It started when we watched a three-part BBC series entitled Becoming Frida Kahlo. It's a good doco. A range of expert voices comment on the life of this Mexican artist who is now seemingly everywhere, and we hear directly from her through the words she recorded in diaries and letters. There are plenty of close-ups of her artwork (always striking, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque). And we meet a fascinating cast of secondary characters, probably 50 per cent of whom you want to follow up in their own right.

Nothing is simple about Frida Kahlo. She was born in 1907, and died in 1954. But she declared her year of birth to be 1910, to align it with the start of the Mexican Revolution. The woman we now associate with sui generis beauty and inimitable panache was bullied at school because polio had caused her to walk with a limp. It was then that she started to learn not only to embrace being different, but to thrive on it. And that's a lesson she was forced to relearn time and again throughout her tumultuous life. She isn't even out of her teens before she's involved in a terrible accident, in which a tram runs into the bus she's travelling on. Her multiple injuries condemn her to lengthy bedrest and lifelong complications. But she learns to paint in bed.

She is, it seems, indomitable. But she needed enormous courage. In the course of her life she endured scores of operations. And the bus injuries meant she couldn't carry a pregnancy to term. Despite wanting children, she suffered a succession of miscarriages and medically ordered abortions, ensuring this desire remained unfulfilled. Part of her leg was amputated shortly before she died. (Her death is somewhat mysterious. The official cause was given as pulmonary embolism, but it has been suggested that she overdosed on painkillers.)

To have suffered all that, and STILL produced an incomparable body of artwork, is little short of extraordinary.

However, it's her relationship with Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) that's the most unfathomable element of her life story. She's strong and energetic and intelligent. Yet she becomes something akin to his slave. They marry. He's totally unfaithful. So is she, admittedly, and they probably always envisaged a fairly open relationship. But there's something skewed about it all. He had an affair with her sister, after all. Her sister... And though he's not too bothered about her relationships with women, he's jealous of male lovers (perhaps the most famous of whom was Leon Trotsky).


A self-portrait that Kahlo painted for Leon Trotsky on his birthday

But, as she says, "I love Diego more than I love my own life." She always came back.

Art historian Luis-Martin Lozano summarizes: "You can't have Frida Kahlo if you don't understand Diego comes first. Art itself is not enough. At the end, where is this woman without the person she loves?"

And that's a view that seems to be echoed by Kahlo herself: "Deep down, you and I love each other very much. And even if we go through countless affairs, we shall always love each other. All these things, that have happened and happened again, for the seven years we've lived together, and all the rages that I've gone into, have only led me to understand better, that I love you more than my own skin."

There's footage of Kahlo and Rivera here. She's so tender; he's so enormous... Trotsky is in there too...

In all, Kahlo leaps out of the doco as an immensely talented and innovative artist, as the original self-image-constructor, and as an inveterate rule-breaker, who made no concessions where her art was concerned, painting experiences (pain, miscarriage, heartbreak, suicide) that others shied away from.


Henry Ford Hospital, 1932. A depiction of her awful miscarriage

***

So that was all very interesting, and for the most part entirely new to me.

And then you start digging a bit deeper, and it all becomes even more intriguing. It's complicated, with all the journeys, and the paintings, and the illnesses, and the break-ups, and the lovers... There's a bit of a timeline here. But below are some threads to keep pulling at:

1. POLITICS

Because Kahlo's life and art are so incredibly colourful and dramatic, argues Janice Helland, her works have been subjected to exhaustive psychoanalysis, but their political content has been largely ignored. Yet Kahlo joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, and was staunchly anti-imperialist all her life. Her use of Aztec motifs, for example, reflects "her political demand for a unified, nationalistic, and independent Mexico". And one of her last acts in life was to participate in a public protest opposing US intervention in Guatemala.

According to Helland: "The psychological reductionism that equates the bloody, brutal imagery in Kahlo's work with a desire to 'paint away' her accident, suffering, and pain does little justice to her work. It reduces an important group of paintings done by a deeply intellectual and socially committed artist to simply a visual cry of personal angst. But this was not Kahlo's intention. Since she grew up after the Mexican revolution and reached maturity when indigeneity and Mexicanidad were strong forces in her country, we should expect to find direct references to romantic nationalism in her work. And since she was a political person, we should expect to find her politics in her art."

She was a fan of Stalin, but then so were many in that era... "She died with an unfinished portrait of Stalin on her easel. Framed above her bed were pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao."

It was also for political reasons that she rejected the "surrealist" label, declaring: "I detest Surrealism. To me it seems a manifestation of bourgeois art. A deviation from the true art that the people hope for from the artist... I wish to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me."

The best way to see Kahlo, says Helland, is "not as a Surrealist, nor as a member of any other Western modernist movement, nor exclusively as painter of the female experience, but as a committed Third World cultural nationalist".

With that in mind, you start to see politics in other places, too.

In a letter to Leo Eloesser, her doctor and friend, in March 1941, she makes a lengthy comparison between Mexico and "Gringolandia". What's good about the United States is that Rivera can work. Even if there are arguments about his work (and there often are), there are formal channels for addressing them. "Here [in Mexico]," by contrast, "he finishes a fresco, and a week later it's all scratched or spit upon." Nevertheless, she is not a fan of "gringos": "I very much dislike the way they are, their hypocrisy and disgusting puritanism, their Protestant sermons, their limitless pretentiousness, and the fact that one always has to be 'very decent' and 'very proper.'"


Self-Portrait on the Border of Mexico and the United States, 1932. Helland: "Kahlo stands on the border between the highly industrialized, robotlike United States and agricultural, preindustrial Mexico... The pre-Columbian side of the painting has a rich, lush border of vegetation deeply rooted in the dark earth. In contrast to this, the industrialized United States (FORD is clearly printed on the smokestacks) is represented by high, narrow buildings rooted in the earth with electric cords that grow light bulbs. The robots on the right are balanced on the Mexican side with a skull that relates to the skulls that often lined the stone walls of Aztec temples, a life-sprouting-from-death metaphor"

In 1947, she wrote a letter to Mexican President Miguel Aleman (once her high school classmate), accusing him of allowing Rivera's work to be censored (the mural that was to adorn the dining hall of a new government establishment in Mexico City was defaced by a mob intent on obliterating the "God does not exist" sign that one of the historical characters was holding): "It is not possible that you -- who represent at this moment the will of the Mexican people, with democratic liberties gained… through the bloodshed of the people themselves -- can allow a few investors, in complicity with a few ill-willed Mexicans, to cover up the words that tell the History of Mexico and the work of art of a Mexican citizen whom the civilized world recognizes as one of the most illustrious painters of our times... If you do not act as an authentic Mexican at this critical moment, by defending your own decrees and rights, then let the science- and history-book burning start; let the works of art be destroyed with rocks of fire; let free men get kicked out of the country; let torture in, as well as prisons and concentration camps. I can assure you that very soon with very little effort, we will have a flaming 'made-in-Mexico' fascist regime."

Rivera, be it noted, was constantly getting into trouble because of the ideological edge to his work, but maybe we need a bit more of Kahlo's spirit to resist the idiocies being perpetrated against art in our day and age.


San Francisco, 2004. The time Kahlo spent here was characteristically bittersweet

In diary entries in the early 1950s, Kahlo asserts: "I'm convinced of my disagreement with the counterrevolution -- imperialism -- fascism -- religions -- stupidity -- capitalism -- and the whole gamut of bourgeois tricks -- I wish to cooperate with the Revolution in transforming the world into a class-less one so that we can attain a better rhythm for the oppressed classes."

And again from her diary: "I feel uneasy about my painting. Above all I want to transform it into something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement, since up to now I have only painted the earnest portrayal of myself, but I’m very far from work that could serve the Party. I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the revolution. The only true reason to live for."

And yet -- pace Helland -- Kahlo herself writes, in 1953: "My painting contains in it the message of pain... It's not revolutionary... Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best."

Not an either/or, then; more a both/and: Both doggedly political and deeply personal.

***

2. RIVERA

There's no exhausting this subject, because it's just so weird...

First, I skimmed Diego Rivera's My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, originally published in 1960 (the 1991 edition is available here). This was written in collaboration with Gladys March, but she insists "this is Rivera's own story, told in his own words". There's some strange, strange stuff in here, and obviously the bulk of it is about his work. But there's plenty -- PLENTY -- about women, and truly, it's hard not to think that Rivera had a problem...

He refers to his "four wives" (not all were legal marriages). The first was Angeline Belloff, with whom he has a son. During this period he strikes up a relationship with Marievna Vorobiev: "Angeline and I were down and out. Our flat was bitingly cold. When our little son, born just before my affair with Marievna, became sick, there was no money for doctors or medicine or, for that matter, for food, and the baby died. This innocent death terribly depressed me."

At the end of Rivera's text, March has added reflections by the wives themselves. Belloff says that Diego made her "ecstatically happy", and they were "wonderful companions". But he's obviously erratic. When she gets pregnant, he suggests legalizing their marriage, but also rants that the child will disturb his work: "All in all, Diego was very annoyed at having to play the role of a father... But then Diego always became maniacal whenever he felt that his work was in danger of being interrupted." This will prove to be a theme...

Belloff takes him back after the Marievna debacle, but she is unforgiving about the way he "cavorted with his friends in the cafes" as their child lay dying. "Given the opportunity to live my life over again, I would still choose to spend those same ten years with Diego, despite all the pain I suffered afterwards, because those years were by far the most intense and happy of my whole life... He has never been a vicious man, but simply an amoral one. His painting is all he has ever lived for and deeply loved. And to his art, he has given the fidelity he could never find within him to give to a woman."


From Diego Rivera's autobiography, My Four Wives. I'm not sure Kahlo would have thanked whoever chose that particular photo...

Guadalupe Marin was No. 2 in the longstanding relationships. Curiously, says Rivera, it's "a few days after Lupe and I set up housekeeping", that he first encounters Kahlo: "While painting, I suddenly heard, from behind one of the colonial pillars in the spacious room, the voice of an unseen girl." It's Frida Kahlo. (We're now about half-way through the book, which is understandable as Rivera is about twice the age of Kahlo). He says she looks just 10 or 12 (actually, she was nearer 15). He goes on to note: "She had unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes. Her beauty was that of a child, yet her breasts were well developed." OK... Good to know that... This is when she asks to watch him work.

Anyway, unrelated to that incident, his marriage with Marin starts to fall apart. He says she's jealous and possessive. "And I, unfortunately, was not a faithful husband. I was always encountering women too desirable to resist..." His "friendship" with painter and photographer Tina Modotti was the final cause of the divorce from Marin.

In her "statement" at the end of the book, Marin writes: "Diego has always paid much attention to women throughout his life, but he has always been respectful toward them. However, I don't believe for a minute that he likes any of them for themselves, for if he did, he would be faithful to them. One thing Diego truly likes about women is the money they can give him, since the majority of his mistresses have been women of great wealth... But I still love Diego, both as a friend and as the father of my children."

A few years after the split from Marin, re-enter Kahlo. She asks him to critique her work. "I did not know it then," Rivera writes, "but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And she would continue to be, up to the moment she died, twenty-seven years later." They marry. The way he writes it, it sounds as though it all happened quite quickly, but actually four years separate that first serious meeting and the wedding, at which point she's 22, and he 42.


Wedding portrait, by Victor Reyes, 1929

Her "torturous miscarriage" is devastating because, he reports, she had long been "obsessed" with the idea of having his child... And she is dogged by ill health.

"I never was -- the reader may be bored with my repeating it -- a faithful husband, even with Frida. As with Angeline and Lupe, I indulged my caprices and had affairs. Now, moved by the extremity of Frida's condition, I began taking stock of myself as a marriage partner. I found very little which could be said in my favor. And yet I knew I could not change... I loved her too much to want to cause her suffering, and to spare her further torments, I decided to separate from her."

Which sounds pretty disingenuous, given the effect their divorce had on Kahlo...

Rivera doesn't even remember his affairs with accuracy. He says he had a fling with Marin's sister, and with Kahlo's best friend. In her statement at the end of the book, Lupe Marin denies there was anything with her sister -- but of course, there was very definitely something with Kahlo's sister...

He says he regrets the divorce ("my 'victory' quickly changed to gall in my heart"): "We still loved each other. I simply wanted to be free to carry on with any woman who caught my fancy. Yet Frida did not object to my infidelity as such... She took it as a personal humiliation to be abandoned for sluts. To let her draw any line, however, was this not to circumscribe my own freedom?"


The Two Fridas, 1939. Completed shortly after her divorce from Rivera, this shows two aspects of her personality, traditional and modern, connected but bleeding. She later admitted it was an expression of "her desperation and loneliness with the separation from Diego"

Eventually, on 8 December 1940, they remarry. He is concerned about Kahlo, who is very ill, and is aided by the intervention of Dr Eloesser, who had been treating Kahlo. She understands she still can't expect fidelity, but imposes a few conditions of her own. (Rivera says that at one point he "took steps toward a second divorce", at which "Frida suffered deeply", but it came to nothing because the most recent object of his marital ambitions turned him down...)

I'm aware of my possibly inappropriately critical edge. I know it was a different era. And, at the end of the day, people run their lives differently. But I can't help finding his tone-deafness extraordinary: "Following the loss of her leg, Frida became deeply depressed. She no longer even wanted to hear me tell her of my love affairs, which she had enjoyed hearing about after our remarriage. She had lost her will to live." The day of her death, 13 July 1954, he describes as "the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever". And everyone grieves differently, too. Again, though, it seems ineptly put: "Once out of Coyoacan, I went on a mad tear of the night clubs. I hate them, and yet I couldn't bear being alone with my thoughts. My only consolation now was my readmission into the Communist Party."

There's one more marriage. To Emma Hurtado, who had been Rivera's agent since 1946. He's suffering from cancer at this point, and the two go off to Moscow so he can have treatment.

He's a mixture of impressions right to the end: "During my long stay in bed, I thought often of Emma's kindness, tenderness, and self-sacrifice, and of how very much like Frida she was... Too late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida. But I could not really say that, given 'another chance,' I would have behaved toward her any differently than I had. Every man is the product of the social atmosphere in which he grows up and I am what I am... I had never had any morals at all and had lived only for pleasure where I found it... If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait... As I lay in the hospital, I tried to sum up the meaning of my life. It occurred to me that I had never experienced what is commonly called 'happiness'... All I could say was that the most joyous moments of my life were those I had spent in painting; most others had been boring or sad. For even with women, unless they were interested enough in my work to spend their time with me while I painted, I knew I would certainly lose their love, not being able to spare the time away from my painting that they demanded. When I had to interrupt my painting to spend days in courting a woman, I would be unhappy for losing the never-to-be-recovered time. Therefore, the women who were best for me were those who also loved painting."

More evidence, it seems, for the debate about whether you can be a wonderful artist/writer/whatever, and still be a decent human being...

Hurtado's "statement" seems coloured by some of Rivera's own misogyny: "Of course he still has many other women friends. But for a man like Diego, that is necessary; he needs to feel many different kinds of emotions in order to be able to paint as he does. And yet, I must say, it is the women who are always chasing after him, not he after them. He is always polite and attentive to them; they respond to his chivalry; and before he is fully aware of it, he is already involved." Poor chap... What a nightmare...

There's no statement by Kahlo, as she was already dead. Instead, March included the catalogue introduction Kahlo wrote for the National Institute of Fine Arts' exhibition of Rivera's work in Mexico City. Part of her incredibly loving tribute goes like this: "Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the earth suffer because of the rains, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape. To my way of thinking, everything has its natural compensation. To Diego painting is everything. He prefers his work to anything else in the world. It is his vocation and his vacation in one. For as long as I have known him, he has spent most of his waking hours at painting: between twelve and eighteen a day. Therefore he cannot lead a normal life. Nor does he ever have the time to think whether what he does is moral, amoral, or immoral."


Photo taken by Nickolas Muray, 1946, in New York. According to Maria Popova, "the abyssal mismatch between his longing to be her husband and her wish that he be only her lover" made Kahlo "the great heartbreak" of his life

3. KAHLO'S PERSPECTIVE

Of course, you have to wonder whether you've got it all wrong, and the two of them were just living their lives, unencumbered by outmoded concepts such as fidelity. If both were consciously, consensually, and equally unencumbered, and genuinely happy about all extra-marital stuff, what harm could be done?

But it just doesn't read like that. This always seems an unequal relationship, with one heart somehow always much bigger than the other.

Informative here are a couple of works:

First, there's a very moving little book called The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas. Compiled by Martha Zamora, this was published in 1995, and is available here.

Kahlo was a prolific letter writer, and her style is warm and open. There are a number of letters to Alejandro Gomez Arias, her first "novio". The romantic relationship fizzled after her accident, but they remained friends.


Portrait of Alejandro Gomez Arias, 1928

In May 1932, there's a harrowing letter to Dr Eloesser, asking whether she should or should not have an abortion, since she was unlikely to carry the child she was expecting to term: "I don't think Diego is very interested in having a child since what he's most concerned with is his work and he is more than right. Children would come in third or fourth place... I am talking to you as one of my best friends rather than as a doctor. You don't know how valuable your opinion is, since here I have NOBODY. As usual, Diego is very good to me, but I don't want to bother him with such things now because he has all that work to do, and he needs tranquillity and calm above all." Before she could receive his advice, according to Sara McIntosh Wooten, she had had that awful miscarriage.


In 1926, when she started to think she would never be able to bear a child, she hand-wrote these cards. Announcing a non-birth...

And, in a letter dated 18 October 1934, to Ella and Bertram Wolfe (the latter is Rivera's biographer), she comments on that gutting relationship her husband had with her sister: "You know better than anyone what Diego means to me in all senses, and on the other hand, 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 and is getting worse every day... I had trusted that Diego would change, but I can see and know that it is impossible; it's just a whim on my part... He wants total freedom, which he always had and would have now if he had acted sincerely and honestly toward me. What makes me saddest is that we are not even friends anymore. He always lies to me and hides every detail of his life as if I were his worst enemy... I've lost my best years being supported by a man, doing nothing else but what I thought would benefit and help him. I never thought about myself, and after six years, his answer is that fidelity is a bourgeois virtue and that it exists only to exploit [people] and to obtain an economic gain... I think that the only solution is to get separated from Diego because I don't see the point in living together, burdening him, and being in the way of his total freedom, which he demands..." And, indeed, in 1935, Kahlo takes on her own apartment, begins a relationship with Isamu Noguchi, and travels to New York with some women friends.

This is not the divorce he later asks for, however (that's not until a few years later). In July 1935, there's a letter to Rivera: "All this anger has simply made me understand better that I love you more than my own skin, and that even though you don't love me as much, you love me a little anyway -- don't you? If this is not true, I'll always be hopeful that it could be, and that's enough for me... Love me a little. I adore you."

In July 1941, she tells Dr Eloesser: "Remarriage is working well. Small amounts of arguing, greater mutual understanding, and, on my part, fewer obnoxious-type investigations regarding other ladies who suddenly occupy a preponderant place in his heart. You can understand that I finally learned that life IS SO and the rest is unimportant."

A couple of years later, in 1944, she's writing to Bertram and Ella Wolfe: "Love: Better than ever because there is a mutual understanding between the spouses without getting in the way of equal freedom for each spouse in similar cases. We have eliminated jealousy, violent arguments, and misunderstanding. There's a great deal of DIALECTICS based on past experience."

None of this says "relaxed, open relationship on the basis of equality" to me... It seems to speak of endless concessions from one, and not much in the way of adjustment from the other.

So many of her letters focus on Rivera's needs. She worries when he's depressed; she worries about his health; she worries about his career. In March 1947 she asks Carlos Chavez to divert as much as possible of the money raised from The Two Fridas to Diego, who's broke (and building his anthropological museum in the Pedregal district near Coyoacan): "Hopefully, you'll be able to arrange something because I'm at the edge of desperation."


Frida Kahlo

So you can't help but cheer when Kahlo, in 1946, just a few months after another gruelling operation, asks Ella to secretly pass on letters to Josep Bartoli: "I can tell YOU that I really love him and that he's the ONLY reason that I feel like being alive again... I beg you to tear up this missive as soon as you find out everything you can tell me about this wonderful man... Don't forget to tear up this letter in case of future misunderstandings. Promise!"

Second under the informative sources heading is The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. Available here, it was published in 1995, and contains an introduction by Carlos Fuentes, and an introductory essay by Sarah M. Lowe. Then, in full colour (and, because it's Kahlo, there's LOTS of colour), we have reproductions of the diary pages, followed by translations and commentary by Lowe. It's beautiful and intriguing, although, as Lowe acknowledges: "Reading through Frida Kahlo's diary is unquestionably an act of transgression, an undertaking inevitably charged with an element of voyeurism. Her journal is a deeply private expression of her feelings, and was never intended to be viewed publicly. As such, Kahlo's diary belongs to the genre of the journal intime, a private record written by a woman for herself."

The diary begins in the mid-1940s. Her father had died; she had been divorced from Rivera towards the end of 1939; they had remarried a year later; she now knew she could never have children; her health was deteriorating... She kept this journal for the last 10 years of her life: "It documents her physical decline... An awful progression -- regression -- unmistakable, as Kahlo faces the loneliness and terror of her illnesses."

And there is SO MUCH Diego...


"Diego: Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth..."



***

4. WHAT REALLY MATTERED?

You see what has happened? I start with Kahlo, and then it all somehow becomes about Rivera...

Because it's bewildering, this relationship. The man is no oil painting, after all... He was notorious for his infidelity, and he often didn't have much money. What did he have that drew women like flies to fly-paper? What drew Kahlo, that supremely independent-minded person, who was normally ever ready to defy every convention for the sake of her own self-expression, into what seems -- I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't judge -- like utter servility?

I really have no idea.

So let's close by going back to Kahlo herself.

The imagery she used, as Janice Helland makes clear, always had political overtones. The use of (often bloody) Aztec motifs, for example, "derives much of its power from the depth of her convictions. Thus, the skeletons, hearts, and Coatlicue, images relating to the emanation of light from darkness and life from death, speak not only Kahlo's personal struggle for health and life but to a nation's struggle. It is this intense interest in her homeland that is behind her transformation into a mythological or cult figure the Mexican people." Helland picks out theme after theme from Kahlo's paintings that have a political as well as personal resonance.

In the 1950s, as we said, she started -- at least partly -- to link her work more explicitly to politics. In her annotations to the diaries, specifically a five-page text dated November 1952 (but probably constructed over a longer period of time), Lowe notes: "Most interesting is Kahlo's comment on the political content of her own work, which she refers to as 'revolutionary realism'. Until now, Kahlo's thoughts on painting tended toward poetic ruminations relevant mostly to her own personal cosmos. She seems now to yearn for a 'scientific' peg on which to understand her own work. She has become preoccupied with a Marxist interpretation of her world, a fixation that is apparent throughout the rest of her diary."

Kahlo's diary entry regrets that her poor health meant she "was of no use to the Party. Now in 1953. After 22 surgical interventions I feel better and now and then I will be able to help my Communist Party... For the first time in my life my painting is trying to help in the line set down by the Party... I am only a cell in the complex revolutionary mechanism of the peoples for peace in the new nations, Soviets -- Chinese -- Czechoslovakians -- Poles -- united in blood to me. And to the Mexican Indian. Among those great multitudes of Asian people there will always be the faces of my own -- Mexicans -- with dark skin and beautiful form, with limitless grace..." One of her last self-portraits, unfinished, she originally entitled "Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism".

I like this Kahlo best, still embracing the world from her now much diminished world. Even after she has undergone an amputation, her diary also attests to moments of joy and gratitude. The last three entries, dated April 1954, are full of thanks to specific people, but also acknowledge her own tenacity: "Thanks to myself and to my powerful will to live among those who love me and for all those I love. Long live joy, life, Diego, Tere [Teresa Proenza, a politically active friend], my Judith [Ferreto, on of her nurses] and all the nurses I have had in my life who have taken care of me so marvelously well. Thanks for being a Communist as I have been all my life. Thanks to the people of the Soviet Union, to the people of China, Czechoslovakia, and Poland and to the people of Mexico, above all those of Coyoacan where my first cell was born..."

Her last image -- "of apocalyptic chaos and reckoning, of transfiguration and transportation", says Lowe -- suggests that death is close: "Few artists have had the audacity to picture their own departure from this world, but then few faced death on so regular a basis. Never had the often-quoted statement by Kahlo seemed more appropriate: 'I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.'"


RIP, Frida Kahlo