In Our Time - Frida Kahlo

Episode Date: July 9, 2015

Born near Mexico City in 1907, Frida Kahlo is considered one of Mexico's greatest artists. She took up painting after a bus accident left her severely injured, was a Communist, married Diego Rivera, a celebrated muralist, became friends with Trotsky and developed an iconic series of self-portraits. Her work brings together elements such as surrealism, pop culture, Aztec and Indian mythology and commentary on Mexican culture. In 1938, artist and poet Andre Breton organised an exhibition of her work in New York, writing in the catalogue, "The Art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb." She was not as widely appreciated during her lifetime as she has since become, but is now one of the most recognised artists of the 20th century. WithPatience Schell Chair in Hispanic Studies at the University of AberdeenValerie Fraser Emeritus Professor of Latin American Art at the University of EssexAndAlan Knight Emeritus Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.ukh, slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the painter Frida Carlo was born near Mexico City in 1907. Though not widely known by the time she died in 1954, her reputation has grown dramatically in the last 30 years, and she's now seen as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Her self-portress are at the core of her work.

She's often dressed in the traditional costume of Native American women, Native Mexican women, sorry, and she emphasizes her worn continuous dark eyebrow and the faint shadow of moustache. Many show her body damaged by polio and broken by the bus crash, which almost killed her and left her with chronic pain for life. She became part of the cultural revolution that followed the violent Mexican revolution,

twice the wife of the then-famous Diego Rivera, a prominent communist. She sheltered Trotsky in her. her home when Stalin had exiled him from the Soviet Union, leading to warn of many affairs. With me to discuss Friedrich Carlo are, Patient Shell, Chair in Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Valerie Fraser, an emeritus professor of Latin American art at the University of Essex, and Alan Knight, Emeritus Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of Oxford. Patient Shale, Frieda Carlo, was a woman of her time. What was happening politically in Mexico

around the time of her birth? Well, as you say, Melbourne, she was born in 19. just at the end of the Porfidio Diaz dictatorship. This period in Mexico was known because Diaz brought order, progress, stability, modernization, industrialization, loads of foreign investment to Mexico. But there was a downside to this picture. Rights for working people were not respected. Industrialization was without checks and balances. The middle classes were unable to progress because of problems with cronyism and particularly rural peasants were dispossessed of their land. And these pressures came together around the 1910 presidential election. Diaz had promised he was going to step down and then he changed his mind.

And when he changed his mind, particularly middle class reformers who wanted effective democracy and didn't want to continue to have Diaz reelected, organized. And one of them, Francisco Medero, who had been unable to stand against Diaz in the 1910 election, called for revolution. And revolution began in the autumn of 19. Now, the genie that was out of the bottle could not be put back. And although Medero and his supporters expected that once Diaz was overthrown and he was elected, which happened in 1911, that would be the end of the revolution. But it wasn't. It continued for the greater part of a decade. And the

different factions that rose up in Mexico all over the country were fighting for different things. Some of them wanted land redistribution. Some of them wanted more effective political governments. Some of them wanted an end to cronyism. And the faction that ended up winning was one of the moderate reformist factions. And they were fighting for the reform and implementation of the 1857 constitution. But the period, the decade following 1910, was one of mass movements of people, mass disruption. Mexico City, near where Carlo grew up, although it wasn't itself a battlefield. It was a prize for these different factions. And so invading armies were coming and going. There was widespread. There were problems with disease, with shortages of food. So there was a lot of disruption in the first years of her life.

She identified with the revolution so closely throughout her life that she lied about the year of her birth and said she was born the year the revolution started three years. She didn't want to be younger. No. Well, she also was out of school for a few years, so that may have been part of it. But yes, she was a child of the revolution and she wanted to be seen as a child of the revolution, born in 1910. Yes. And you say not much happened in Mexico. What does not much happen mean? I mean, only a few people dead. I'm what we're talking about? No, no. In terms of the death toll, no, the death toll was significant. And as I say, there was disease as well as fighting that actually increased the death toll.

But Mexico City itself was not a major battleground of the revolution. So when the troops came, they wanted to hold Mexico City, the fighting, the different revolutionary factions. When these troops were coming, it was to seize Mexico City as a problem. prize, but it wasn't the major battleground of the revolution. But the main point you're making is that she was brought up in in revolutionary times as a young girl and was

intoxicated by it and on the side of it and that stayed with her for the rest of her life. Yes, and also the subsequent period when she was a teenager, the 1920s, the mobilization then as civil society trying to figure out what the Mexican Revolution meant, how would Mexico be reformed?

And she wanted to be thought of as part of that, and she was. Yes, exactly. Alan Knight, what do we need to know about her family? Well, the family are an interesting mix. Her father was a European immigrant from Germany of Hungarian Jewish background. A rather intellectual or stear fellow came over as a middle-cast migrant. Mexico was not a country of large European migration like Argentina.

He worked in retail jobs, eventually set himself up as a photographer, which was a booming area of business in the 1890s. he was also chronically ill. He had recurrent epileptic fits, and we can see certain aspects of his life paralleled in that of his daughter, Frida, who was his favourite daughter of six. He had six daughters. The mother was very different. The mother was a Mexican woman from the southern state of Oaxaca of part Indian parentage. So Frida did have some somewhat tenuous claims to have Indian ancestry as well.

And so she had this family background, part European, Jewish, rather intellectual, reading Schopenhauer, playing the piano. On the other hand, she had this family. this much more traditional maternal Mexican background, also very Catholic. And she was brought up as a Catholic till her teenage years. She went to communion, she went to confession. She then broke away. And one can see elements of both these traditional Spanish, Mexican, and also perhaps the more bohemian, eastern European elements in her life.

One very important point which patients mentioned was the family had prospered and done very well. The father had gone into photography and become almost the official photographer of the Porfirian regime. With the revolution, the main impact on her and the family was not fighting. She claims later to have been part of this, but probably that's embellishment. Or a fib. Let's call it an embellishment.

Let's be kind. She'd probably witnessed some peripheral conflicts on the edge of Mexico City, but she didn't participate, I don't think. She was too young, for one thing. But the family fortunes went downhill, like a lot of middle-class people, because of the economic dislocation, the inflation, and she had to work. So she did go out to work,

and I think she had some sense of the family fortunes going down. Perhaps that also gave an inclination towards radical reformist politics, which really kicks in in the 20s. I think that's when she really sort of can be seen to be a political animal. What work did she do? She worked partly with her father. She worked in photography workshops, which again has a significance probably for her work,

which often has a rather meticulous, closely-grained, photographic quality and she did various jobs so she though she was a relatively well-off middle-class background the family was by no means rich and so early in life as later in life she had to earn her keep you mentioned roman catholicism how powerful was that in her makeup as a young woman and throughout her life i think formerly she repudiated when she was a teenager and she entered into this rather behemian circles at the prepper which was the college she went to a secular institution, 2,000 boys and about three dozen girls, and she had a good time. At that point, she broke with the church. And indeed, like many Mexican revolutionaries of the 20s, she was

strongly anti-clerical. She regarded the church as backward and superstitious. However, artistically, you can see very strong influences with Spanish, Catholic paintings, paintings of saints, votive offerings, small pictures put up by people, which we may come back to talk about later. So I think artistically, aesthetically, Catholicism very important. But as a lifestyle, as a credo, no, and indeed she espoused communism and it said, particularly very towards the end of her life, communism was the sort of closest to a surrogate religion that she had. Did she stop going to church entirely? Did she draw on any specific images from the church? She stopped going to church entirely and clearly her whole lifestyle, her beliefs,

her communism were a preudiation of the church in almost all senses. But she used a lot of religious motifs. I mean, one particular would be the San Sebastian image of a saint being punctured by arrows and stab wounds, and she repeats that in a lot of her pictures, including of herself. Valerie Fraser, she had polio,

cholera, when she was six, and then she was, at 18, she was in a quite horrific bus accident. I'm afraid if you talk us through those two things, not a fine start to your morning, but still, here we go. It's not a happy story. She did

have polio in need when she was little which damaged her right leg and then she was incapacitated for quite a while so she was on her own in bed yes because that begins to matter and that begins to matter the times that she was on her own she's on her own in this house in what was then a little town outside the center of Mexico city uh with the family and then the bus accident she was traveling on the bus and the tram and a tram ran into it and it was the horrific accident and she had a handrail of the bus went right through her abdomen. She broke her leg in 22 places. She broke her collarbone.

She broke her spine. She broke her pelvis. And it took a long time to stitch it. In fact, it's astonishing that she survived it all really when you think of what she went through. But she was obviously confined to bed for a very long time. at home with all sorts of manner of plaster corsets around her supporting her back and her legs and things and she obviously never fully recovered and it was became a really important part of her life because she had to go through over 30 future operations she was always going through

operations to adjust this or to have bits of her toes removed and things when she was just really in pain more or less continuously for the rest of her life. What's amazing is that she did initially recover, and she could walk and she could, in fact, even dance, and she was quite active in her 20s and I think early 30s, and then she begins to seize up and it ends up. She spends a lot of time in bed anyway and a lot of time in a wheelchair. We know that, ironically, she was going to take up medicine,

but just put the kibosh on that and when she was recovering she took her painting was this a deliberate act of her parents to give her something to do or was it something she'd been doing and wanted to develop and could develop by in the almost immobile state in which she found herself? A bit of both I think she

had been studying medicine she had always doodled and done little drawings and she loved medical drawings she loved the insides of bodies as well as the outsides of bodies and what the accident does is she has to abandon her medical studies,

except that she doesn't because she becomes her object of study. It's her body. She's now become the subject of her medical investigations, if you like, and a lot of her paintings are of the insides of bodies as well as the outsides of bodies. And she extends this also into the natural world, so she often shows the veins and things of plants as well as... She's always really interested in the way things work,

how things are put together, and that I think comes from her medicine. Do you have any accurate information about what she actually did when she was recovering from this accident? Because it took her a long time. She's there in a hospital or at home. Did anybody teach her? Did she get special pains?

How did she manage it? She's lying on her back. Can you give us any facts? Yes. Her mother was quite helpful here, apparently. She was indeed lying on her back. got a special easel that could fit on the bed and then they put a mirror above the bed

so that she could look at herself and paint. And her parents provided her with oil paints so that she could paint. So that's where the self-portrait, because we're coming to this obsession with self-portrait. Which is the biggest thing she did. So it started there by looking at them and painting herself. It started there. What can I do?

I'm lying in bed. You know, I've got me. I'm obsessed with me. My body hurts all the time. And there's a mirror of me above. So that's where I start, really, I think. I think that's how she does it. In her 20s, when she started to be active again, as Valerie indicated,

she met Diego Rivera and then married in 1929. Now, why did you tell us about him? Diego Rivera was the preeminent muralist of the Mexican muralist period. He had been contracted by the Ministry of Education. by the time they're married already to paint the Ministry of Education itself, to paint her prepa, her high school, and to paint in the National College of Agriculture. But he was a larger-than-life character as well.

What was this theme of his murals? Because he did quite a lot in America as well, didn't he? But anyway, let's go on. What was the main theme of the murals? The main theme of the murals was Mexican history and re-understanding Mexican history through the prism of the revolution and showing Mexican history

and valorizing Mexican culture with the Mexican Revolution, really being the culmination of it and promising a new dawn. And massive? And massive. Huge. And he learned to paint murals in Italy. So he took traditional fresco methods and brought them to Mexico. Massive.

Just on multiple floors, multiple panels, sweeping around staircases in the National Palace in Mexico City. Massive scale. And massive scale of topics. And he was a bit massive himself, wasn't he? He was a massive man. He was big, he had a big belly, and he had bulging eyes. And even he admitted that he looked a bit. like a toad. Now, he might not seem like someone who would be appealing to women, but in fact, he was. By the time

he and Frida got married, he had already had many affairs. He was a total womanizer throughout his life, and he had a habit of leaving the women who bore him children. He'd done that three times by the time he and Frida got married. He'd spent a decade in Europe, mostly Paris, as part of the art scene, making friends with and then falling out with Picasso. And that decade was when the Mexican Revolution happened. So despite the fact that he fashioned himself a revolutionary subsequently, he carried a pistol, he saw himself as bringing the revolution forward through art and through new representations of Mexico. He wasn't actually a revolutionary from the period of the revolution. Did he go over to Russia at that particular? Yeah, he went to Russia in 1927, 1928. And that was important

for him. Yes, yes. But it didn't, it didn't in any way. He was a communist. He joined the Communist Party in 1922 and going to Russia was part of his commitment to communism. On the face of it Alan Knight, Frida Kahler who was quite small and had these

numerous afflictions and was starting off painting but not known whatsoever as a painter and this Burley International by then figure don't seem particularly well much but they got married at least got married twice. What was going on there?

Well, I suppose sex, really. You tell me. I think there was a little bit more to it than that. They are contrasting figures. You look at the many pictures that show them together. I mean, he was 300 pounds, and she was a bit over 100 pounds. And he was also 20 years older, and he was established and famous, and she was just beginning to make it.

And their relationship was entirely sort of tempestuous and complex. They had repeated separations and falling out. They got divorced once and remarried. again, so it was not by any means an easy relationship. As Patience said, Diego was a serial womanizer. Frieda herself had numerous affairs with both men and women, including the famous brief fling with Trotsky, probably designed to make Diego feel jealous. So it was not a sort of happy relationship being that sense. On the other hand, it does seem to be very creative. They encourage each other's work. They were each other's sort of most fervent admirer and critic.

Although, of course, their work is substantially different. And Diego was up on the scaffolding, doing these vast wallscapes in Mexico or the US. She was doing these sort of very small, precise, more miniaturist kind of pictures. There is a little bit of crossover influence from him to her, some of her early pictures. But really, they're doing very different things. But the other thing probably is Diego, in many ways, was somewhat infantile in his behaviour. She was vivacious, lively, bohemian, but quite hard-headed. So when it came to managing finances, which they didn't do very well,

she was more capable than he was. and there's an element in which she mothered him, particularly in later years. Romero went to the USA to do some murals and was again celebrated there, and I've seen some of those, again, massive and very on the nose. She went to America with him. What did you make of it? She didn't like America as much as he did. He went and was, as you said, lionised at least by many people

and did some very fine work, particularly in Detroit. The irony being here was a communist, although he'd actually been expelled from the Communist Party for various deviations. He then became a Trotskyist. But while he's in America, he's getting commissions from the fat cats of American big business, like Ford and Rockefeller. And he's painting these enormous pictures which combine a Marxist message and a sort of populist message for the people,

also a kind of reverence for machinery for the Ford V8 engine. So he was quite entranced by American modernity, if you like. She didn't like this so much, partly perhaps because she was on the margin. She continued to paint in the US, but she was in some ways an appendage of Diego while he was working. He was a workaholic when he was doing the murals. So she felt isolated and their relationship was on and off. She had a very serious miscarriage when in Detroit in 1932. And she yearned to go back to Mexico.

In the end, they did partly because he fell out with the Rockefellas. There was a huge spat, which I won't go into. They had to go back. She preferred Mexico. what he did. Because he put Lenin in a picture without telling them basically. That's worth saying. So going back to Mexico suited her more than it suited him.

And she always contrasted American materialism with sort of fecund, Mexican sort of salt of the earth, which she depicts in one of her famous pictures. Marie Fraser, one of Carla's most famous painting dates from this time and it's called Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States. Now then, by the magic of radio, you're going to tell us about it. Yes, this was one of the pictures that she painted when she was in Detroit,

when not only did she have a particularly nasty miscarriage, this time she really thought she was going to be able to carry the baby to term, and some of the doctors in Detroit said, oh, well, have a go, but it didn't work. And also that she found out that her mother, was dying in Mexico and she had to go back to Mexico and it was a fearful journey. She got there just in time but then she went back to Detroit. So she was very sort of dislocated during this time in all sorts of ways and she painted this extraordinary picture of herself in a sort of fancy frilly pink prom gown with nice lacy gloves.

But carrying a Mexican flag and a cigarette, she loved to carry a cigarette because it's sort of offended people, always has a fickle cigarette in her hand if possible. And with on the one side, on the right hand side behind her, there are these windowless, very tall tower blocks and strange anthropomorphic machinery sort of heading towards her in a little phalanx. And then in the clouds above, in the steam,

there are four chimneys that say Ford written across them because it's all Ford money that they're there on. there's a cloud of smoke with the American flag in it. And then on the other side, in contrast, there's a lot of crumbling Aztec ruins and bits of Aztec sculpture. And above, on the Mexican side, you have the sun and the moon and lightning. And the sun and moon are somehow contrasted with the smoke of the United States on the right-hand side. and then Carlo herself stands on a little plinth

where she is called Carmen Rivera. She's very much the wife of Diego at this point. And this is plugged in on the US side to three machines which produce light heat and air. So you've got the sort of machinery running the world on one side. And then the wires are all connected on the other side to ridiculously fecund Mexican plant life. And it's unclear whether Carlo in the middle

is, in fact, generating the electricity that makes all these things work or because she's sort of plugged into it. It's sort of weird. That painting was done at that time. Did anybody buy it? Were people interested in what she was painting at that time? people were beginning to become interested.

What does that mean? Did you have an exhibition in a gallery? No, not at this point. So when people came to see, talk to Diego, they talked to her husband. They looked at her paintings on the way out. And Rivera was fantastically supportive and encouraging her all the time. But no, she wasn't showing at this point or selling. Did she think of herself, I am a painter and I'm going to continue to paint

and one day I will have exhibitions like Diego and all the rest of it? I think she did. Yeah. She was in some ways so powerful and so self-confident. It's almost as if it didn't matter whether she was going to have exhibitions at this point. I'm going to paint. This is what I do. Patience, which elements of traditional Mexican culture?

Mallory's mentioned this in the painting. Which did she embrace and why do you think she did embrace it in the way she did? We've already heard about a few of them. One is the Mesoamerican culture, and she was interested in pre-Columbian art. and ruins, and many of the objects that she painted, and Diego Rivera as well, were in their personal collection. They were big collectors of pre-Columbian art and artifacts. They were also, she was very influenced, as Alan mentioned, by Catholic iconography and by popular art,

the Vretablos, and some of which were these ex-votos. The Rettavlos were portraits of saints and Mary showing their suffering, and they would be put either at home or the church. The ex-votos were narrative paintings which would show the intercession of a saint or the Virgin Mary to miraculously save someone. And so they're little narrative paintings. They're very small. They were painted on tin, and they had an inscription on the bottom, which would describe what was happening. And you see this narrative element and the use of the scrolls and the inscription in her work. The Catholic iconography also comes through, as we've heard in terms of, for instance, the doves, in terms of the thorns that she uses, obviously, coming from Christ's crucifixion. And she also picked up a little bit on the popular press in Mexico in the late 19th century, which had lurid illustrations of crime and satire in these she used, too.

She liked to go back to her mother's half-Indian roots, especially in the way she dressed. There was a folkloric element, very strong and completely against all the flapper stuff that was going on. Yes, yes. Well, that was coming out of the trends of the Mexican Revolution. and how are we going to remake Mexico and we're going to look to our own culture, our own history for inspirations. And Frida was not the only woman of fashion

dressing up like this, but she stuck with it and she took it to an extreme and she made it her own. And it also conveniently hid her damaged right leg and Diego liked it as well. Alan Knight, we're going to try another painting now. And this one is particular gruesome. It's a woman who's been stabbed to death. It's called A Few Small Nips.

So you tell us about it. Yeah. There are two English translations of the Spanish is one was Quantos Piquititos, and there are two translations, one you gave, the other one which I will also give you, which is a few little pricks. And it's a picture, as you said, of a young woman who's dead lying on a table

in a very sort of bare, sparse room. It's quite a small picture, about 12 by 15 inches. And standing over her is a man with a bloody shirt and knife, and he has stabbed at multiple times. She's virtually naked. except for a sort of shoe and a garter. So she looks to be a possibly loose woman.

It's a cream passional of some sort. The interesting thing about this twofold. First, it picks up on everything Sasha Patience just said. It is very much like an ex-voto, these small sort of giant postcards which commemorate violent incidents put up in churches. They represent salvation. This doesn't. This is just a nasty killing.

But it also picks up on this tradition in Mexico of displaying, often rather gruesome, scenes. We can still see it in the press and on videos today. It goes back to the woodcuts of the 19th century of murders, killings, assassinations. And so she's picking up on that and indeed on the Catholic iconography, San Sebastian and the rest of it. The other important aspect of this picture is it reflects her own personal turmoil at this time. It was done in 1935. She'd returned to Mexico with Diego. Diego then began an affair with Frida's younger sister, Christina. Unlike many of Diego's affairs, this was more serious and prolonged

than the fact that it was her sister, to whom she was close, obviously made it worse. She and Diego separated for a time. They didn't yet divorce. And this picture is clearly a cry from the heart about a woman being betrayed and stabbed. Though interestingly, the woman lying there looks much more like Christina than it does look like Frida,

and the killer does look a bit like Diego. And the title was because he said in his... You tell me where the title gave him. The title was what... A convicted criminal said to the judge, after stabbing this woman multiple times, I just gave her a few little nips. And it's put across in a scroll in the way that these traditional paintings usually were done. Let's go to the heart of her work, really, with you, Bowery Flazer, which were self-portraits.

I think upwards of 200 paintings, more than 50 self-portraits, and if you thought of Frida Car, you would think of this up. Right. Why did she do it so often, and what can you tell us about them? Well, I think the first reason that we've discussed is that she couldn't do anything else when she was in bed, that that was her closest, most vivid subject. And she was fascinated by herself. I think it was, if you like, it's a form of dealing with her own pain. It's a form of dealing with being stuck in bed.

But it's also a presentation of herself as an independent, powerful woman. I mean, I think that the few small nips painting we've just been talking about that Alan was describing is an example of her feminism. She really felt very, very strongly that this way in which the culprit, the murderer, had responded to this was outrageous. Oh, I just gave her a few small nips

and she happened to die sort of thing. And so that the picture is about her own pain and her sister's affair with Rivera, but it is also about her feminism. And I think part of presenting herself is about exploring different ways of presenting herself as a really powerful figure. And the first thing you look at is the face,

as you very often do, and there were distinctive things about her face which she overemphasised, but they're there all the time. Can you tell us about that? She does indeed over-emphasise them, I think, but she had very bold black eyebrows which met in the middle. And she has very, very black hair and olive-colored skin.

She emphasizes the olive-colored skin to emphasize the Indian associations. And then very often she adds a slightly dusky moustache. And she wasn't embarrassed about that. She would add the moustache, I think, and exaggerate it almost. Why did she make the eyebrows into one continuous eyebrow? So it looks like a stealth bomber, right? to make herself different, I think. She just didn't want to be like anybody else.

She wanted to be really independent. And this massively coiled her as well. And the wonderful hair, which she does in so many different ways. And then when she, I think it's after the divorce, she does this wonderful portrait when she cuts off all her hair and says, oh, well, you only loved me for my hair. And so there's this hair everywhere like snakes. all over the floor and over the furniture and everywhere.

Patient Sheld, there's a photograph from 1937 of Carlo welcoming Trotsky as he continues his attempt to find a safe haven, having been kicked out of Russia, as he disembarks in Mexico. What happened between those two? Trotsky, as we've heard, he's kicked out of Russia. He had sought refuge in Turkey, in France, in Norway, but he needed a new place to go. And Diego de Verde, who was a Trotskyite, heard about this and asked President Lazaro Cardenas, could Trotsky please come to Mexico? And Cardenas agreed as long as Trotsky didn't interfere with domestic politics. Rivera, however, was sick when the boat was coming into dock in Tampico.

So Frida Kahlo went on her own to pick him up and pick them up. Trotsky, his wife and his secretary. And they all went to Mexico City and ended up staying. The Trotsky entourage stayed for two years rent-free in Frida's childhood home. And the couples became very close, quite close. heard already about the affair that Frida had with Trotsky, and there was a falling out between the couples afterwards, not directly related to the affair. Some of it was about politics. Some of it was that Diego was a bit of a pain, a bit of a provocateur. He gave Trotsky a little

candy skull that had Stalin written on it, things like that. He talk about nipping someone. He enjoyed nipping. Anyway, and there were two assassination attempts, and actually in 1940 in August of 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico. Alan Knight, she was very firm, communist, and yet you've already mentioned she, in America, he's been mentioned around the table

that they went and worked for American very rich people and those are people who commissioned them. Was she uneasy about that? What did she do about that? The problem was great for Diego because as a muralist, he needed great big walls and a lot of money needed big commissions, and those tended

to come either from the Mexican government or from rich Americans. And so his work in America was essentially with Ford, Rockefeller and so on. So he had to make this compromise. And as he said, the communists hate me because I work for the capitalists. And the capitalists hate me because I'm a communist. And I put Lenin in my murals and they destroy my murals. It was less of a problem for freedom because though her pictures can be said to be in some ways political, in a sort of more general feminist sense, she's depicting certain ideas about Mexico, about women.

She is not as overtly political. but she did take part in politics, and interestingly it was in the last years of her life when she was extremely ill and bedridden that she almost became most communist of all. At this point, Diego had been expelled from the Communist Party, but she was still in it, although I don't actually think her sort of grasp of politics was particularly close or intimate. She went on demonstrations, she subscribed to causes. She was not really a paid-up, fully active member of the Communist Party. Valerie Fraser

We've mentioned one or two of Carlo's works She's at this stage The Trotsky's beginning to emerge As a painter Nothing like as famous as Vera although the tables Would be turned on that later

But still she was beginning to emerge as a painter And taken seriously by other people as a painter And in view was Breton and Picasso And Kandinsky saying She's someone that we ought to reckon with And so on What do you think which of her paintings would you say

made in that reputation most? Was it the self-portraits? I think it's a combination of the self-portraits and the persona. I think because she presented herself in New York when she had her first show in the Gilles-Levi Gallery

she would dress in her Tijuana outfit and people would crowd around behind her in the streets and say, where's the circus? And then she was very much a show-off like that. And she was certainly being advertised as the wife of Diego Rivera. But she sort of lived with that. She coped with that.

And she was included in Vogue and Vanity Fair and these sorts of things. So she was happy to be used in that way. Having being used in that way, is it at this time that her paintings, people, serious people, well I've mentioned a few, very seriously, began to think, yes, she is a good painter in her own right. That's happening then. Yes, that's happening then.

And she's being bought by galleries as well as the Louvre buys a painting. I think New York museums are buying paintings and big private collectors are certainly buying paintings. Can we develop that? Can you develop that, Michelle? I mean, how is it going? We're talking about the 30s are we now? Yeah, yeah. And she is, well, depending on the whole, she says she is.

There we are. Yeah, late 20s and into her 30s. As Valerie said, she was a persona before she became known as a painter. And her whole life was on show. She was a modern day celebrity before she became known as a painter. But by the time we got into the late 30s

and into the 40s, she... This is not her age. No, sorry, this is the 19... Yes, yes. So by the... She only had two solo shows in her life, the one that we've already heard about in 1938 in New York

and in Mexico in 1950. just before she died. But she was starting to be featured in shows in the United States of Mexican art in general. And she also, by the second half of the 1940s, she was commonly featured in Mexican shows, in Mexico of Mexican art. So she was starting to gain more of a reputation

as an artist in her own right by the last decade of her life, I'd say. Was she anywhere near doing what you really wanted, which was to make a living out of painting? No, she never made a living out of her paintings. And it was a frustration to her that she always had to rely on Diego Rivera for support, and particularly with her medical bills, support was a big issue, financial support. And her paintings never sold for large amounts of money in her lifetime. I think she made quite a good living, and she had to, because she separated from Diego in 35 for quite a period.

They divorced for a year in 39 to 40, and she made a resolution at that point. She had to live on her own and had to support herself. And that's not coincidentally when she begins to sell, not least Edward G. Robinson, the actor, who is one of the first American real patrons of her work. So I think by the late 30s... It was a great art collector. Yeah, and he knew what he was doing, and he bought her work. And I think from that point on, whether she covered her costs, which as you say, her medical costs were very high,

I'm not sure of the family finances, but I think she was pretty much independent. And that was one of the aims of continuing the painting at this point, that she needed to be independent. Because Diego was so totally unreliable, both in financial respects and in terms of the relationship. Can you give us some idea, Alan Knight, of the... the sense of shape of the last few years of her life, because she died in her 40s, and we're getting towards the end of that. So what's going on?

Is she living with him? Where is she living? What's she doing day by day? That sort of stuff. Yeah, the last years of her life are very sad and tragic. She died in 1954, aged us 47. She was virtually bedridden towards the end. She was drinking a lot.

She was using a lot of pain-killing drugs. Diego was still there. They'd remarried, and in his own sort of, of way he was supportive, though he did continue to have affairs on the side. She was continuing to paint, but her painting does start to deteriorate in the last years. It becomes much less precise, and much more like kind of daubs. If you look at her journal that she kept in her final years, it's a kind of strange, almost stream of consciousness, set of ideas and images interspersed with pictures and doodles. So it does suggest somebody who is getting somewhat disconnected

from the world whose painting, whose technical skills are in decline. She, And it's at this point, as I said, that she seems to be most driven to proclaim her communism, including an almost sort of filial respect for Stalin as the great hope for mankind. And the doodles include these strange. She was painting a portrait of Stalin when she died. And so you have the sense of someone who is not only physically going downhill very fast, but also is losing some of the sort of precise mental powers that she had had as an earlier time. I don't think we've quite yet, Valerie Fraser, if you could do it for us,

given listeners who don't know her work, some impression of the tremendous intensity of those self-portraits. I mean, there are 55 of them. You can't look away from them. They are fierce and dramatic and as far as, I don't know, beautifully painted. Can you talk a bit about that? Yes, she, as I think Alan's absolutely right, when she's really in pain at the end of her life,

she just goes on painting self-portraits and they're less interesting. But I think the main stuff it's the powerful gaze which is usually straight in the eye. You can't escape from the gaze and one painting that I particularly like is my nurse

and I where there is a huge brown woman with an Olmec mask holding in her arms a tiny little baby Frieder but with an adult body and these gigantic, feeding from these gigantic breasts,

which are oozing milk. And as I was saying earlier on, there's this sort of sense of x-ray with you're looking inside as well. So there's all the glands of the milk bubbling out. And it's such a powerful image with the rain coming down behind is milky, the huge trees and leaves and things around it.

Everything is so full of life and fertility. and Frida herself is a part of it and she's being fed by it but she's also feeding it. How did she, when and how did she come to prominence? She came to prominence. I mean I said at the beginning she was one of the most famous artists of the previous century that's because of your note so is she and how did it happen? Yeah, well as we say she was famous in her own time

and her house for instance became a museum very shortly after she died but it was in the 1970s in the United States, the Chicano movement, which was a part of the civil rights movement, recognizing the unique identity of the Mexican-American population in the United States. And she was seen as an artist who spoke to that experience and also a feminist icon. And she became quite prominent as a feminist icon in Europe as well. Alan, what would you say that her legacy is now then?

Yes, I think her celebrity, which has gone up greatly in recent days, decades is partly, as you say, as a symbol of Mexicanness. Her pictures are very reproducible. You can see Frida, key rings and fridge magnets. So she's almost like a sort of Che Guevara icon that's instantly recognisable. And interestingly, Diego's reputation has gone down, partly because those great big historical murals have come to seem very passe. They're part of an old revolutionary tradition that's completely gone in Mexico, or very nearly completely gone, whereas she represented something different, something surrealist, something more personal, and above all, something feminist. And so I think she sort of caught the wave of the last generation as now in a way

eclipsed her husband and partner as an artistic celebrity. Would you agree with that? Yes, I would. I think she has lived on, I mean, partly through things like Salma Hayek's movie. You know, she's... I'm awfully sorry. Is it fine? Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Valerie, Valerie Fraser. a patient shell and Alan Knight.

That's it for this series of In Our Time. We were back on September the 24th. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I mean, you covered the territory of all, didn't you think? I think we hit all the buttons pretty much. I wanted to talk about how the Britons

and the Trotskis and the Ruevarez all went off around Mexico together. These are the road trips you want to be on. Wouldn't you like to be part of that? What interesting holiday companions. Oh my goodness me. You've never done Diego Rivera, have you? Oh, really? No.

The trouble is because they're so intertwined. I kept feeling I was kind of pulling him in. You have to because they're so intertwined. And I feel, you know, hang on a minute. We shouldn't be talking about all this life stuff. We should be talking about the art, but you can't. Well, radio is not exactly. No, no.

I think of the life. The life is fascinating in itself. And her life is particularly fascinating. You can't escape it. You can't talk to her about three or four pennies. We can't just sit here and talk about pennies all the time. It doesn't going to work. And the paintings don't make sense without knowing about her life.

No, exactly. That's what I mean is that unlike other artists, which certainly wouldn't work on radio because you can talk about it. But in her case, the life is so inextricably linked to the art. You can't understand it unless you know. I went to that house and blue house. Did you? I was in Mexico to a city two three times.

And it is extraordinary. Yes, too is extraordinary. This was many years ago, and I didn't get the full impact of it there, and I went in, looked around intently, and conscientiously. I didn't feel the effect of it as much as I do now.

It's as if it takes a while for it to break through. Not for you three, but it did for me. I think it's also recognizing what a transformation that house was from the old Portfutian, European heavy drapes to this Mexican. exuberant culture and the garden and the pyramid in the garden

and all of that at the time. That was the cutting edge. Yeah. Yeah. She had an influence. Do people want to paint like her? Yeah. And I was all women or is it all women? No, no, no. I was looking at this stuff and for instance there's a Japanese artist called Yasumasa Morimura who completely redid her portraits. He staged them as a photographer and they're very good. I mean, they really work. He's got an indrogenous face as well.

But she continues to be a big inspiration for artists all over the world. I think that my problem with her partly is that there was a whole generation of wonderful women artists at the same time. And there's an awful lot of work that could be done to raise their profile a bit. She's very much the one who captures the image. No, no, it's not her fault. No, no, in terms of future research and scholarship, it's not her fault, certainly. Well, and I think being married to Diego Rivera immediately gave her a leg up in terms of prominence. I mean, she was a celebrity before she became known as a painter.

Simon comes in, our producer. That's it. Make his announcements. And also just an appreciation for Melbourne, I think made it through all. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. It's like the beginning of the Jules Holland program, you know, where you see him sort of rushing across London on trams and tubes.

That's right. Well, I don't know any of those. No. It was a pedestrian, Rochelle. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.