Frida Kahlo: the ideal victim

Anthony Daniels in the New Criterion (I think that's Hilton Kramer's "I hate all art after 1900" rag):

Anyone interested in the sociology of taste could hardly do better than visit London at the moment, where what used to be known as the Tate Gallery is offering two exhibitions, the first of portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the second of works by Frida Kahlo. It will probably not come as any great surprise to readers to learn that the public for these two exhibitions is different, socially, demographically and, above all, culturally.

The public for the Joshua Reynolds is small, elderly, and conservative, or at least conservatively dressed. Although the exhibition has been given a title to ensnare the young—“The Creation of Celebrity,” with its suggestio falsi that there is nothing much to choose between Brad Pitt, Puff Daddy, and Elton John on the one hand, and Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and Doctor Johnson on the other—they are not deceived. They may know nothing much about the past, except that it is dead and good riddance to it, but they know enough to know that Joshua Reynolds is not one of them: never mind that his most sympathetic and beautiful portraits of women are those of high-class courtesans, and that his portraits of literary figures are not mere likenesses, but delineations of their very souls, or characters if you prefer. But soul and character make us uneasy nowadays; it is personality that interests us: particularly our own, of course.

Which brings us by a natural association of ideas to Frida Kahlo. She is something of a phenomenon, at least in terms of fame and marketing: she has shot up the artistic hit parade in the last quarter of a century, to very near its top. This is not her fault, of course, but neither does it necessarily redound to her credit. The crowd at the exhibition, at least when I went there, was large and overwhelmingly female, and many of them had the washed-out, slightly embittered look of British women novelists. They’d probably insist upon calling Nelly O’Brien (Reynolds’s most famous courtesan subject) a sex worker.

Let me confess, however, to an admiration, within bounds, for Frida Kahlo’s work. Her art survives its pretty obvious technical limitations, and I find quite a lot of it moving, though it is difficult for me to disentangle the artistic from the extra-artistic reasons for my response. For example, I suspect that two paintings at the exhibition affected me more, for reasons of biography, than they would affect most of her fervent, which is to say, ideological, admirers. The two paintings were El Difuntito Dimas Rosas and Unos Quantos Piquetitos.

El Difuntito is the post-mortem portrait of a little boy who died aged three in 1937. He is dressed, according to a Mexican tradition, in biblical robes and a crown, and placed on a mat of woven leaf, holding a gladiolus in his lifeless hand. Kahlo gets the death of such a child exactly right: the hooded, half-open eyes that it is difficult to believe are now entirely unseeing, the upper lip slightly retracted to reveal the teeth. The pathos, the tragedy, is real, and the technique more than adequate to what is being expressed.

El Difuntito took me sharply back to the days when I practiced medicine in Africa. Not far away was a hill to which I was one day summoned. An army truck, carrying sacks of grain, with seventeen people on top of the grain, had not made it up the hill and started to slide backwards. The people fell off and were crushed, or smothered, by the grain that fell after them. Ironical death, to be killed by grain having lived in hunger!

Of course, there was nothing I could do. The dead were laid out by the side of the road by the time I arrived. A mother laid beside her four children, aged between two and five, as regularly graded as organ pipes, four difuntitos just like Frida Kahlo’s.

When I returned to my clinic, troubled by what I had seen and frustrated by my impotence, I had a discussion with my intelligent African assistant, Christopher, who believed that the hill was inhabited by evil spirits because accidents so often happened there. “The driver was drunk, Christopher,” I said. “And the truck had no brakes because no one ever maintains anything in this country.” But Christopher was insistent: the driver had been drunk for a long time, and the truck had had no brakes for weeks, months, or years: so for him the question was still, Why there? Why not somewhere else or not at all? The answer for him was obvious: not pombe—maize beer—but evil spirits. Frida Kahlo, who in many of her pictures derided the unfeeling mechanical rationalism of the United States—except when it came to her own medical treatment—might have approved of this pre-modern and therefore authentic mode of thought.

As for Unos Quantos Piquetitos—a few small nips—it resonated with a later stage in my medical career, when I became much preoccupied with the violence and cruelty of British urban existence. A woman, naked except for a rolled-down stocking and a shoe on her right foot, lies murdered on a bed, with multiple stab wounds and blood everywhere, the murderer in a hat and himself covered in blood standing by the bed holding the knife. Above him, two doves, one white and one black, hold aloft a white scroll with the words “A few small nips,” and the frame itself is splotched with red, to underline the sordid bloodiness of the scene.

The bitter irony of the words on the scroll held by the doves is exactly right. The painting was based upon a real case, and I have spoken to quite a few men who have given their lovers “a few small nips,” that is to say, stab wounds in multiples of ten, their frenzy of jealousy being later described (by them) in precisely such euphemistic terms. There is no mistaking the genuine and justified outrage with which the picture was painted.

It is, I suspect, for her extra-artistic associations that Frida Kahlo is most appreciated. That she had an artistic talent is undeniable, and many of her pictures are memorable (do you really not remember them once you have seen them?), but it is surely going a little far, from the point of view of artistic considerations alone, to say, as the catalogue does, that she is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. The fact that she can be seriously regarded as such, however, surely tells us quite a lot about our modern sensibility.

No advertising man could have given her a better biographical profile for eliciting a favorable response at the present time. She had polio at the age of six and subsequently walked with a limp; she was severely injured in a crash, aged eighteen, and suffered from the results for the rest of her life (she died aged forty-seven), undergoing twenty-two operations in the meantime. She married a man, Diego Rivera, who was flagrantly unfaithful to her and who even had an affair with her sister; she was probably bisexual and had a couple of lesbian affairs; she had two miscarriages, either of which might have killed her, and was in any case ambivalent about having a child; her father was a German who settled in Mexico and her mother was half-Indian, thus conferring on her the original virtue of hybridity (though in fact she didn’t so much live in non-European cultures as visit them or collect their artifacts, and turn them to her artistic use). Her politics were radical; she was anti-American, though in her case America always returned good for evil. She was Stalinist, at a time when all right-thinking people agreed that the killing of millions was the road to utopia, but she also had a fling with Trotsky and towards the end of her life displayed a less than dialectical-materialist attraction to the wisdom of the East, thus later appealing to the New Age, healing-power-of-crystals end of the dissent market. All in all, a pretty good C.V. for the modern age.

A large part of her oeuvre was self-portraiture. Not surprisingly, much of it reflected her suffering, both physical and at the hands of a man she adored but who did not treat her well. This self-portraiture is saved from mere self-indulgence, at least for me, by the very real nature, intensity, and protraction of her suffering, that made any kind of achievement in the circumstances a triumph of the human spirit. There is a photograph in the exhibition of Diego Rivera, her faithless husband whom she loved passionately, leaning over her in her hospital bed and kissing her, and another of her being brought, emaciated, prostrate, and unable to sit up, to her first one-man exhibition in Mexico City in 1953, not very long before her death. I think only someone who could not understand how it is possible for a person to love another who was unworthy of that love, or who could not imagine the reality of physical suffering, and what it took to triumph over it, could fail to find these photos intensely moving.

And yet there is something unhealthy, of equal intensity, about the disproportionate adulation that Frida Kahlo has received over the last two or three decades. I think that what has happened is that people with no objective right to do so have equated her suffering with their own, and have appropriated her work as a symbolic representation of their own minor dissatisfactions and frustrations, victimhood being the present equivalent of beatitude.

They say, “I too have known a faithless or a worthless man; I too have suffered from persistent headaches, dymenorrhoea, or sciatica; therefore, Frida Kahlo has understood me, and I have understood Frida Kahlo. After all, I have suffered just like her. Moreover, like me, she was a moral person, which is to say that she had all the right attitudes; she was on the side of the oppressed, at least those who were not in the Gulag; she loved indigenes as a matter of principle; and she took part in the holy work of dissolving boundaries, the boundaries between sexes (or rather, genders) and between cultures.”

Besides this, what can Sir Joshua offer? True, he was born in comparatively humble circumstances, but he sided, professionally and biographically, with the oppressor class, with dead white males and their female collaborators. True again, he suffered a disability at the end of his life, namely deafness, but that meant only that he was unable to enjoy the society of others of his ilk, which surely served him right. There’s nothing to sympathize with there.

The death of ideology? A premature announcement, I suspect.

(Anthony Daniels’s most recent books are Utopias Elsewhere and Monrovia Mon Amour.)