A tousle-haired teenager with mischief in her sparkling eyes bragged to her schoolmates at the Art Academy of Mexico City, "My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera."
Diego Rivera paid little attention to this little nuisance until one day, when they both were in Mexico City; she cornered him on the staircase of the National Palace where he was commissioned to paint murals. She thrust a canvas, one of her first paintings, in front of him. He saw a spark of genius there, and encouraged her. A friendship between Frida Kahlo and Diego slowly developed.
At age sixteen, she suffered a terrible accident. The car she was riding in crashed into a bus resulting in a fractured pelvis, a severely damaged spine, and a metal spike pierced her body. She bore years in plaster casts and many operations. Her suffering was intense.
Painting was her only solace. Diego arranged a rack above her hospital bed so that she could look up and paint with her right hand, her only limb free of casts. Many of the capital's painters and intellectuals visited her bedside. Diego was often at her side, instructing, criticizing, and guiding her painting techniques. During this time their romance began.
At last, she was released from the hospital, and on August 23, 1929, she and Diego were married. He was forty-three and his new bride had just turned nineteen. Still her suffering was constant. Frida's great regret was that she could not fulfill that teenage boast she had made to all her school chums -- now she could never have a child. To add more sadness to her misery, she also had to endure the many extra-marital adventures of her husband. Basically, it was neither of their faults. Frida's injuries allowed her little pressures of any sort, and Diego's abundant sexual appetite drove him in other directions. Love and sex were entirely two different things for them. It was during this time that she had an intellectual love affair with Leon Trotsky.
Her art was entirely realistic at the beginning. Through her pain and Diego's infidelity, gradually her work assumed a brutal, strange quality, evolving into surrealism and mysticism. Her increasing popularity earned her one-woman shows in New York and Paris. Oddly enough she had a hatred for gringos.
After a seven-year marriage, Frida and Diego parted, but their separation was a period of unhappiness for both. She truly loved her sapo (toad) and he missed her companionship, the unfailing spirit and joy of the tiny Frida. They remarried on December 8, 1940. Frida's portrait appears repeatedly in Diego's murals. In the famous mural on the Hotel Prado in Mexico City, she stands just behind him.
In early 1951, Frida had a one-woman show, a retrospective of most of
her work, showing the development in her work from self-taught primitive to poetic sophistication. Every painting had the image of Frida herself. By then Frida was bedridden and arrived in an ambulance for the opening. From a wheelchair she was grace and majesty personified. The show was a tremendous success. Frida's paintings were considered at par with Diego's by the buyers as well as the press.
Later that same year, Frida suffered her fourteenth operation in sixteen years, this one resulting in the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Her spirit waned and the flame of vitality dimmed. She took to wearing the billowing embroidered traditional long skirts of Mexican women. Colorful ribbons decorated her braided hair that was sometimes piled in a halo around her head. Frida emphasized the raven wings of her eyebrows and made up her face with unusual artistry. She wore the heavy jewels of the Mexican Indian. She, herself, became her most artistic work of art.
Her "Retrato de Diego Rivera," a six-page folio, showed that she had an extraordinarily sensitive and poetic literary ability. In it she displayed her intense and tender love for her husband.
On July 13, 1953, Frida Kahlo died in her sleep at the early age of 43. Diego became an old man, as he stood helplessly by her bed in abstract mourning. She was given the national honor of lying in state in the Hall of the Instituto de Bellas Artes. Ex-President Lazaro Cardenas stood honor guard.
Her birth home and final residence in Coyoacan, Mexico City, is today her tomb and can be visited to view her collections and little treasures. The final Mexican touch over her high bed is the torture instrument in which she had been encased and suffered -- the plaster cast.
Frida had lived a valiant, courageous life, and is a truly noted Mexican artist. Her paintings are prized and sought the world over. Kahlo was not deluded. Across her last painting, just before she died, she wrote: "Viva la Vida!" Hurray for Life!
