great hope.

Why did Frida use her body so much?

Her broken spine, for example?

It was precisely at that time when

she was advised to use the steel corsets

which must have been dreadful

So the body is sublimated

It's not sexualised in Kahlo's work

So that's the point

We think of our bodies when our bodies hurt

Otherwise not at all.

What I find interesting

is how this physically fractured woman

tormented by her body

by her obsession of not being able to become pregnant

and with all that, she paints

How she overcomes and mitigates her pain

and her physical condition through her painting

So when she paints obvious things

like The Broken Column

she does it with great devotion

like an escape

searching for the beauty

that she can't find in her physical being.

Frida Kahlo painted and drew in her diary

in the last ten years of her life.

The diary drawings and self-portraits

are very fluid, very sketchy, kind of wild and very surreal.

Which is interesting because all of her oil portraits were so precise.

It was also a place where she could write about her need for Rivera.

She talks about her love for him.

She also talks about politics.

Yes, it describes her deepest thoughts

her intellectual concerns

but it is a work of art

It is a representation of her because she was visual

It's very intimate

She didn't think that anyone was going to see it

She is making connections while also writing poetry

and reflecting her influences

The diary is how she understands herself

Above all it demonstrates the complexity

but also the big ideas and originality of Frida

There is such a beautiful phrase that describes her house, her life

"The whole universe, the world, Mexico"

The Blue House is the intimate world of Frida Kahlo

its colours, its cuisine

its Mexican aromas, its vegetation

It is a microcosm of Mexico.

While Kahlo became increasingly imprisoned

by her disabilities,

Rivera continued to use his freedom

to have very public affairs with film stars and celebrities.

As her physical world diminished

Kahlo created ever more complex worlds on her canvases.

The dominant theme remained her love for Diego.

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico),

Diego, and Me, and Mr Xolotl.

It kind of describes what you see there.

The general composition is the yin and yang.

You have a division of Earth and sky,

male and female,

and you have the Sun and the Moon.

And the Sun is the colours of the night sky,

and the Moon is the colours of the daylight sky,

so it's about balance.

It's very much impacted and influenced

by Hinduism and Daoism and Buddhism,

so at that time she is very immersed in this idea of the yin-yang.

It's infused by autobiographical elements,

by pre-Hispanic mythologies,

Christian imagery and Hindu symbolism.

Altogether it creates this concept of a series of embraces.

One of the quotes that I love from her is where she says,

"Love is the basis of all life,"

It is a kind of desire for life, even though there is some pain there.

The Christian element is very clear

because it looks like the Madonna and Child and Saint Anne,

and she knew that.

The Earth goddess, if you will, the Earth is very Mexican.

She has cacti as her hair

and you see the vegetation is very much Mexican.

She also has a cracked-open breast, with milk coming out,

and she embraces Frida Kahlo who is a beautiful Tehuana woman

but also with a wound or a pain.

Frida Kahlo holds Diego Rivera as a baby in her hands.

What's really interesting is that he has a third eye -

again her interest in Shiva and Hindu symbolism.

He holds a flame near his loins,

which is the lingam, which is his phallus, if you will.

They're also Shiva and Parvati, the Godhead,

the man and the woman that are part of Hinduism.

Of course, after she could not be his wife

and could not bear his child,

their relationship kind of morphed into

them babying each other and being together.

The last is Mr Xolotl.

Xolotl is the Nahuatl dog-shaped god,

a deity that guards the underworld.

So you have love and death.

You have night and day.

You have Moon and Sun.

You have female and male,

all the opposites coming together in this series of embraces.

Kahlo underwent an increasing number of surgeries

including an unsuccessful bone graft operation on her back.

She spent most of 1950 in hospital,

becoming addicted to morphine.

She was taking a tremendous amount of drugs

towards the end of her life.

Demerol seemed to be her favourite one.

And she lacked control a lot of the time.

When she painted she could only paint for a short while,

tied into her wheelchair.

She was supported, I think, by tying herself to the back.

In 1951 she painted a portrait of Dr Farill,

who was her orthopaedic doctor.

And there she holds the third palette that she ever painted,

which is shaped like her heart.

So we had three palettes in her oeuvre.

We had the first one, 1931, Diego Rivera holds it.

He is the painter; she is his little demure Mexican wife.

Then, after she loses her hope of being a mother,

she grows a third arm and she is born an artist.

Then in 1951, just three years before her death,

she holds a palette that is a heart.

Her paintbrushes are dripping with blood.

Kahlo's first and last solo exhibition

in her home country took place in April 1953.

Aware that she was deteriorating,

Diego Rivera and some of Kahlo's friends organised an exhibition of her work.

Kahlo was too ill to be moved from her bed.

As per her doctor's orders she stayed there,

but had the bed moved from her house to the gallery for the opening night.

Her arrival delighted friends and journalists

who had gathered in the gallery

and the exhibition was a resounding success.

Frida Kahlo died at the Casa Azul on the 13th of July 1954.

She was 47.

"I am always afraid that I will get tired of painting.

But this is the truth; I am still passionate about it.

Painting completed my life.

I lost three children and a series of other things

that would have fulfilled my horrible life,

but my painting took place of all of this.

Frida painted her life,

her pain, her political attitude.

I don't think she would have ever liked to be caged into a style.

She's going to be very important in the history of painting

for being this free spirit that was not blocked into a period of painting

or a form of painting or being in vogue.

Her work transcends time.

I can only think of Rembrandt and Van Gogh

whose self-portraiture moves beyond being a portrait of themselves

and moves on to being a portrait of the human condition.

She provides a visual vocabulary

where pain, trauma, human emotions becomes communicable.

The paintings she painted that deal with issues like

the female body and disability and gender fluidity and identity;

those are the things that interest people in 2020

but she already dealt with them in such a deep way during her lifetime.

I think that Kahlo is very important for the story of Mexican art.

She is, in many ways, a unique artist.

Her reputation has stood the test of time,

for reasons that make sense

and for some that are about popular celebrity that are problematic.

There may be at different moments resentments about Fridamania,

this idolising and deification of Frida Kahlo

in a way that obscures her art.

She's given me strength to overcome my fear of painting

To have the courage to paint without fear, without censorship

That is the courage I took from Frida

To believe in art there aren't any rules

In art there isn't any censorship

You make your own freedom

Because when there is censorship

you might as well not paint anything.