The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. - book reviews

Art in America, March, 1996 by Jill Johnson

The reproduction of Frida Kahlo's diary by Harry N. Abrams is a very special publishing event.(1) Never seen before outside Mexico, the diary had been under lock and key at the Kahlo museum in Coyoacan. This replica is a beautiful fabrication, authentic in its details and faithful to the original. Even without foreknowledge of Kahlo or her work, or the circumstances of the diary's creation, one can hold it in hand unopened, certain that there is much to enjoy within. An intimately scaled book, it has a strapping weight and presence, indicated first by its impressive red cloth binding imprinted with a gold foil stamping of a detail from the first image in the diary, and then confirmed by the heftiness of the paper chosen to receive the facsimile impressions of Kahlo's own pages--a coated stock with a dull finish. The 161 diary pages consisting of texts and images (minus those torn out from the original by friends of Kahlo) are preceded by an introduction by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and an essay by art historian Sarah M. Lowe. Following the diary itself are translations of the text with reduced black-and-white reproductions of every page and commentaries by Lowe.

Kahlo kept the diary from around 1944 until her death 10 years later at the age of 47. According to Hayden Herrera's comprehensive 1983 biography, the original red leather volume was purchased in a rare book store in New York City by a friend and given to Kahlo "with the hope that filling it might offer her some solace at a time when she was sick and lonely."(2) Herrera identified the initials imprinted in gold on the cover (and reproduced in this facsimile) as "J.K."--adding that the book was said to have belonged to John Keats.(3) (However, the "J" has an unmistakable short line through its vertical stroke, perhaps indicating an "F.")

"Sick and lonely" were two conditions that famously governed Frida Kahlo's entire oeuvre. A third and correlative condition was her masochistic devotion to Diego Rivera, Mexico's great muralist, whom she married in 1929, divorced in '39 and remarried a year later. A fourth was her identification with the 1910 Mexican Revolution (she habitually changed her real birthdate, 1907, to 1910), ushering in the seismic cultural shift in Mexico from European models back to the country's precolonial Aztec past, which both Kahlo and Rivera idealized and addressed in their work. Kahlo's ties with Mexico's indigenous culture can be paired with her dedication to Communism. In autobiographically explicit texts near the end of her diary she says, "The clear and precise emotions of the `Mexican Revolution' that I keep were the reason why, at the age of 13 [1920] I joined the Communist youth."(4) All these elements--illness, solitude, an attendant focus on self (most evident in her many self-portraits, roughly 55 of them), Diego, the Mexican turnover and Communism--inform Kahlo's diary as they do her body of paintings. Mostly absent, however, from her diary entries are signs of the fastidious attention to detail and composition that characterize her paintings.

"Automatic" writing in various scripts, hues, moods and degrees of clarity or messiness, both of thought and execution, along with riots of color and spontaneous, seemingly childlike bursts of imagery evolved from accidents, doodles and improvisation (or a kind of pangenesis--single semblances polymorphously reproducing themselves) make this book a visual delight. It is richly incidental, but also arresting in the frequent instances where Kahlo generated a fully formed picture, turning her diary page into a canvas, as it were. Colored pencils, inks and washes, crayons and gouache are her mediums. Especially gratifying are those images where strongly inked figuration on a page has seeped through to the other side, compounding meanings by accident. One picture--of a sun radiating jagged, lightning-like, blood-red streaks, crashing out of a blue-wash sky into the top of a pyramid, and titled "Ruinas" below--is wonderfully "contaminated" by the shadowy but discernible face and upper torso of the lushly colored image of a man with a fantastic headdress on the page's reverse side. Appearing phantomlike on the "Ruinas" page, filling the space under the pyramid about to be detonated by the sun, the man seems to embody Mexico's obliterated pre-Columbian past (here the sun/pyramid becomes his "headdress"); he perhaps suggests the man in Kahlo's existence who dogged her, a sun-god of both life and destruction. Sarah Lowe proposes that the "Ruinas" picture is a pointed metaphor for Kahlo's deteriorating condition.

Experiencing for many years the protracted aftereffects of the accident that nearly killed her when she was 18 and a student at the National Preparatory School (a trolley plunged into the fragile wooden bus she was riding on in Mexico City), Kahlo documents her obsessions with death and survival, her pain and treatment, her resolve to live, to maintain her humor and alegria, to keep creating, in the face of great suffering. From 1950-51: