Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer

An entrenched narrative of suffering permeates the telling of her life. While considering the representation of Kahlo that has emerged from the combined efforts of researchers, filmmakers, artists, and ardent admirers, it is crucial to keep in mind that Kahlo’s life, like any biography, is recounted so that a chronology is made into a cohesive narrative by concentrating on events, and associations among events. Tautologically, selected events become relevant as a persona emerges from an investigation of historical evidence, including letters, diaries, exhibition reviews, interviews, and paintings. Kahlo’s character development and life story have been produced simultaneously, in accordance with one another, in such a way that various social classifications—nationalist, invalid, rebel, hypochondriac, lesbian, adoring wife, childless mother, sexually desired object, antibourgeois, communist—are seen as being illustrated in her paintings. Furthermore, among biographies of Kahlo, and therefore throughout interpretations of her paintings that emulate the author=corpus model, these classifications generally revolve around two core aspects of her life, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera and the interminable deterioration of her body. Kahlo’s own words from a 1951 newspaper interview have been cited consistently to support the centrality of these circumstances. She remorsed, “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar ran over me. . . . The other accident is Diego.”⁴ The streetcar accident refers to the horrifying, life-threatening 1925 accident in which an iron handrail impaled Kahlo’s torso, causing extensive injuries and lifelong physical complications. The Rivera “accident” alludes to Kahlo’s anguish over his notorious womanizing. Thus her statement is taken as evidence that her life was emotionally and physically torturous, and her paintings accordingly are interpreted as documents of her pain.

      It is tempting to condense Kahlo’s life into a narrative of emotional and physical health, first because biographers’ interviews with the artist’s colleagues and acquaintances bind significant events, passions, and idiosyncratic characteristics of the artist’s life to her marriage and/or illnesses. And second, it allows for a heroic/tragic drama. Because Kahlo’s life has been recounted as a litany of physical and psychological symptoms, she is revered for her “triumph” in creating art despite the “torment” of bodily and emotional injury. A pervasive torment/triumph approach can be gleaned from a cursory glance at monograph and essay titles: Andrea Kettenmann’s Frida Kahlo: Pain and Passion; Malka Drucker’s Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph in Her Life and Art; Martha Zamora’s Brush of Anguish; Nancy Breslow’s “Cry of Joy and Pain”; Hayden Herrera’s “Frida Kahlo: The Palette, the Pain and the Painter”; and Gloria Orenstein’s “Painting for Miracles.” (There are notable exceptions to the preponderant heroic/tragic interpretations of Kahlo, which are cited in subsequent chapters and from which many of my ideas have developed.)

      While recognizing Kahlo’s resilience fosters admiration, it also implicitly solemnizes the tribulations of her life so that celebrating her strength simultaneously and necessarily evokes sympathy for her pain. Accordingly, Herrera evaluates Kahlo’s entire oeuvre, and her late-twentieth-century popularity, in terms of bipolarities subsumed within the overarching battle between surrendering to pain and struggling for survival:

      There is the tension created by Kahlo’s festive, becostumed exterior and her anguished interior. There is a split between her mask of control and the turmoil that thrashed inside her head. Even as she presented herself as a heroine, she insisted that we know her vulnerability. And while she was compelled to see herself and to be truly seen, she hid behind the mythic creature she invented to help her withstand life’s blows. . . . [H]er self-portraits . . . were not just a means to communicate feeling, but a device to keep feeling in check. Thus while her paintings draw us into her power, they also frustrate. They are steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence . . . forc[ing] us to come face to face with Frida . . . and . . . with unexplored parts of ourselves.⁵

      Herrera’s appraisal insinuates that the act of painting was emotionally exhausting for Kahlo and that the act of viewing her paintings is emotionally exhausting for Kahlo’s admirers, in essence suggesting that Kahlo’s paintings devour the artist as well as the audience. The production of paintings is, in Herrera’s judgment, thought to have depleted the artist’s pain but also to have consumed her energy as she sought to control “the turmoil that thrashed inside her head.” The painted products then superseded the actual being of Frida Kahlo and replaced her with “the mythic creature she invented” and “hid behind.” And this mythic creature depicted in self-portraits devours its audience “draw[ing] us into her power,” and yet, “steely in their distance and obdurate in their silence,” the paintings do not soothe the “anguished interior” of the artist or “unexplored areas of ourselves.” The title Devouring Frida refers to these aspects of Kahlo’s constructed persona and reception and also to the canons and theories that seamlessly have been incorporated into the mythic Frida. In other words, Kahlo herself is construed as devouring, expending herself and her audience, but she also is devoured, consumed by the implicit ideologies of the author=corpus paradigm. Within those biographies that do not acknowledge theoretical applications and assumptions, there are indeed ideologies at work in the seemingly benign, objective quest for historical facts that, together, recount Kahlo’s dramatic life. I argue that the “mythic Frida” narrative eradicates the social and cultural negotiations that mediate recollections by colleagues and acquaintances, thereby impeding an analysis of Kahlo’s paintings as representations of political inquiry. For example, as I argue in the chapter on “Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico,” the symbolic significance of motherhood relevant to postrevolutionary reconstruction in Mexico is apparent in recollections of Kahlo’s miscarriage and perpetuated in interpretations of Henry Ford Hospital. My analysis of the painting takes postrevolutionary nationalism into account as I look beyond the personal iconography of the self-portrait for references to social and political prescription and resistance.

      Countering the author=corpus approach that leads to the “devouring” mythology of Kahlo, I undertake a semiotic, feminist analysis of the mechanisms through which the Frida myth has been constructed. Semiotic theory offers a methodological process for investigating the construction of meaning, context, artist, and audience, whereas feminist art history promotes theoretical reasoning for why I should want to dilute Frida’s mythic status. I embark on this project not simply to show how ideologies are written into interpretation but to interrogate the celebratory aura surrounding Kahlo’s mythic persona. It is important to recognize that, as the feminist dictum declares, the personal is political. Characterizations of Kahlo’s emotional and physical well-being invoke cultural definitions of health and illness, gender relations, social restrictions, sexual expectations, and creative production. As Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen note, “The phrase ‘the personal is political’ rejects the traditional exclusion and repression of the personal in male-dominated politics. It also asserts the political nature of women’s private individualized oppression.”⁶ Texts that most powerfully relegate Kahlo to a feminine sphere of apolitical art and private life uncritically and insidiously sequester the artist from broader social contexts.

      Even some recent essays that set out to broaden the social relevance of the artist’s work maintain a patriarchally defined gender prescription that empowers the male by disempowering the female cultural domains. Kahlo’s biography, and thus the commemoration of her life and work, have been composed through various and specific cultural lenses that, despite claiming to reveal, have distorted the politics of Kahlo’s life. For example, as I discuss in the chapter on “Unveiling Politics,” Kahlo’s ethnic clothing and self-portraits in Mexican dress generally have been interpreted to represent Kahlo’s fervent nationalism, or mexicanidad. While this conclusion has a certain validity, it is not specific, for there were many “nationalisms” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Artists, intellectuals, and politicians debated the country’s self-definition and its social, political agenda. However, an investigation of Kahlo’s specific political views has been precluded by the generalized assertion that she embraced her heritage. (This omission partly is a reflection of the difficulty in discerning women’s political views from historical records written by key male politicians, activists, artists, and social critics.)

      Most of Kahlo’s biographers implicitly recognize the constructedness of interpretation.⁷ For example, Robin