Kahlo. Gerry Souter

the narrow view she commanded.

      By December, 1925, she regained the use of her legs. One of her first painful journeys was to Mexico City.

      Frida and Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

      1931

      Oil on canvas, 100 × 79 cm

      San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, bequest of Albert M. Bender, San Francisco

      Shortly thereafter, she was felled by shooting pains in her back and more doctors trooped into her life. Her three undiagnosed spinal fractures were discovered and she was immediately encased in plaster once again. Trapped and immobilised after those brief days of freedom, she began realistically narrowing her options. As days of soul searching continued, she passed the time painting scenes from Coyoacan, and portraits of relatives and her friends who came to visit.

      Portrait of Eva Frederick

      1931

      Oil on canvas, 63 × 46 cm

      Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City

      The praise her paintings elicited surprised her and she began deciding who would receive the painting before she started. She gave them away as keepsakes. With this painting, she began a remarkable lifetime series of fully realized Frida Kahlo reflections, both introspective and revealing, that examined her world from behind her own eyes and from within that crumbling patchwork of a body.

      Nude of Eva Frederick

      1931

      Crayon on paper, 60.5 × 47 cm

      Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico

      By 1928, Frida had recovered enough to set aside her orthopedic corsets and escape the narrow world of her bed to walk out of La Casa Azul once again into the social and political stew that was Mexico City. She began reexploring the heady world of Mexican art and politics. She wasted no time in hooking up with her old comrades from the various cliques at the Preparatory School. Soon, as she drifted from one circle to another, she fell in with a collection of aspiring politicians, anarchists and Communists who gravitated around the American expatriate, Tina Modotti. During the First World War and the early 1920s, many American intellectuals, artists, poets and writers fled the United States to Mexico, and later to France, search of cheap living and political idealism.

      Paisaje con cactus (Landscape with Cactus)

      Diego Rivera, 1931

      Oil on canvas

      Private collection

      Study of the Portrait of Luther Burbank

      1931

      Crayon on paper, 29 × 21 cm

      Collection of Juan Coronel Rivera, Mexico

      They banded together to praise or condemn each other’s works and drafted windy manifestos while participating in one long inebriated party that lasted several years, lurching from apartment to salon to saloon and back. These expatriates fashioned a sentimental vision of the noble peasant toiling in the fields and promoted the Mexican view of life as fiestas y siestas interrupted by the occasional bloody peasant revolt and a scattering of political assassinations.

      Portrait of Luther Burbank

      1931

      Oil on masonite, 86.5 × 61.7 cm

      Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City

      Into this tequila-fueled debating society stepped the formidable presence of Diego Rivera, the prodigal returned home from 14 years abroad and having been kicked out of Moscow. Despite his rude treatment at the hands of Stalinist art critics and the Russian government’s unveiled threats of harm if he did not leave, Diego embraced Communism as the world’s salvation.

      Portrait of Lady Cristina Hastings

      1931

      Red chalk on paper, 47 × 29 cm

      Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico

      Soon after his arrival in 1921 he sought out pro-Mexican art movements, Mexican muralists and easel painters, photographers, and writers. Within this deeply Mexicanistic society, Tina Modotti’s circle of expatriates and fellow travelers fit right in to the party circuit. Frida drifted into this stimulating circle. As Frida recalled her first meeting with her future husband:

      We got to know each other at a time when everybody was packing pistols; when they felt like it, they simply shot up the street lamps in Avenida Madero.” “Diego once shot a gramophone at one of Tina’s parties. That was when I began to be interested in him although I was also afraid of him.”