Frida & Diego - Revolutionary Artists

The other day I went to see the exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the V&A (closes 4 November 2018) with some of my colleagues from the British Museum. It was a bit of a busman’s holiday for us, everyone tending to pay as much attention to how the exhibition was presented as well as to what it was presenting. Professional critiques aside (we all thought it was very well done, as are all V&A shows in general!), it put me in mind of a couple of trips I made to Mexico City back in 2011 and 2012, when I first encountered the work of the artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

On the first of those two occasions I visited the Palacio National to see the amazingly exuberant and overflowing murals there painted by Diego Rivera. And on the second trip I also visited Frida and Diego’s modernist house in San Ángel. I must admit I didn’t know much about either of them beforehand. I was familiar with Frida Kahlo’s striking self-portraits, but other than that I knew very little else. But they were quite a curious couple. In his lifetime Diego was perhaps considered to be Mexico’s foremost and most famous artist, although Frida may nowadays perhaps be more widely known internationally. They seem to have had quite a strange relationship, marrying and divorcing and then marrying again. Each jealously having multiple affairs, although each remaining deeply attached to the other. Both of them were political activists, and their circle of friends included Leon Trotsky (with whom Frida had a brief affair). Rivera helped Trotsky, then seeking political asylum, to settle in Mexico – where the Russian revolutionary, who had fallen foul of Joseph Stalin, survived one assassination attempt in which his house was riddled with bullets only to be cut down famously by a blow to the head from the blunt end of an ice pick (recounting this story always brings to mind the Stranglers’ song, No More Heroes). Trotsky’s house in Mexico City is now a museum, somewhere I very much wanted to visit but sadly never managed to get to on either of my two trips. The V&A exhibition has some very interesting ‘home movie’ film footage of Trotsky in Mexico.

Trotsky gives a speech in Mexico - British Pathe News, c.1938

The exhibition showcases a cache of Frida’s personal possessions which had been stored in a locked room in her family house, Casa Azul in Coyoacán, which had been shut up after her death in 1954 and only opened in 2004. Consequently the exhibits are all deeply personal, beginning with family photographs and cine films, then moving on to a portrayal giving a sense of the Casa Azul itself, followed by her personal prosthetics and medicines, and culminating with a fantastic display of her famously colourful costumes all deeply symbolic, largely inspired by ethnic Mexican traditional cultures, showing her deep sense of patriotism and allegiance to the ideals of the Mexican revolution. She used to say she was born in 1910, the year the revolution began, overtly aligning herself to her nation’s history even though she was actually born in 1907. All her life she had been associated with left-leaning artists, free-thinkers and Communists. Her clothes were also carefully designed to hide her infirmities. Early on in her childhood she had been made lame by polio and in her teenage years she was impaled by a steel handrail when a bus she was riding had collided with a tram. It took her a long time to recover from this horrific accident, and it was whilst she was bed-ridden and convalescing that she first took up a paintbrush. Hence the motif of her bed is a prominent feature of the exhibition. In later years, looking back on her life, she said “I had two accidents in my life. One was the bus, the other was Diego.” As she got older the injuries she sustained in the bus crash dogged her life and only got worse, requiring her to wear prosthetics and medical corsets, seriously impeding her movement and confining her either to her bed or a wheelchair – hence her art tends to be deeply self-reflective. She said “I paint myself because I am so often alone, and because I am the subject I know best.” I suppose it’s this quality of infirmity and introspection which kept putting my in mind of the work of the Japanese poet, Masaoka Shiki, Frida’s near contemporary, who was similarly trapped inside his own failing body and channelled the visceral experience of debilitating illness and medical treatment into his poems. What shines through in Frida’s work though is a fiery sense of resistance and resilience overriding the frailty.

Frida and Diego’s house in San Ángel is a fascinating place. It was specially built for them by the architect, Juan O’Gorman, a follower of Le Corbusier, in 1931-1932. It is actually two houses, the larger, ochre coloured one being Diego’s, and the smaller, blue coloured one being Frida’s. The two houses are connected by a little bridge. Exploring them both rather put me in mind of a cross between Monsieur Hulot’s eclectic old house and the coolly modern house of his sister in the Jacques Tati film, Mon Oncle. 

Curiously I seem to have only taken one photograph of the house, with its rather ingenious organ cactus fence (there’s a colour photograph of Frida sitting beside this in the exhibition); although I have very clear memories of exploring the rooms with their wooden floors and large light-filled windows, with the accumulated ephemera of Diego and Frida’s lives scattered about the tables, worktops and window ledges. And every room had that distinctive mid-twentieth century scent of decayed Formica and furniture polish, which reminded me of my grandparents’ homes. Compounding that sensation of being lost in time, I see from my photos that after visiting Frida and Diego’s house, my friends and I went on to visit an ice cream parlour housed in a beautiful old art deco building, probably not too far away. I’m not sure why I didn’t take more photos that day – perhaps it was because, like the exhibition and her artworks, it all seemed too personal and private, like somehow I was intruding upon private-public lives in a deeply personal space, even though Frida and Diego are now both long gone.

Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up

The V&A Museum, London

Until 4 November 2018 (paid entrance fee)