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

Art in America, March, 1996 by Jill Johnson

Frida's mother, born in Oaxaca in 1876, uneducated, of Spanish and Indian descent, represented the heritage claimed by Frida and Diego in the Mexican Renaissance. Frida can be seen as torn between her parents' different backgrounds, or challenged to integrate them, in her progress through life as both person and artist, handicapped all the while by her unsound physical condition. One solution to the torment of her marriage was to imitate her husband and take lovers of her own--a ploy making her vulnerable of course to one of patriarchy's classic double standards. Her female liaisons left Diego unfazed, often amused, while her affairs with men--if he heard about them (Leon Trotsky and Isamu Noguchi were two among a number)-- caused him to whip out his pistol and threaten murder.

Two entries in her diary address extramarital interests--copies of letters written 1938 and '39. One is to New York photographer Nickolas Muray, with whom she had a serious affair, as she makes clear. "Never, in all my life will I forget your presence/You took me to you when I was shattered and you restored me to a complete whole." The other, to painter Jacqueline Lamba, wife of Andre Breton, with whom, says Lowe, Kahlo "became close, in part as a reaction to the academic and theoretical discussions among Breton, Trotsky and Rivera from which they were excluded." Kahlo writes, "I have not forgotten you--the nights are long and difficult...and you gazing at me so as to keep me in your heart...the color of your skin, of your eyes and your hair change with the winds in Mexico."

She concludes the letter with a warning confirming her primary emotional, or at least official, identification with her husband, which is evident in her fairly continuous nattering over Diego in the diary, saying, "all [my] eyes see," and all she touches, "from any distance, is Diego." She was political primarily in the traditional male sense of the term--in which politics is understood as exclusively embracing affairs of state (revolution and counter-revolution). Scarcely wavering in her role of devoted wife, never faltering in her determination to survive and transcend the effects of a traumatic accident, Kahlo seemed able to assimilate and withstand any amount of abuse. Her legacy remains a triumph of spirit in the face of adversity. Turned into a martyr by her injuries and by her womanhood, she made it seem as if these two conditions were twinned.

Her diary is a gorgeous phoenix; it adds to the luster of her posthumous life as an artist.

(1) . Published in Mexico simultaneously by La Vaca Independiente.

(2) . Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, Harper and Row, 1983, p. 263.

(3) . Ibid.

(4) . Kahlo's diary texts are cited in English throughout, as translated (by Barbara Crow de Toledo and Ricardo Pohlenz) in the appendix to this facsimile edition.

(5) . Herrera, p. 183.

(6) . Ibid., p. 107.

(7) . Andre Breton, who claimed her for Surrealism when he met her in 1938 and famously defined her work as a "ribbon around a bomb," called himself "privileged to be present...at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the society of men of genius." Herrera, p. 214.