Frida Kahlo by Gerry Souter

Author:Gerry Souter [Souter, Gerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783107438
Publisher: Parkstone International
Published: 2015-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

69. Self-Portrait dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, 1940.

Oil on masonite, 59.5 x 40 cm. Private collection, USA.

70. Self-Portrait dedicated to Sigmund Firestone, 1940.

Oil on masonite, 61 x 43 cm. Private collection, USA.

71. Me and My Parrots, 1941.

Oil on canvas, 82 x 62.8 cm. Private collection.

72. Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943.

Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 63 cm. Collection of

Jacques and Natasha Gelman, Mexico.

But here, she’s relaxed and accepting in her virtually luminescent white gown trimmed in lace. Curiously, in the arms of the stone-faced, golem-like surrogate, the girl seems as much a sacrifice as something cherished. At the bottom of the painting is a retablo banner, but it is blank.

Of this painting, Diego Rivera wrote in 1943:

And Frida is the only example in the history of art of someone who tore out her breast and heart to tell the biological truth of what she feels in them of reason/imagination that is faster than light, she painted her mother and wetnurse, knowing that she really does not know their faces. The nourishing “nana’s” face is only the Indian mask of hard rock, and her glands are clusters that drip milk like the rain fertilises the earth, or like the tear that fertilises pleasure. The mother is the grieving mater with seven daggers of pain that makes possible the torn opening through which emerges the Child Frida, the only human force that has created birth by means of its own action in reality.[26]

She also painted her only formal portrait of Diego Rivera. The year had not been good for Diego’s mural commissions. He looks tired and undernourished, His illnesses and eye problems have taken their toll. Though his own work volume had slipped, he tirelessly devoted much of his time to propping up Frida’s confidence in her capabilities. Her rendition of his diminished presence is tender and sympathetic.

On the other hand, his act of callous infidelity with her sister would never be far from Frida’s palette and brushes. She created Memory in 1937, an enigmatic trio of three Fridas: as a suspended schoolgirl costume at the time of her accident, but with only one arm, and as Frida dressed in white with her cropped hair and wearing a bolero jacket made of cowhide. A wooden lance pierces a heart-shaped, see-through hole in the jacket. No hands extend from the jacket’s cuffs, but the third Frida – a Tehuana costume on a hanger – extends an arm to the wounded and helpless Frida. As though wrenched from her chest by an ancient Aztec priest, her huge heart lies abandoned on a desert landscape pumping vast quantities of blood into the soil and the sea. Red blood vessels tie the three Frida images together – each of them incomplete and all tied to the pain of a broken heart.

My Doll and I, painted in oil on metal, speaks to her childless state, not with pathos, or longing, but rather with an aloof acceptance. She wears a Tehuana skirt and blouse and sits next to a naked boy doll.

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