The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Smith Stephanie J.;

Author:Smith, Stephanie J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

The Long Road Home

Unfortunately for Reyes, the PCM’s renewed commitment toward a greater inclusion of women came too late. Indeed, on 1 June 1940, La Voz de México published the names of eight comrades recently expelled from the Party—seven men and one woman. The Communist Party’s paper listed Aurora Reyes among the former PCM members removed for currently having “links with Trotskyist groups, always working without connection with the Party’s higher organizations and base, and receiving influences from people foreign to the political line of the PCM.”142 Reyes’s removal from the Party in some ways mirrored Concha Michel’s previous experience in late 1933 and 1934. As Jocelyn Olcott notes, Michel left the PCM after the Party’s newspaper published notice in November 1933 of the Central Committee’s decision to expel her. Long active in the PCM, Michel refused to conform to the Party’s position that characterized “women’s issues” as secondary, an interpretation labeled as “antimarxist” by the Central Committee.143 Although La Voz de México failed to provide the specifics underlying Reyes’s own expulsion, much like Michel, Reyes promoted women’s positions within the PCM but also expressed criticism with many of her male comrades’ decisions to treat women differently from themselves.144 After she left the PCM, Reyes continued her work as an artist and a poet. Kahlo and Reyes also remained close, even through the twists and turns of their respective careers and relationships. Demonstrating the eloquent words of a poet, Reyes wrote to her friend from Oaxaca, “From this other land, from this other country, or more accurately from another planet, I remember you, Frida, now more intimately and closer than ever.”145 After a long career, Reyes died on 26 April 1985, in Mexico City.146

Lying in a Paris hospital bed in February 1939, Kahlo clearly found herself in another world of sorts. Following her November 1938 New York show, held at the Julien Levy Gallery, Kahlo traveled to Paris in January 1939 to participate in an exhibit organized by the surrealist and Trotskyite André Breton.147 Breton wrote the preface for her New York exhibition, and theoretically had arranged for Kahlo to show many of the same art pieces in Paris. Upon her arrival, however, Kahlo found her paintings still in customs and the supposed show in disarray. To make matters even worse, her stay with Breton and his wife resulted in an exceptionally disagreeable experience for Kahlo.148 Very quickly, Kahlo became ill with a serious kidney infection, and after over two weeks in the American Hospital, she refused to return to the Breton home. As she wrote her intimate friend and portrait photographer, Nickolas Muray, Kahlo remained convinced she caught her infection from food served during her time at Breton’s residence.149 Eventually the promised show came to pass, but not without additional conflict. Kahlo furiously reported to Muray that the gallery only would include two of the paintings because the subject matter of her other art could disturb the public.150 According to the catalog, however, Kahlo ultimately exhibited eighteen of her works at the Renou & Colle Gallery from 10 March to 25 March.

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