By Paul Dunwell, writing for EasyFrame
© Copyright EasyFrame 2021
What this article is about
'Self Portrait Along the Borderline Between Mexico and the USA' is by a largely self-taught painter, part naïve folk artist and part surrealist, who was unconventional in every sense. It shows the artist at 25, standing on the threshold between two contrasting worlds: the agrarian Mexico she came from and the industrial North America on which she felt her career depended. She was bound to both.
It is a small painting in oil on sheet metal, only about 31 x 35 cm, and rich in symbolism. It is also intensely gloomy. The artist was always in pain and often unhappy, and at this point she was beginning to realise she might never have children. She wrote that the work expressed the trauma of being homesick (she was in the USA when she painted it) and of feeling tremendously isolated, especially after a miscarriage.
We look here at the work, the context in which it was made, and its creator.
The artist, her health and a lifetime of tragedy
She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in Mexico City in 1907. Her father, Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, was German and took the name 'Guillermo' in Mexico. Her mother, Matilde Calderón y González, was a Catholic 'mestiza', of mixed Spanish and indigenous Mexican heritage. Frida was the third of four sisters, and there were two half-sisters too. She was much closer to her father than to her mother.
For a while Frida worked with her father, a photographer. A friend of his, the printmaker Fernando Fernández, taught her to draw, and that seems to have been the extent of her training.
Her father suffered from epilepsy, and the two were perhaps all the closer because each understood the other's infirmity. Frida caught polio at six, which left her with a thin, weak leg. Then at 18, when she was thinking of a career in medicine, the bus she was riding with her boyfriend was in a crash that killed several people. A handrail pierced her pelvis. He escaped almost unhurt and helped to free her. She faced a long convalescence, and she was never again out of pain.
She longed to be a mother, and that made another bond with her father, whose first wife had died in childbirth. It was not to be. She lost several pregnancies, some by miscarriage and some ended to save her life. Later she needed bone grafts to her spine, lost a leg to gangrene and contracted bronchopneumonia. She died at just 47, officially of a pulmonary embolism, though without a post-mortem it has never been certain. Her last drawing was of a black angel.
Politics, private life and the Trotsky affair
Mention of the artist's politics and private life is not gratuitous, because both are in the painting.
In a family photograph from her teens she wears a man's suit, and she was often thought of as androgynous. She is seen as a feminist too. In this work there is a girlishness: a flouncy pink dress and long lacy gloves. Yet she has a cigarette in her hand, and it is no secret that she swore like a trooper.
She married the great muralist Diego Rivera twice. The brief divorce followed infidelities on both sides, though they stayed friends throughout. Theirs was what one would call an open marriage. She had relationships with men and women, and in recent years she has been taken up as a standard-bearer for LGBT rights.
As for politics, she always leaned to the left and in later years became stridently communist. One of her lovers was Leon Trotsky. Rivera helped secure him asylum in Mexico in 1937, after he fell out with Stalin, and Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, were given a home by the couple. The affair was brief. Sedova found out and read her husband the riot act, and Kahlo had lost interest anyway.
By 1939 Rivera and Trotsky had fallen out, and the couple later sided with Stalin. In 1940 the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros led a failed attempt on Trotsky's life. Months later a Soviet agent, Ramón Mercader, whom Kahlo had met in Paris, killed Trotsky in Mexico City. Kahlo and her sister Cristina were questioned and held for a couple of days, then released without charge.
What's going on in this painting?
As with all the artist's work, the subject reflects who she thought she was and what her life had been.
The contrast between the Mexico she loved and the USA her husband loved (she had married him in 1929) is plain. The Mexico she admired (see the flag she holds) was historic, rural and pre-Columbian, the Americas before Columbus arrived in 1492. The USA her husband championed was industrial and mechanised, with skyscrapers and a Ford car plant.
On the Mexican side we see a ruined temple, rubble, a stone skull and fertility idols from different regions and peoples of ancient Mexico. There are lush plants with white roots, and a sun and moon with lightning between them. The whole montage is about life: creating it and sustaining it.
The American side is futuristic (or it looked so then) yet lifeless. Black cables seem to draw power from the Mexican side. There is smoke, ducting and chimneys and no real sky, and the US flag, its stars dim beside Mexico's sun and moon, sits under a cloud. It is hardly alluring.
The values that built America were opposed to those of the communists, so the contrast is not just about lifestyle and heritage. It is political, a clash of cultures.
In the middle stands Frida Kahlo, impassive and statue-like, torn between the two, though not equally: we can see where her heart lies. She stands on a pedestal, or boundary stone, carved with the words 'Carmen Rivera painted her portrait in 1932'. She may have used 'Carmen' because 'Frida' (she spelled it 'Frieda' until the rise of the Nazis) sounded too German, and she uses her married surname. She may well have felt torn, not least because much of the couple's income came from North America, generated by the very industry she disliked.
Her art has been described as 'a ribbon around a bomb', and there is a documentary about her life by that name.
Conclusion
Here was a thorough nonconformist who ploughed her own furrow. It was a sad one. She left no children, but a great deal of very interesting art.
You can buy unframed prints of Frida Kahlo's work affordably. See www.fridakahlo.org.
You'll want to frame whatever you buy. Any good framers will show you a range of solutions and advise on what suits the work and where it will hang. You can contact EasyFrame on 01234 856 501 or at sales@EasyFrame.co.uk, and they'll always chat even if you don't want to buy!