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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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How Frida Kahlo’s Love Affair with a Communist Revolutionary Impacted Her Art

Leon Trotsky, Natalya Sedova, Frida Kahlo and Max Schachtman, Mexico, 1937. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images

In the summer of 1940, Frida Kahlo found herself in jail. Mexico City police suspected her as an accomplice in the murder of the embattled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Several days prior to her arrest, he’d been gruesomely offed with an ice pick. His murder—and her implication in the crime—was a dramatic turn of events, especially considering that Kahlo and Trotsky had been giddy lovers just three years earlier; she’d even dedicated a striking self-portrait to him.

Kahlo had many romantic partners over the course of her short life (she died in 1954 at 47), but few resulted in dedicated paintings—and fewer pointed explicitly to her political beliefs. The liaison with Trotsky did both. Although their romance only lasted several months, it offers a window into Kahlo’s politics and how deeply they influenced her work.

Kahlo and Trotsky first met in 1937, when the painter was 29 and the politician was 57. Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, were vocal supporters of Marxism and had been on-and-off members of the Mexican Communist Party for a decade, since 1927. Influenced by the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the century, they advocated for a populist government and believed political power should rest in the hands of the working class. In Rivera’s 1928 mural The Arsenal, he showed Kahlo as an activist. Wearing a shirt emblazoned with a red star (red being the traditional color of Communism), Kahlo disseminates weapons to workers while a flag bearing the Communist party’s hammer-and-sickle insignia flies over the scene.

Leon Trotsky lecturing. Copenhagen, Denmark. , 1932. Robert Capa Magnum Photos

The couple also championed Mexicanidad, a post-Revolutionary movement that called for stripping the country of colonial influence and replacing it with the trappings of indigenous culture. It was in this spirit that Kahlo dressed herself, painted, and even gardened. On most days, she donned traditional Tehuana clothes, elaborately patterned skirt-and-blouse ensembles native to Oaxaca. Many of her paintings took cues from age-old Mexican votive panels, and she and Rivera re-planted their yard to include only native plants (succulents abounded).

By the mid-1930s, Kahlo and Rivera both considered themselves Trotskyites. They’d followed the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism closely, and knew Trotsky as a hero of the 1917 October Uprising, which cemented Vladimir Lenin and the Socialist regime’s rise to dominance. But when Joseph Stalin assumed leadership in 1924, he consolidated power and demoted Trotsky, exiling him for good in 1929. As a result, the Communist party fractured into two main camps: Stalinists and Trotskyites.

It was Rivera who convinced Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer Trotsky political asylum in Mexico. After several years in Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova boarded an oil tanker and docked in Tampico, Mexico on January 9, 1937. Rivera was sick, so Kahlo greeted them at the port, along with a troop of armed guards. In photos of the disembarkment, her Tehuana garb stands out among a sea of police uniforms and three-piece suits.

Frida’s Plaster Corset with a Hammer and Sickle (and Unborn Baby), 1950. Frida Kahlo Gallery Sofie Van de Velde

Friday Kahlo and Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1937. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Kahlo and Rivera offered the Trotskys their second home, the now famed Casa Azul, equipping it with guards, barricades, covered windows, and alarm systems to ensure their political hero’s safety. Sedova recalled the beginnings of the trip fondly in a letter to friends: “We were breathing purified air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cacti to the suburbs of Mexico City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, collections of Pre-Columbian art, paintings from all over: we were on a new planet, in Rivera’s house.”

It wasn’t long after the Russian couple settled in that a romance developed between Kahlo and Trotsky. The politician’s secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, remembered the pair’s blatant flirtations under the nose of Trotsky’s wife. Sedova didn’t understand English, the language in which the lovers communicated. They met clandestinely at Kahlo’s sister’s house, and Trotsky slipped love notes into books he lent her. Kahlo and Trotsky’s meek attempts at discretion didn’t prevent Sedova from discovering the affair. She gave her husband a “me-or-her ultimatum,” as scholar Gerry Souter points out in her 2014 book on Rivera. It seems that Kahlo tired of the romance around the same time, and by July their physical liaison had fizzled. (For her part, Amy Fine Collins wrote in Vanity Fair, “[f]riends recall that long after Trotsky’s assassination Kahlo delighted in driving Rivera into a rage by humiliating him with the memory of her affair with the great Communist.”)

Despite their split, the two remained friends for some time, and on November 7th—Trotksy’s birthday and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution—Kahlo gifted the politician a vibrant, sensual self-portrait. In the painting, Kahlo stands between two curtains, recalling the theatrical style of traditional Mexican ex-voto panels, created for devotional purposes and often found atop Catholic church altars or makeshift home shrines. She stares resolutely at the viewer, presenting herself with self-assurance and strength in a bold peach skirt and a fringed rebozo shawl. Rouge swaths her lips and cheeks, and ribbons weave through her thick plaits of hair. She cradles a small but bursting bouquet while holding a letter that reads: “To Leon Trotsky, with all my love, I dedicate this painting on 7th November 1937. Frida Kahlo in Saint Angel, Mexico.”

Leon Trotsky and his wife arrive in Tampico, Mexico, surrounded by police and artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.

Trotsky displayed the portrait in the intimacy of his office. When Surrealist André Breton visited in 1938, he too fell for the piece, later gushing: “I have for long admired the self-portrait by Frida Kahlo de Rivera that hangs on a wall of Trotsky’s study. She has painted herself in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies, and it is exactly in this guise that she draws aside the mental curtain.” He continued, with a typically gendered reading of the work: “We are privileged to be present, as in the most glorious days of German romanticism, at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the society of men of genius.”

The painting reveals two sides of Kahlo’s politics. On one hand, it denotes her allegiance to the international Communist movement and, in the moment she created the work, its Trotskyite faction. On the other, her devotion to Mexicanidad and Mexican nationalism is elucidated through the work’s allusions to ex-voto panels and traditional Mexican decoration, fashion, and even plantlife.

As Stalin’s power grew, Trotsky’s supporters dwindled and his enemies multiplied. In 1939, Kahlo and Rivera both switched camps, becoming Stalinists. Rivera and Trotsky had been moving apart politically for some time; Unlike Trotsky, Rivera supported General Francisco José Múgica in Mexico’s controversial election to replace Cárdenas, while Trotsky called Rivera “childish in politics” and derided him for his “political ambiguity.” Despite these differences, Trotsky attempted to resurrect their relationship, even writing to Kahlo for help in the matter; she didn’t respond.

By May 1940, fellow Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Trotsky (Rivera was an early suspect in the case). He wasn’t as lucky several months later. On August 20th, Ramón Mercader, an undercover agent working for Stalin, killed Trotsky with an ice pick. Kahlo had met Mercader in Paris the previous year, and was brought in for questioning by the Mexican police. She was released a day later, and soon after traveled to San Francisco, where Rivera was working on a mural.

The hammer and sickle emblem is draped over the casket of Frida Kahlo at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, 1954. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.

Despite her stint in jail, the incident didn’t dissuade Kahlo from continuing to embed politics into her paintings. In fact, references to Communism ramped up in her works from the 1950s. As scholar Andrea Kettenmann writes in her 1999 book Frida Kahlo, 1907-1954: Pain and Passion, the artist became “explicit in her last productive phase.” In 1950, Kahlo painted a hammer and sickle on one of the orthopedic corsets that supported her increasingly weak back, and in a diary entry from 1951, she worried that her failing health would restrict her from serving the Communist cause. “I want to turn [my work] into something useful; until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self, but one which is unfortunately a long way from serving the Party,” she wrote. “I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive that my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live.”

Several years later, in 1954, Kahlo painted her most pointedly political work: Marxism will give Health to the Sick. (Its original title was longer-winded: Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism.) The canvas metaphorically links Kahlo’s physical suffering with her allegiance to Communism. At the center of the composition, she holds a red Marxist book, while large hands (another symbol of the movement) embrace and uplift her corset-sheathed body. With Marxism to bolster her, she’s able to fling her crutches to the side. On one side of the painting, a dove, the universal symbol of peace, hovers above planet Earth. On the other side, a depiction of Karl Marx himself strangles a monstrous Uncle Sam/Eagle hybrid. The painting’s message seems clear: If Marxism can heal Kahlo, it can heal the world.

When the artist died later that year, a banner boasting a hammer and sickle swathed her coffin. Trotsky was long gone, but the painting Kahlo made for him—and her bold conviction in fusing politics and art—survived.

from Artsy News

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today-in-wwi · 8 years ago

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Trotsky Arrives in New York

Trotsky pictured with his daughter Nina in France in 1915. Nina did not join her father in the United States.

January 13 1917, New York--Leon Trotsky, like Lenin, had been in exile before and during the war. He had had to flee Vienna for Switzerland in the first days of the war to avoid arrest as a Russian national. In November 1914, he moved to Paris and began publishing a socialist and anti-war newspaper called Nashe Slovo (Our Word). As it was in Russian, French authorities paid it little mind until it was found in circulation among the Russian Expeditionary Forces in France. Under pressure from the Russian government, the French deported him to Spain in October. Spain wanted little to do with him either, and in turn deported him to the United States in December, on a "wretched little Spanish boat" (in Trotsky's words) called the Montserrat.

The Montserrat arrived in New York harbor on January 13. Trotsky wrote:

Sunday January 13. We are nearing New York. At three o'clock in the morning, everybody wakes up. We have stopped. It is dark. Cold. Wind. Rain. On land, a wet mountain of buildings. The New World!

His arrival was well-publicized in the socialist and Russian presses, and it even got some coverage in the major newspapers. A short item on page 2 of the New York Times two days later describes the arrival of "Leon Trotzky," who had been "expelled from four lands" for his socialist and pacifist writings. Trotsky, who considered himself a fierce revolutionary, was apparently a bit embarrassed by these tame characterizations.

Trotsky was welcomed by socialist emigrés in New York, most notably his fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, who had been deported to the US from Norway a few months earlier. Trotsky's partner, Natalya Sedova, recalled that "Bukharin greeted us with a bear-hug," or, in Trotsky's words, "welcomed us with the childish exuberance characteristic of him." Sedova goes on: "[We] had hardly got off the boat when he told us enthusiastically about a public library which stayed open late at night and which he proposed to show us at once." At around 9PM, Trotsky, Sedova, and Bukharin all went off to see the New York Public Library.

Today in 1916: German Navy Pushes for Renewed Submarine Offensive Today in 1915: Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold Forced to Resign

Sources include: The New York Times; Kenneth D. Ackerman, Trotsky in New York 1917.

#trotsky #wwi #ww1 #ww1 centenary #world war 1 #world war i #world war one #the first world war #the great war #bolsheviks #American Neutrality #leon trotsky #january 1917

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hauteculturefashion · 6 years ago

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At Haute Culture we can’t think of any other 20th-century artist of whom we would like to read 50 facts about, let alone write them. But Frida Kahlo was much more than a painter, more than a feminist, more than a fashion icon. Her paintings themselves have stood the test of time and are arguably more intriguing to a modern audience than they were in her time and they certainly become richer the more you know of her fascinating life story. Frida’s 47 years were often filled with pain but always fuelled by passion. Read on to discover 50 incredible facts on this fascinating woman’s life, loves and legacy.

Frida Kahlo Art Facts

Frida was a self-taught artist and received no formal art training or education. She learnt how to paint as a cure for boredom whilst being bed bound during her recovery from a near-fatal accident.

She did not consider herself a surrealist artist. Surrealism, during its heyday, was defined as art inspired by the unconscious mind. Unlike surrealist artists such a Salvador Dali and René Magritte, Frida Kahlo stated “I never painted my dreams. I painted my own reality.”

She was the original queen of the selfie, painting over fifty-five self-portraits.

The colours used in her paintings represented her emotions.

Frida often painted directly onto tin in order to emulate traditional Mexican folk art. She also used a variety of mixed media in her works such as newspaper cuttings, photos and shells.

The vast majority of her works are very small in scale.

Frida was a trailblazer for her time. It was very rare for an artist to make their art so personal; the ill health and emotional traumas that directly influenced her work were acknowledged as being completely original for their time. She painted herself as she felt and she wanted to make her feelings known.

Her 1939 painting Dos desnudos en el bosque (La tierra misma) sold for over $8 million in 2016, the highest auction price for any work by a Latin American artist.

Frida was the first Mexican artist to sell her work to a major international museum: The Frame, 1938 was purchased by The Louvre Museum in Paris the same year.

She once arrived at her solo exhibition in her own four-poster bed.

Andre Breton famously referred to Frida’s art as “A ribbon around a bomb”.

Frida did not start to take her painting seriously until much later on in her life.

“I am my own muse. I am the subject that I know best, the subject I want to know better.”

– Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo standing in front of her largest self-portrait Las Dos Fridas 1939. Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS.

Frida Kahlo Fashion Facts

The majority of Frida’s wardrobe and many of her other personal possessions were kept locked away in a bathroom for fifty years. (Click here to read our post on How Frida Kahlo Used Fashion To Build Her Legacy)

Frida was famous for shunning mainstream contemporary fashions in favour of wearing traditional Mexican indigenous dress.

She dressed not only as a way to express her personal style but also to express her political and feminist beliefs. The majority of Frida’s iconic outfits were from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a region in the south of Mexico famous for its powerful matriarchal society.

She would customise her own clothes with ribbons, bells and trinkets.

Pablo Picasso made a pair of earrings for Frida.

Parisian fashion design Elsa Schiaparelli designed a dress titled Madame Rivera in Frida’s honour.

She was twice featured in Vogue magazine.

Frida choose flamboyant clothes with lots of pattern colour and decoration as a tool to conceal her disabilities.

She dressed as much to impress her husband, who adored traditional attire, as she did for herself.

Throughout her life she frequently played with society’s gender boundaries surrounding fashion at the time by wearing men’s garments such as work shirts, dungarees, denim and suits.

Dressing elaborately was not just for public show. Frida would wear her dazzling dresses, Aztec jewellery and hair full of flowers around the house to do daily chores and paint in her studio.

“The gringas really like me a lot and pay close attention to all the dresses and rebozos that I brought with me, their jaws drop at the sight of my jade necklaces.” – Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo dressed in her daily attire two years before her death. Bernice Kolko, 1952

Frida Kahlo Relationship Facts

Frida adored her father, Guillermo Kahlo, who was a photographer for the Mexican government. Her father proclaimed Frida as his favourite child.

However, she had a tense relationship with her mother who she referred to as being “hysterically religious”.

Frida had three sisters; Matilde, Adriana, and Cristina. Her younger sister, Cristina, whom she also considered to be her best friend, broke her heart by having a love affair with her husband Diego in 1934.

Frida’s husband Diego Rivera was one of the most famous artists in the world at the time of their marriage.

Frida believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that she and her husband Diego Rivera were soul mates,. This is why she consistently tolerated his behaviour towards her.

Although Frida did not officially “Come Out” there are multiple reports of Frida having romantic relationships with both men and women. The most famous of these was the French/American entertainer Josephine Baker.

Frida and Diego were married, divorced and married a second time only one year after their divorce. They mutually acknowledged that they couldn’t live without each other. Part of the re-marriage agreement was that they would abstain from having sex with each other.

The couple had countless affairs with other people during their marriage. Frida’s longest affair (around 20 years) was with the famous fashion photographer Nickolas Muray. Her most controversial affair was with their mutual friend, the exiled Russian Revolutionist Leon Trotsky. Frida and Diego lived in separate houses which were only joined by a rooftop bridge that allowed them to entertain their guests privately.

Frida’s Doctor, Dr Leo Eloesser, was one of her closest lifelong friends. They frequently wrote letters to each other for most of her life.

Frida kept many pets such as dogs, deer, birds and monkeys, which most critics believe were substitutes for the children she could not have.

“Make love. Take a bath. Make Love again.” – Frida Kahlo.

Leon Trotsky (second right) and his wife Natalya Sedova (far left) are welcomed to Tampico Harbour, Mexico by Frida Kahlo and the US Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman, January 1937. Photo credit: Getty Images/Gamma-Keystone.

Frida Kahlo Heath Facts

Frida contracted polio when she was six years old which resulted in a shorter and more withered left leg.

At the age of 18, Frida was in a tragic bus accident which almost left her for dead. The collision resulted in multiple full body breaks and fractures to her spine, legs and pelvis which would inhibit her from carrying a child to term and continue to slowly kill her over the next twenty-eight years.

Due to the lack of contraception and her inability to carry a child to term Frida was the victim of numerous miscarriages. The most notable miscarriage took place in Detroit in 1932 which subsequently resulted in Frida producing some of the most original and harrowing works of the twentieth century.

She was in pain for most of her life and underwent over thirty operations and procedures to try to correct her ever-deteriorating body, she wrote in her diary and in a letter to a friend that she felt death frequently dancing around her bed.

She was suspended for the ceiling with bags of sand tied to her feet.

In 1950, she spent nine months in the hospital due to the presence of gangrene which eventually saw her left leg amputated.

Towards the latter years of her life, she became drug and alcohol dependent due to the incredible physical and emotional pain she endured from being repeatedly bed bound for months at a time.

She lied about her age. Frida was born in 1907 but told people she was born in 1910 to give the impression that she was born during the same year that the Mexican Revolution began.

She died in her bed of a pulmonary embolism when she was just 47 years old. She knew the end was in sight and wrote in her diary “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to return – Frida”, just a few days before passing.

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly.” – Frida Kahlo.

Frida painting in her bed, Anonymous, 1940. Photo Credit: Frida Kahlo Museum

Frida Kahlo’s Philosophy Facts

Frida was a feminist and her ideals made a very unique woman for her time. She lived and travelled alone, she earned her own money by making her own art, she expressed her emotions, sexuality and political views freely and fiercely fought for equality throughout her life.

She was a communist and a part of the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party. Frida believed that communism meant community and wished for the masses to rise up and take leadership of Mexico.

Frida was, at heart, an optimist. She was a fighter and rarely let the poor fate she was served both physically and romantically get the better of her.

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” – Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo laying down by Nickolas Muray. Photo credit: Google Arts and Culture

Frida Kahlo’s Loves in Life

Frida was an avid writer. She kept a diary and had many pen friends.

She collected dolls and traditional Mexican folk art.

She loved to entertain guests by cooking big meals and hosting frequent parties.

She had a deep love of music and would dance whenever she was able.

Frida was an incredibly passionate and hopelessly romantic woman. Diego was the greatest love of her life and she never gave up on him.

“I love you more than my own skin and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyways, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and I’m satisfied with that. Love me a little. I adore you.” – Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo’s lipstick print on a photograph of her husband Diego Rivera by Anonymous, 1940. Photo credit: Frida Kahlo Museum

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