A little song at the people’s altar: The revolution is harmony of form and of color and everything that exists and moves….
Frida and Diego would amuse themselves by drawing cadavres exquis or singing corridos. Although Diego couldn’t carry a tune, he loved to sing, and he took pleasure in listening to Frida, for she sang with great spirit and could handle the falsetto breaks in songs like “La Malagueña” beautifully.
O beauty Mexico convulsive
I am the flower, I am the feather, I am the drum and the mirror of the gods. I am the song. I rain flowers. I rain songs.
I am the flower. I weep songs. I weep paint.
the parrot Bonito outside drinking tequila and beer and squawking I can’t — I can’t get over this hangover ¡No se me pasa la cruda!
swearing
the alegría girl with glee
a little dog howling
the alegría girl on fire
Accident: dance! dance! A pair of red legs severed from their body and between them a pair of lips.
her theater of the ferocious and absurd
her love of the circus, boxing matches, movies, street theater
And she sings in the glade
I am a poor little deer that lives in the mountains.
Since I am not very tame, I don’t come down to drink water during the day.
At night little by little, I come to your arms, my love.
Accident:
Everybody tells me not to lose patience, but they don’t know what being bedridden for three months means to me … after having been a real street wanderer all my life. But what can one do? At least la pelona did not take me away.
Everywhere skeletons hanging from the ceilings and walls and furniture. Big skeletons clothed in popular dress and little skeletons in all corners of the bed
arrangements of jewels, glass balls, embroidered costumes, bells, feathers
and skeletons dancing
la pelona dancing
layers of petticoats the hems embroidered by Frida with ribald Mexican sayings
Her Tehuana dress
hair decorated bows clips combs bougainvillea blossoms
an embroidered blouse and long skirt with a ruffle of cotton on the hem
long necklaces of gold coins
elaborate headdresses with starched lace pleats
and jewelry — glass beads, pre-Colombian jade, colonial pendant earrings
the elaborate stage of you
She raises a ringed hand
I am only one cell of the complex revolutionary mechanism of the people for peace and of the new Soviet-Chinese-Czechoslovakian-Polish people who are bound by blood to my own person and to the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Amongst these large multitudes of Asiatic peoples there will always be my own faces — Mexican faces — of dark skin and beautiful form, limitless elegance, also the blacks will be liberated, they are so beautiful and so brave …
and she paints.
Accident: Alejandro
“The electric train with two cars approached the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more and more, but for a time it did not break. It was a bus with long benches on either side. I remember that at one moment my knees touched the knees of the person sitting opposite me, I was sitting next to Frida. When the bus reached its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the train kept moving. It ran over many people.
“I remained under the train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis. When I was able to stand up I got out from under the train. I had no lesions, only contusions. Naturally the first thing that I did was look for Frida.
“Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, ‘¡La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.”
Votive: Diego
… Upon your form, at my touch the cilia of flowers, the sounds of rivers respond. All the fruits were in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate…. of the mamey and pure pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated through all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Odor of essence of oak, of the memory of walnut, of the green breath of ash.
You are present, intangible and you are all the universe that I form in the space of my room. Your absence shoots forth trembling in the sound of the clock, in the pulse of the light; your breath through the mirror. From you to my hands I go over all your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours.
She draws
his image on her forehead
their faces forming a single head Diego.
Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. My body fills with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent light of lightning. The dampness of the earth. Your armpit is my refuge. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel your life shoot forth from your flower-fountain which mine keeps in order to fill the paths of my nerves which belong to you.
spoken and signed with magenta kisses.
Gringolandia
“He is enchanted with the factories, the machines, etc., like a child with a new toy. The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is, as in all of the United States, ugly and stupid.”
On its letterhead, the Wardwell called itself “the best home address in Detroit.” What that meant, the Riveras discovered after a few weeks, was that the hotel did not take Jews. “But Frida and I have Jewish blood!” Diego shouted. “We are going to have to leave! I won’t stay here no matter how much you lower the price unless you remove the restriction.” Desperate for customers, the management promised to comply and also reduced the rent.
New York:
Apparently the thought that capitalists might do well not to hire an avowed communist to decorate one of the world’s truly great urban complexes did not occur to the young Nelson Rockefeller. Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.
When an acquaintance suggested that she buy herself some stylish clothes, Frida briefly gave up her long native skirts for the amusement of wearing chic Manhattan modes — even hats — and twitching her hips along the Manhattan sidewalks in a parody of the confident strut of a Manhattan socialite. She poked fun at everything that struck her as funny, and that was a lot.
Weekly Sales in Millions!
Nine months later, after the Riveras had left New York, the mural was chipped off and thrown away…. When he repainted the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1934, he placed John D. Rockefeller, Sr., among the revelers on the capitalist side of the mural, in close proximity to the syphilis spirochetes that swarm on the propeller.
American drugstores, for example, were a fantasy world. Once when she was passing a pharmacy in a taxi, the word Pharmaceuticals written on the outside struck her as so ponderous that she composed a song called Pharmaceuticals and much to the driver’s mirth, sang it loudly during the remainder of the ride.
She adored department stores, shops in Chinatown, and dime stores. Frida went through dime stores like a tornado. Suddenly she would stop and buy something immediately. She had an extraordinary eye for the genuine and the beautiful. She’d find cheap costume jewelry and she’d make it look fantastic.
In the morning when they read newspapers, Frida would burst into laughter over the little photographs of columnists that accompanied their texts. “Look at those crazy heads!” she would say. “It’s not possible. They must be crazy in this cou
ntry!”
Weekly Sales in Millions!
Directly in the middle of a composite image that shows Manhattan as the capital of capitalism as well as the center of poverty and protest in the Depression years hangs Frida’s Tehuana costume. My Dress Hangs There.
… Frida mocks the North American obsession with efficient plumbing and the national preoccupation with competitive sports by setting upon pedestals a monumental toilet and a golden golf trophy…. Snaking around the cross in the stained glass window in Trinity Church is a large red S that turns the crucifix into a dollar sign … instead of showing Federal Hall’s marble steps, Frida has pasted on her canvas a graph showing “Weekly Sales in Millions”: in July 1933, big business seemed to be doing fine, but the masses — tiny, swarming figures at the bottom of the painting — were not the beneficiaries.
The garbage overflows with a human heart, a hand.
… Also their lifestyle seems most dreadful to me: those fucking parties where everything is solved after imbibing a bunch of aperitifs (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a happy way.) …
You will reply that you can also live there without aperitifs or parties, but in that case, you can never do anything and it seems to me that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and to become “somebody,” and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to be anybody.
and she watches—
other people dance—
at the parties the rich have, all day and all night.
and she floats—
missing home.
San Francisco Nov 21, 1930
Lovely papá,
… I send you all my affection and a thousand kisses. Your daughter who adores you
Frieducha here is a kiss
Write to me
everything you do
and everything that happens to you.
Beautiful Chabela, Tell me how Uncle Panchito, Aunt Lolita and everybody else is doing.
As soon as I arrive you must make me a bouquet of pulque and quesadillas made of squash blossoms, because just thinking about it …
turkey mole, chiles and tamales with atole
Don’t forget me here
Weekly Sales in Millions! she croons.
Pharmaceuticals!
The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is as in all the United States, ugly and stupid.
Votive: Vision
You watch you scrutinize your pain
and
paint it grief
and
paint it
the consolation of your face.
You watch you observe your desire
close up and afar
and
at the same time
you paint
You sanctify your pain
and
paint it
with care
love
with utmost tenderness
you watch and tend it
paint.
the limping line
you write
beautiful faltering
You double yourself
or triple yourself
placed on the various stages of your psyche
floating past now on a sponge there you go
a swooning woman with another woman
loving or with a
monkey curling
or a fetus curled up or
the self—
its thousand consolations.
Resourceful, wouldn’t you say? laughing you paint
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
Self-Portrait with Braid, or with Monkey, or with Cropped Hair
A series of self-portraits. Self-portrait with pompier. Self-portrait with young Arlesian. Self-portrait in red by a fountain. Self-portrait as lighthouse keeper. Or on the rue Saint Jacques.
What the language gave. What the paint—
drawn to the longing
Each mark a door
Each word a boat
The Chinese yin and yang sign,
a mystical griffin,
and in the upper-right-hand corner
the outlined footprint often found in Mexican codices indicating the direction of events.
a red pressure
or yellow — a yellow feeling—
Yellow—
color of madness, sickness, fear
leaf green: leaves, sadness, science. The
whole of Germany is this color.
you paint:
a skeleton running down the page or a Frida caressed by paws—reddish purple — old blood of the prickly pear, the brightest, the oldest, and brown — color of mole, of leaves becoming earth.
real and imaginary celebrating animals
and the smeared mouth.
Hayden Herrara: she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil and ink and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.
there, there … touch me there
and you add paint tenderly sweetly
touch me—
and she puts a little paint—there
something blooms
a ripe fruit
her face
the dark corridors of sensibility
A skull with flowers
look
She smiles.
dalliance grief in the afternoon, love
navy blue: distance. Also tenderness can be of this blue.
from the near and far
Blood in the corner now saturating the page
Accident: the landscape is day and night.
Obscene
obscene
and the little deer
In Aztec mythology and iconography, the image of the deer stands for the right foot, and it was this part of Frida’s body that was now full of pain.
you watch
you scrutinize
a human head with antlers weeping
the heart—
extract it
the pain—
isolate it
paint
the deer in the glade
the way the face separates from
the lace of the costume
the way the face seems to floaton one side on the other side
detached like that for a moment.
in the dissimulation
or the multiplication
mirrored
She paints with her heart and blood and she is adored and scorned now for it — disparaged — mocked.
worshipped adored
all the Frida icons. She smiles.
Three concerns impelled her to make art, she told a critic in 1944: her vivid memory of her own blood flowing during her childhood accident, her thoughts about birth, death and the “conducting threads” of life, and the desire to be a mother.
Running through the glade, the deer is pierced by 9 arrows.
She laughs and weeps. She winks through tears. Eyebrows like hummingbirds—hummingbirds as magic charms to bring luck in love.
confront the self one more time and look.
2 of you.
after the accident she always saw herself as two Fridas: one Frida who was dead and one who was alive.
4 quadrants
earth and sky
day and night
3 times she tried to have a child.
Fruit weeps with you.
The knife through the succulent melon paint.
foregrounded against all that encroaches. Whole
Diego don’t go
The vegetation tangle of cactus and thrusting flowers
Paint solitude.
the foliage encroaching and night
devotion
Behind the skeleton, in the middle distance, what does she see? Like the nail, sinister and threatening. Silky and yellow — yellow
for illness and madness—
She sees
on a scaffold he seduces a line of actresses — her daily
hallucination
Diego!
2 Fridas
one dead Frida and observer and observed
and one who was alive
how to paint feeling
maroon fruit split open more madness and mystery
heart, heart
3 days of blood (no child)
Diego!
she paints
Even the table is wounded. And the skeleton has a broken right foot.
Stripped this time of her Tehuana costume
dressed in a man’s suit
shorn hair yellow chair
To be sung: Look if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that your hair is cropped short I don’t love you anymore.
She sits in a desolate yellow chair alone. Yellow for—
Diego, Diego.
Avenida Engaño
A tree with chopped-off branches, 20 numbered, Diego’s affairs.
Deceit Avenue
Ruin
House for birds
Nest for love.
All for nothing.
yellow chair alone.
She paints—
Paint the dress without the woman when you can’t find her
When you can’t bear it paint—
When you can’t bear it anymore
And Diego says, and Diego — he smiles with pride
“Look at her work … ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.”
paint:
Bonito
paint sadness
Papa! Papa!
Do not flinch. Do not turn away — enter pain. Paint love. What the water gave you
What the language
pleasure, sadness in the afternoon and death
greenish yellow: All the phantoms wear suits of this color … or at least underclothes.
The death of my father was something terrible for me. I think that it’s owing to this that I became much less well and I grew rather thin again. You remember how handsome he was and how good?
Darling Papa, write to me here is a kiss
Self-Portrait with Bonito shows Frida in a dark blouse, wearing no jewelry or hair ornaments — Bonito who had recently died is perched on her shoulder.
paint:
the recumbent Frida — deep incisions in her back
the seated Frida holding court and corset and scorn.