Frida in America by Celia Stahr

Frida in America by Celia Stahr

Author:Celia Stahr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group


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After five long days in her hospital bed, Frida picked up a pencil and made a drawing of herself seated in a chair with a stiff-looking neck and a wide-eyed blank stare. Another wide-open eye is on her hospital gown, looking as though it’s emerging from her chest under her right shoulder. This eye looks out directly with what appears to be a flash of light. It is reminiscent of a third eye, with its connotation of perception beyond ordinary sight.

This was the second time Frida had included a third eye in a drawing. The concept is found in several religious traditions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, and in art it is most recognizable as a third eye appearing in between the eyes or on the forehead. In The Dream, the drawing she had created four months earlier, the Shiva-like eye emitting flames on the façade of a high-rise next to Diego’s face looks alive with passion and fury. But in the drawing of Frida in a hospital gown, the flash in the third eye is subtle, perhaps indicating her connection to an inner realm of spiritual and artistic sight.

Back in Mexico City five years before, Frida had watched Diego incorporate the third eye into his murals at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, such as a grisaille image titled Labor, featuring a meditating, cross-legged Buddha-like woman with a star in the middle of her forehead. It’s similar to the design Diego made for the cover of the periodical El Maestro, where he placed an all-seeing eye at the center of a five-pointed star, symbolizing the progression from the physical to the spiritual—earth, water, air, fire, and spirit.

Frida began using the third eye in her drawings while in the United States. It would become a recurring motif in her mature paintings and later diary entries. Two years after her miscarriage in Detroit, Frida made her interest in the all-seeing eye explicit in a drawing titled Third Eye. It depicts a large eye with a landscape scene embedded in it. A profile of an oversized toddler sits on the ridge of a mountain with the face of a clock above that reads ten minutes past five. This dreamlike landscape within an all-seeing eye may have been inspired by a hallucinatory experience Frida had while losing large quantities of blood and possibly receiving nitrous oxide during the miscarriage in Detroit, as the time on the clock coincides with the onset of her increased bleeding that morning on the Fourth of July while in bed at the Wardell.

While it’s hard to know what drugs Frida received at Henry Ford Hospital, there are important clues that point to her altered state of mind during the acute phase of her miscarriage. When she was lying on the gurney being conveyed through the basement corridor at the hospital, she marveled at the beauty of what she thought were colored steam pipes above her. But in fact the long tubular shapes that ran the length



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