March 30, 2020 • 42 mins
Frida Kahlo is a revolutionary Mexican, feminist, and LGBTQ artist whose devastating trauma became the key ingredient in her ability to evocatively show pain and suffering on a canvas. She became a symbol of revolution for the disenfranchised. What made her willing and able to reveal her own differences and stand for the rights of others?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Frieda Carlo
was an icon for the Chicano civil rights, feminist, and
lgbt Q movements. Her vehicle was her art, which is
(00:21):
unusual and very autobiographical. Her paintings revealed her traumatic history
and ongoing struggle with both physical and emotional pain, as
well as her inner strength, perseverance, and resilience. My guest
today is Celia Starr, a professor at the University of
San Francisco, where she specializes in modern American and contemporary
(00:43):
art with an emphasis on feminist art and gender studies,
and she is the author of the new book Frieda
in America, The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist. Magdalena
Carmen Frieda Carlo E Calderon was born in July nineteen
o seven, though she often told other people that she
was born in nineteen ten, the same year as the
(01:05):
start of the Mexican Revolution, a movement that Frieda strongly
identified with. Born in Mexico City to a father from
Germany and a Mexican mother, they were in a typical
couple and unusual parents for the time. She was born
(01:26):
in July of nineteen oh seven, though that doesn't seem
to be what she referred to as her birthdate to
the world, interestingly, which also has to do with her
character and her character formation. Her parents were in Mexico
at the time, but her father's origin is really German
and her mother was from the area. They were somewhat
of an unusual couple, somewhat of unusual parents. He was German,
(01:50):
she was from Mexico. Her mother, Matilde, was born in Oahaka.
They met actually at a jewelry store. They worked in
the same jewelry store in Mexico City. It's really after
her father. His name when he was born as Wilhelm,
but he changes it when he moved to Mexico and
he becomes Guillermo. They actually knew each other, but when
(02:10):
Guillermo's first wife died, he really turned to Matilde and
her family for support, and then they're close, they get married.
They really forged this relationship, with Guillermo taking an interest
in photography and Matilde really encouraging him to seek that
as a profession, and so he does quite well. He
(02:33):
becomes a professional photographer. Her family is involved with photography,
is that right? Her family of origin, Yes, her father
was a photographer. It was in the family, and she
was like, yes, this is a good thing to do.
And it's also really interesting that what you point out
that when he came to Mexico himself, right, he really
reinvented himself, including his name, all sort of his likes
(02:55):
and propensities and so on, and just interesting for people
to keep in mind in terms of what kind of
model might Freed have had for reinventing herself, which becomes
important later in her life exactly. And because he was
a photographer, he also did portraits, although that was not
his favorite genre. He typically photographed buildings, but he did
(03:18):
photograph his wife, Matilda when they were first married. He
did a lot of photographs of her. He did a
lot of self portraits, and it does show in both
of these examples taking on various personas. And so I
think that definitely influenced Frieda as well, influenced her not
only in the freedom to take on different personas, but
also he at times photographed his family and including Frieda
(03:42):
and she as we'll talk about, I guess in a bit,
but you know, took on different personas even in these photographs,
and that was more than acceptable to him. In the
words another father might have said, why my daughter, are
you dressing in a suit and looking like a man,
and I'm not taking that picture. But that did not
happen at all. He was completely accepting and interested, if anything,
(04:07):
in photographing her in whatever persona she presented at that time. Yeah,
and I would even say I think he encouraged it
because on one of the photographs of Frieda, where she
is dressed in a man's suit, it says she looks
like Frieda wrote on there that it was her father's
suit that she was wearing, so he had to lend
her the suit. Therefore, I would say he encouraged it, which,
(04:31):
as you point out, seems pretty highly unusual in this
context of you know, at this point it's like nineteen
twenties Mexico. But they are in a suburb of Mexico City,
so they do have a lot of contact with you know,
the urban modern society. But nevertheless, yeah, that was highly
unusual for a father to do. But I will say this,
(04:52):
when you look at the history of women artists, typically
what you find is that um, women who were able
to venture out and become artists and you know, be
educated and even sometimes forge careers. They almost always have
a father who is supporting this, and so in that way,
Frieda is no different. In addition to his supporting ultimately
(05:15):
her choosing art as a career, he really, as you said,
he has this. Maybe it's urban liberal, unusual certainly for
the nineteen twenties, but the issue of let's say, sexuality,
what is acceptable to do, what is acceptable to show,
what is acceptable to be? He not so much her mother,
(05:35):
but he has an attitude of acceptance and encouragement. The
relationship with the mother is somewhat different. It sounds we
don't know as much about her relationship with her mother,
particularly early on. I mean, we do have a lot
of information that comes out in the twenties when she's
writing letters to her boyfriend at the time, Alejandro. Of course,
(05:55):
there's this tension that's there because of various factors. But
I will say this, I think typically in the literature
we've seen a more of a strained relationship between Freed
and her mother, and I think that's true overall. However,
what I found in my research was actually much more
of a loving, supportive relationship than I ever realized. One
(06:17):
thing I think that's important for people to understand is
that when Frieda was really starting out as an artist,
and we haven't talked yet about, you know, she had
this terrible accident when she was a teenager, but when
she is forging her out into sort of taking on
art for herself, it's her mother who suggests they make
some kind of an easel for her to have in
(06:39):
her bed while she's convalescing. And also she suggests putting
a mirror in the top of her canopy bed so
that she can look at herself and do self portraits.
And I think that's really significant that she's right there
supporting that. And when you look at letters that they
wrote to each other when Frieda was living in the
United States in her early twenties and she's writing to
her mother, a very tender relationship emerges. So I think
(07:05):
that there was a lot there that was positive as
well as some of the tensions. At the age of six,
she contracts polio, which sadly was not that unusual in
that time period, and relative to how many children did
she fared reasonably well. But it did affect her leg,
(07:27):
particularly neurologically, and she had this shorter and more withered
lower limb, which is something that she always felt or
subsequently felt I guess uncomfortable about children would tease her
or bully her about she would think of ways to
cover it up. And also importantly, she had this unusual
interaction with the teacher who examined her, already unusual to say,
(07:51):
you know, you should not basically engage in sports because
you have this situation with your leg, but I fear not,
you can basically hang out and spend time with me,
with some of these other girls who were also spending
time with me, it sounds as though there was some
sort of impropriety in terms of perhaps a lesbian relationship
or I mean, you can't really say a relationship, you'd
(08:12):
have to say this is a child, you have to
say a lesbian predatory situation. And Frieda was removed essentially
from school as a result. Yeah, I think this is
a very obviously important event that happens in her life
for many reasons. And it is really complicated, as you're
pointing out, because on the one hand, this teacher was
acting inappropriately as far as we can tell. You know, again,
(08:33):
we don't have all the details. It's hard to know
exactly what happened from what we do know. She examines
freedom says, oh, you can't participate in pe. You're not
physically able to do this, which is seems ridiculous because
her father had really trained her to be an athlete.
She was actually quite good at you know pe. But
the teacher says, no, you can't do this. So right
(08:53):
away Frieda feels that she singled out. Doesn't like this.
But then when she starts going to the teacher's room
instead to help her out, the teacher is really nice
to her. She has her sit on her lap, and
Frieda says, as an adult, I fell in love with her,
and yet this improper relationship is developing with the teacher.
And apparently there were two other girls who also were
(09:15):
in a similar situation. I think that has this impact
on Frieda on the one hand, of having this teacher say, oh,
you can't do physical activity, but yet come to my
room and I will have you sit on my lap. I'll,
you know, maybe caress your shoulders kind of thing. And
so this interesting duality that happens here. So the objective
position of excluding her in ways that are painful and
(09:40):
also insinuate that she doesn't have the resilience that in
fact she has had, but paired with this seduction, you
would call it her being very very nurturing, very caretaking,
and very over involved. And that is interesting inasmuch as
again later as we will see in terms of the
(10:00):
conflict for her about you know, to be taken care of,
is that at odds with being capable and being strong
and being resilient, and these two sides that seemed to
be at least early on set up as mutually exclusive
but obviously something most people would want both and and
and she clearly strongly wants both. So it's interesting to
(10:25):
see this early experience that she had sort of setting
it up somewhat at odds with each other, and also
of course at being noted to her as something bad
being done. What the teacher did was wrong, and in
some ways her participation in it was wrong. But these
are all formative experiences as she's moving along, and she
is clearly a very bright girl. That's obvious, right. She
(10:48):
she was a very good student, but again in the
more conservative vein that she was with her family following
originally she thought she wanted to go to medical school.
She wanted to be a doctor, and she's doing very well.
She goes to a school that actually has very few girls.
It is mostly male school. Already an intellectual in in
terms of really liking to dig into ideas and share
(11:10):
them with others and debate and discuss, and starts to
have a romantic life with a boyfriend before she has
this terrible accident. You don't see at that time in
her young life, as you often do with other artists,
a lot of involvement with artistic endeavor. Then she did
have a lot of encounters with art, but it wasn't
(11:33):
her main focus. Partly this happens because her father is
a photographer and she was his assistant. She would go
out with him when he would photograph buildings, and she
would a be there to make sure he had epilepsy,
and so if he had an epileptic seizure, she would
be there to take care of him, but also to
(11:54):
watch out that nobody stole his photographic equipment. She also, though,
was his assistant in the sense that he taught her
about how to retouch photographs, and so she worked also
with him. He also did some painting on the weekends
and also would paint with him, so she had that
from early on. And then she also you know, had
(12:15):
studied some art in school. Her father actually got her
a kind of internship with a printmaker, and you really
see her having a knack for naturalism, you know, in
her teen years. So she did have this background in
art before the accident. Her goal was to go to
medical school to be a doctor, not to be an artist.
And was that because that was a reputable thing to
(12:37):
do or a way to I don't know, make a
good living, or was it that she had felt a
drive to the science, to the interest in the science
of that, or being a helper. Here she has this
father who in some ways is being kind of an
artist in certain ways. What does she describe as, you know,
why a doctor and which obviously didn't work out. But
what is it that draws her to that? Do we know?
(12:59):
I don't think we really know explicitly. But she definitely
was very interested in the body. She was interested in
how the body worked. There are people who have talked
about who knew her in her later years when she
was in and out of hospitals and they were trying
to help her with her her health. There are assistants
(13:20):
who say that Frieda understood medicine in a way that
sometimes it seemed like she knew more than the doctors did,
so sort of a sublimation of this difficulty that she
had first with polio and the loss of you know,
the full function of her leg, and then later this
terrible accident where you know, she had to be submerged
(13:42):
in so many ways in medical care. But a father
who has epilepsy and a mother who it's not clear
what she had, but it does sound like she often
felt that she was sickly at least. But then on
this track of being this great student, she's with this boyfriend,
Alejandro on this alley bus situation, and and there's a
(14:03):
terrible accident and she is very badly hurt. She breaks
multiple bones. Later they discover, in fact, even vertebrae in
her spine have been moved out of position. But she
also was impaled by the steel rod in her pelvis,
which they pull out at the scene, has caused her
to have a pelvic fracture, but probably also impacted perhaps
(14:25):
her reproductive organs. This just completely derails her life. At
that point, she's in a wheel chair, she's bedbound, and
her mother says, hey, let's put up this mirror and
get you these paints and set up this easel in
this way. This is sort of the time when she
first really involves herself in painting herself. You have to
imagine that before she's bedridden, she's going to this National
(14:45):
Preparatory School, which was a very prestigious school in Mexico City.
It was hard to get into. Freda was one of
thirty five girls who went there, and the students who
are going there were seen as up and coming leaders
of this new Mexican ulture after the revolution. Freda was
a part of that. She was going to be a doctor,
you know, a lot of her friends were going to
be lawyers. She was a very active person. She called
(15:08):
herself a street wanderer. She loved roaming around Mexico City.
And now she's had this terrible accident and right she's
in her bed, and it was so difficult for her
to deal with on so many different levels. But yes,
she starts creating art because she's what else is she
going to do? Right she's in bed, she's working on
walking again. Because one thing that's important to understand too
(15:30):
is that she was told she would probably never walk again,
but she was determined that she would walk again. So
she is working on trying to take small steps to
walk again, but she's also creating and a number of
things happen. One is, as she is starting to walk
again finally and she's working on her art more and more,
(15:50):
she realizes a couple of things. One is that all
of her friends have moved on, because she was at
a point where she was about to graduate from the
National Preparatory School and she would have gone on to
medical school. Her friends have gone on, and so what
is she going to do? And also she wants to
help her family financially because due to the revolution, her
father really lost his lucrative job because it was the
(16:13):
government under Porphyrio Diaz who had hired him. After the revolution,
he loses that job. They're struggling financially. She wants to
help her family out financially. This is when right she
becomes very bold and she decided she's going to go
see Diego Rivera, one of the most if not the
most famous artists at that time in Mexico. And she
shows him, you know her work and says, what do
(16:34):
you think. I want to know what you think. I
don't want you to flirt with me. I just want
you to tell me what you think of my art,
which was quite a thing to tell Diego Rivera because
apparently flirted with everybody and it didn't matter what your
age or your age difference was. He was. He was
this big womanizer. Had she made him previously, Yes, he
had come to her school, she had met him, but
it hadn't been a very exciting interaction. It was just
(16:56):
sort of there. Well, she used to tease him. So
when she was going to school, he was paid Antina
mural at the National Preparatory School, and so she would
tease him and pull these pranks on him and things.
But she was just like a schoolgirl, you might say,
at that point. But now she's coming to him as
a woman who wants to make a living as an artist,
so it's a very different kind of context. And he
(17:18):
gives her a very positive response. He's impressed with her work.
He sees she has this unique i this unique vision.
He felt that typically you see in a beginner, certain style,
certain subjects that maybe are common, but he sees something
unique in her early work. And yeah, he encourages her
(17:39):
to keep going, and that was obviously an important turning
point for her. This seems like a good time for
a short break. We'll be right back. Frieda had impressed
a great painter, Diego Rivera, and Diego recognized an intriguing
(18:02):
creativity in Frieda's paintings. In choosing her subject matter, there's
this combination of her internal emotional content and a use
of interesting symbolism, which seems to be again some combination
of emotionally what's happening inside of her, but also politically.
(18:27):
She joins the communist group that is there, and she
developed some very intense political feelings, but it's also culturally
what's happening, at least in the group that she's choosing
to be part of. But it really seemed like this
unique mix that came from inside it is coming out
of her culture. Frieda was from a culture that really
understood that there was another reality, one that lives side
(18:51):
by side with the physical world, an invisible reality, one
place where we can see. This comes out of a
lot of mes American cultures, but specifically I talk about
the Aztecs. They had this concept, certainly of the invisible
or this spiritual realm. Also, of course Catholicism does, and
so she grows up in this culture and understands this
(19:13):
what we might call invisible reality. And I think also
what I've found in really looking closely at the impact
of this accident on her at age eighteen, and then
later a miscarriage that she has in Detroit, and then
also the death of her mother around that same time,
in two all of these are incidents that I feel
(19:36):
take her into this realm of these experiences with death
on a very powerful level. In two cases, I would
say near death experiences for her. In the case of
her mother, of course, it's just experiencing this profound death
of her mother. And she comes through this, I believe,
with a new sense of reality. And what does that mean, Well,
(19:57):
it's a reality again that is connected to the invisible.
I think she uses that in her artwork. Many of
her paintings contain these symbols that are to be read,
decrypted and understood. A lot of her paintings do contain
references to death or the concern about mortality in the
living or losses and emotionally you can understand where that
(20:20):
comes from. But this use of symbols and sort of
the need to read almost the painting, where does that
come from? Well, I think it comes probably from different places.
But two that I think are really important are a Catholicism. Again,
she went to church probably every Sunday for most of
her life. Her mother even had a special bench for
(20:40):
her family at the church in Coyokon where she grew up.
San Juan Batista. I went to this church and it's powerful.
It's a really beautiful, powerful church. And some of the
images that you're looking at, you know, of Christ, for example,
are very painful to look at, the blood dripping down him,
the anguish in his face, and I think, you know,
(21:01):
these were images that were made to be read. And
then again, I think if we look at as tech art,
you know, when she's coming of age, she's coming of
age at the same time that that, in a sense,
Mexico is coming of age in the nineteen twenties, right
rediscovering what it means to be Mexican in terms of
going back to a time prior to the Spanish invasion.
(21:24):
And so I think just to be able to incorporate
symbolism into her work and layers into her work was
probably natural for her, and it was just how her
mind worked. She is a woman in search of or uncovering.
I guess I'll say her many potential identities. You're saying that,
you know, one of them was being very nationalistic. But
(21:44):
the identity of you know, to be Mexican is also
to be as tech, and that seemed very important. Another
identity seemed to be the fluidity of her sexuality, which
is interesting because obviously that would be somewhat at odds
with the Catholic Church and its teachings. I mean, it's
hard to imagine that would have been considered acceptable, nor
(22:05):
might it have been acceptable to be the third wife
of an artist who is known to commit repeated infidelity
during marriage. Anyway, And in fact, her mother seems to
have not been too thrilled that she chose to marry
Diego Rivera. No, she was not thrilled. She wouldn't even
attend the wedding. She wouldn't attend the wedding, which is
(22:25):
quite a statement. The father came and sounds like he
was happy that there was a man who would marry
his daughter and support her. He was a successful artist,
but the mother felt that he was not a good
enough man for her daughter, and certainly his morals were
not consistent with the mother's correct I mean, he's a
communist he's an atheist. He was like twenty years older.
(22:46):
She didn't approve it. However, I will say over time
she did grow to love and appreciate him. I mean,
she does discuss that in letters later on. She recovers enough.
She's walking, She's demonstrated an incredible drive and resilience about herself.
She's painting and marries Diego Rivera. She's painting somewhat, but
(23:07):
really Diego is the big artist, so to speak. And
they go to the United States together, and it's really
in the years there in San Francisco and Detroit and
her experiences and her exposure to other artists in the
community and what goes on with her relationship with Diego
that further shape her artistic expression most definitely. By the
(23:30):
time she comes to the United States, in n she's
a novice artist. She's certainly working on her style, but
she really hasn't developed her own voice yet. So in
many ways, she was working on this what we might
call folk art style and wanting to really see herself
as a painter for the people of Mexico. So when
(23:50):
she comes to the United States, she's kind of, you know,
has all these different ideas in her mind. She's trying
to work through these ideas. We see her development really
pick up speed. She creates the portrait of Luther Burbank,
and that's her first I would say, sort of breakthrough
to a new style while she's in the United States.
It's a very interesting portrait of this man who was
(24:12):
a horticulturist who put forward the idea of hybrid fruits
and vegetables. He was able to create successfully these hybrids,
and so she makes him a hybrid part tree, part man.
And then underneath the tree man is his skeleton, because
he had died a few years before she came to
the United States. Interestingly, even though Diego is this in
(24:36):
some ways larger than life man, he is very ambitious
himself and very charismatic and needed a lot of the
attention focused on himself. He was nonetheless quite supportive of
her and her art. He was, I mean, to his credit,
he was very supportive and he recognized her genius. We
(25:03):
know that she had relationships with men and women during
the marriage outside when they were not married, and we
know that she toyed with the question of gender identity.
She would want to be photographed in her father's suit
or she would emphasize more traditionally masculine features and paintings,
(25:24):
or even in herself in terms of her eyebrows and
coming together and facial hair. Is there evidence that she
internally felt gender fluid. I think she felt androgynous. She
was fascinated by androgyny, saw it as about a balance
between male and female in some ways. You know, she
(25:45):
was raised like a boy because the way her father
treated her was really like the son he never had.
And interestingly, they did have a son who was born
a year before Freedom, but he died from pneumonia and
then of course contracting polio, as we talked about earlier,
brought on her father saying Okay, I'm going to train
you to box, to wrestle, to swim, so that she
(26:08):
could build up her strength, but also so she could
defend herself physically if she needed to from people teasing her. So, yeah,
in a lot of ways, she's raised as a boy,
but at the same time as a girl. And so
I think in a sense you see that combination of
the male and female throughout her life, and she seemed
to really identify as androgynous, and she carries that through
(26:30):
her art. Often emphasizing the facial hair, the unibrow. My
sense is that she really saw herself as inderrogynous. She
had really quite an appetite for the sexual world. She
appreciated the beauty of feminine things and masculine things and
vivid and uh and touching, and she just expresses with
(26:55):
all her senses. And what do we know of Diego's
acceptance of that? Was he similar to what did he
like about that? In her? I think he was similar
in a lot of ways. You know. The way that
he's described also is that even though he's known as
this womanizer, etcetera very macho, but he also is described
as very quote unquote feminine, you know when Frieda describes
(27:18):
him somewhat as a child too, but like, you know,
having almost like breath, you know, because he was overweight
and his body was soft, you know, kind of like
a woman's and a baby's. At the same time, he
was known to be able to really supposedly like listen
to women in a way that most men didn't in
that period. So they both seem to accept each other
(27:38):
as androgynous in many ways. And I think that that
was one of the probably the positive aspects of their relationship.
It's later, actually, even after the period in San Francisco.
I mean, she she goes to Detroit. She sounds like
she's very unhappy there. She doesn't feel as in tune
with the artistic community there. It sounds like she also
(27:59):
misses being in Mexico quite a bit. It's sort of
after this period that she paints some of her most
important paintings. What do we understand comes together there at
that point that enables her to do that. I guess
I would first preface this by saying, I think creative
breakthroughs are mysterious. We can't necessarily know exactly why an
artist has a creative breakthrough. However, certainly in this case,
(28:23):
there are these events that are leading up to it.
Part of it, again is all of the experimentation she's
done prior to her breakthrough paintings in Detroit. But the
other part, of course, is that she discovers she's pregnant
and she's very ambivalent about having this child. One of
the things I detail in the book is, you know,
kind of what she's going through, right, She's this ambivalence
(28:44):
about it. She goes to the doctor and she's thinking
maybe she should have an abortion, and the doctor has
her take quinine and castor oil, which I guess at
that time was something that typically women would try in
order to have a miscarriage. And so she tries it,
but it doesn't work, and then she ends up a
couple of months later hemorrhaging. She's, you know, hemorrhaging at home.
(29:05):
She's rushed to henry Ford Hospital. You know, it's described
by Lucian Bloch, who was a friend of hers at
the time, and her journal and things. As you know,
this was quite dramatic that she was bleeding so much
that it made it sound like, you know, if she
could have perhaps died. Even so, she goes through a
lot while she's in the hospital. It takes a while
for the miscarriage. She's bleeding, and then finally she sort
(29:29):
of expels the fetis and she's distraught. But I think
it's also important that people understand when a person is
ambivalent about an event and then something happens to end it.
In this case, it's actually harder than if you feel
uniformly one way or the other way, because so in
this case, you know, she lost the baby, you could say, well,
(29:50):
she'd come to accept, okay, maybe this is a good thing,
but it's unlikely that she resolved this ambivalence at all.
So then what happens is the guilt about whatever part
of you might have wished for this to happen because
you felt ambivalent from the get go is usually the
most difficult emotion to struggle with. To feel responsible in
some way even though obviously you know you weren't actually responsible.
(30:13):
That your emotions make you feel like, you know, in
some way you may have caused this, and you feel terrible.
So she's in the hospital and then she starts to create.
She starts doing some drawings in the hospital, and one
of the drawings really becomes the foundation for one of
her breakthrough paintings called henry Ford Hospital. So when she
gets out of the hospital, she's still devastating, I mean,
(30:35):
she's she's described really as is depressed and irritable, just struggling.
But she does start to paint again, and when she
creates henry Ford Hospital, you know, she's showing herself in
the bed hemorrhaging. And then she has these objects, you know,
floating above and below her that are attached to these
(30:56):
red artery like the lines. One of them is her child,
but she's in this landscape that's barren. She's not in
a hospital room, she's out in this barren landscape. But
then in the background you see Henry Ford's river rouge plant,
and so it's also industry there. It's an amazing painting
for many reasons. Just first off, the subject itself. It's
(31:19):
this taboo subject. I don't know of any other artists
who had depicted themselves having a miscarriage hemorrhage in bed
like that. People didn't even talk about miscarriages in that
period for the most part. They wouldn't They wouldn't talk about, well,
how does it feel, how are you feeling now that
you had a miscarriage? They just weren't even talking about it, right,
(31:39):
And so to put it on canvas like that was
highly unusual. But she's paints it on metal, and so
she is taking on again the style of the retablo
from Mexico. She is painting it then in this way
to make it look like an untrained artist with painted
but it also has this other worldly quality to it
(32:00):
as well. Her ability to paint. What it meant really
to her to be a woman with all of the strengths,
but all of the difficulties and the tragedies and the terror.
Her ability to do that actually repeatedly, she's sort of
gone down in history really as in many ways of
feminist artist. Even though as you say, she had this
(32:24):
androgyny about her, she really embraced and investigated and earthed
and demonstrated what it felt to her, certainly to be
a woman. I think with Freda, it's personal, but it's
not just about her personal experiences. It's also personal in
terms of her culture, always bringing in her culture and
bringing in these different layers. I think the other thing
(32:46):
that's important to understand two about freed To taking on
these taboo subjects is that she was somebody who was
very honest and blunt in the way she spoke, and
I think she often incorporated that into her art as well.
Even you could have layers of symbolism that could be
you know, uncovered at the same time, you know, just
sort of putting it out there, like Okay, here I
(33:08):
am on this bed bleeding something that we don't typically see.
She's putting it out there because on some level that
was the kind of person she was. She wasn't afraid
in many ways to just state what she really felt
this seems like a good time for a short break.
(33:28):
We'll be right back. Fleeta's health continued to deteriorate. She
has suffered pain since her childhood polio and then accident,
both back pain and leg pain. But now she had
to have toes amputated, and eventually by she had to
(33:49):
have her leg amputated due to gang green. After that
she fell into a deep depression. One of her friends
said that after the accident, you know, at eighteen, she
was quite aware of death all the time, you know,
I mean, I think she said herself, Freeda wrote something
about death dances, you know, around my bed, something like
(34:09):
that when she was recovering. So, yeah, she was always
aware of death. And of course again that's an important
aspect of Mexican culture, to a celebration of you know,
life and death. And so her latest paintings after her
health declines, freed to how how would you describe the
changes there? The paintings of the nineteen forties definitely start
(34:31):
to focus more and more out in nature with animals.
I think she becomes more powerful in a sense. It's
kind of this duality again though she's powerful, but there's
often also a look of maybe sadness too in her eyes,
but her gaze was so powerful in itself that that's
why I say, you know, when you look at them,
you're kind of grabbed by her, but you can't sense
(34:56):
a sadness as well, And then you know, you do
start to see. In ninety three she does one where
she says thinking about death, and she's got an image
of death on her forehead. Then she's got one in
forty nine called Diego and I with Diego on her forehead,
And I just feel like when you get to this
later period, there is more of this emphasis maybe on
(35:16):
this image of death suffering, like the Broken Column of
forty four shows her spinal column broken open. There's a
painting in forty five called Without Hope certainly sounds like
an sad awareness of impending mortality. It does seem like
there's more of that in the self portraits. There's sort
of this open question as to how her life really ended.
(35:38):
As she was bedridden, she was not doing well, taking
pain medications and saying that you know, this is sort
of an unbearable and untenable situation. She gives Diego his
anniversary gift a month before their anniversary. Her last diary
entrance sounds like a goodbye. I mean, it's reported that
(36:02):
she dies in the middle of the night, which wouldn't
be shocking to anyone given how infirmed she was at
that point. There seems to be a question as to whether,
in fact, this was a suicide. Well, of course, it's
hard to know, right. My sense is that she probably
was given an overdose of medication to help her so
she could die peacefully. I mean, there's been speculation that
(36:23):
even Diego requested it, but again it's hard to know.
I don't find it hard to believe that somebody, somebody
could have been free to herself. I suppose gave her
an overdose, essentially knowing that it could kill her. It
just sounds like she was probably ready. Like you say,
in terms of her last entry into her journal, you know,
she says, I hope the exit is joyful, and I
(36:43):
hope never to come back. When you look at the
things that were happening right up to that point, it
does seem like she's preparing for death, preparing to say goodbye. Right.
She is clearly in a lot of pain, and all
the things that they've tried to do for her to
help her be mobile and recover seemed to not have worked.
A lot of people say once she had her leg amputated,
(37:04):
that that was it. She just went downhill, medically downhill.
But it also sounds like psychologically, psychologically yeah, Unlike some
great artists. She certainly had success in her lifetime. I mean,
she was well recognized and admired and had shows and
had her paintings purchased and purchased by places where artists
(37:28):
can only hope to have their work shown. But then, sadly,
actually often the case, after her death and the number
of paintings is finite, she is even more recognized. But
it took a while. I mean, it wasn't immediate. Wasn't
like she died and then suddenly was known as a
great artist. I think a lot of it comes about
in the seventies, in particular due to the interest on
(37:51):
the part of art historians who really start looking at, well,
where are all the women artists? Are there great women
artists or are they buried somewhere we just have to
recover them, or do they just not exist? And so
you see the beginnings of what we call the feminist
art movement, and then also art historians really looking at
the cannon in particular, especially the Western art canon, and
(38:14):
starting to question this history that we've been told and
free to Carlo is one of the artists who is
brought back to the surface and gets looked at more critically.
And then, of course Hayden Herrera writes this significant biography
of her. She's working on it in the seventies, it
comes out in and so there are all these different
(38:35):
factors that really bring Frieda to the forefront, particularly outside
of Mexico. Do you think that there's also something about
the way she lived her life in terms of not
just overcoming so much difficulty, but her being openly bisexual,
openly embracing of her androgyny, and her being openly embracing
(38:58):
of her strong political coal views and weaving those together
in her art that later made us recognize her as
such an important female artist. Yes, I think the cliche
probably fits Frieda, which is that she was ahead of
her time. Therefore it took a later time period to
(39:19):
really understand her more fully and to to recognize her
importance both as a person and as an artist. Also,
I would add to your list that in terms of
how she dealt with her disability, the problems that she
had with walking and and the chronic pain. I mean,
on one level, she originally in her in her art
(39:39):
she sort of hides it in some ways, you could
say she hit it in her way she dressed. But
at the same time, in her art she becomes very
open about it too. She shows her wounds, she shows
her pain again, being very open and honest. And I
think that's refreshing to people. And I think today we
live in this culture where people are much more open
(40:00):
about their personal lives. So she resonates because she was
always a pretty open and honest person. She was a
champion of reducing stigma before we acknowledge that stigma was
a problem. Right. And I want to just add one
thing that I haven't addressed. Something that I find kind
of amazing about Freedo Callo, is that in everything that
(40:20):
I've looked at, you know, read about, you know, things
that she's written, works that she's created, her attitude towards
sexuality seems particularly ahead of her time. She seemed to
love sex with men and women. She says, homosexuality is good,
you know, it's natural. She just embraced the sexuality as
(40:41):
a part of life, the great aspects of life. And
again that's phenomenal considering the time period and the culture
in which she grew up. In Yes, her demonstration of
the appetite for life in this non judgmental way is
undoubtedly something that so unusual for the times, but something
we can admire and appreciate that perhaps she, in her
(41:05):
own way moved the needle for people. Part of great art,
right is how it speaks to the viewer and whether
it changes, makes change acceptable for the viewer. Certainly we
would have to put Rita Collo in that place. As
I say at the end of the book, I think
one of the reasons why she has risen to the
top and she's still there is that she was able
(41:27):
to transform the personal into something universal. Because when you
look at her popularity, not just as a personality but
her art, she's always breaking records in terms of attendance,
and her exhibits are around the world. She crosses cultures
and obviously time periods, because she's really been on this
trajectory since the nineties of her you might say star rising,
(41:52):
and that it speaks to all of us. There's obviously
something they're fascinating fascinating. Well, that wraps things up for
this episode. Thanks Cecilia Starr for joining me. Check out
her book Frieda in America, The Creative Awakening of a
(42:15):
Great Artist. If you're interested in more information about the
people we discussed on the show, you can check out
my book The Power of Different and you can follow
me on Twitter at doctor Gayale salt or at person
Ology m D until next time. Personology is a production
of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor Gayl
Saltz and Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan.
(42:38):
The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing
by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Frieda Carlo
was an icon for the Chicano civil rights, feminist, and
lgbt Q movements. Her vehicle was her art, which is
(00:21):
unusual and very autobiographical. Her paintings revealed her traumatic history
and ongoing struggle with both physical and emotional pain, as
well as her inner strength, perseverance, and resilience. My guest
today is Celia Starr, a professor at the University of
San Francisco, where she specializes in modern American and contemporary
(00:43):
art with an emphasis on feminist art and gender studies,
and she is the author of the new book Frieda
in America, The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist. Magdalena
Carmen Frieda Carlo E Calderon was born in July nineteen
o seven, though she often told other people that she
was born in nineteen ten, the same year as the
(01:05):
start of the Mexican Revolution, a movement that Frieda strongly
identified with. Born in Mexico City to a father from
Germany and a Mexican mother, they were in a typical
couple and unusual parents for the time. She was born
(01:26):
in July of nineteen oh seven, though that doesn't seem
to be what she referred to as her birthdate to
the world, interestingly, which also has to do with her
character and her character formation. Her parents were in Mexico
at the time, but her father's origin is really German
and her mother was from the area. They were somewhat
of an unusual couple, somewhat of unusual parents. He was German,
(01:50):
she was from Mexico. Her mother, Matilde, was born in Oahaka.
They met actually at a jewelry store. They worked in
the same jewelry store in Mexico City. It's really after
her father. His name when he was born as Wilhelm,
but he changes it when he moved to Mexico and
he becomes Guillermo. They actually knew each other, but when
(02:10):
Guillermo's first wife died, he really turned to Matilde and
her family for support, and then they're close, they get married.
They really forged this relationship, with Guillermo taking an interest
in photography and Matilde really encouraging him to seek that
as a profession, and so he does quite well. He
(02:33):
becomes a professional photographer. Her family is involved with photography,
is that right? Her family of origin, Yes, her father
was a photographer. It was in the family, and she
was like, yes, this is a good thing to do.
And it's also really interesting that what you point out
that when he came to Mexico himself, right, he really
reinvented himself, including his name, all sort of his likes
(02:55):
and propensities and so on, and just interesting for people
to keep in mind in terms of what kind of
model might Freed have had for reinventing herself, which becomes
important later in her life exactly. And because he was
a photographer, he also did portraits, although that was not
his favorite genre. He typically photographed buildings, but he did
(03:18):
photograph his wife, Matilda when they were first married. He
did a lot of photographs of her. He did a
lot of self portraits, and it does show in both
of these examples taking on various personas. And so I
think that definitely influenced Frieda as well, influenced her not
only in the freedom to take on different personas, but
also he at times photographed his family and including Frieda
(03:42):
and she as we'll talk about, I guess in a bit,
but you know, took on different personas even in these photographs,
and that was more than acceptable to him. In the
words another father might have said, why my daughter, are
you dressing in a suit and looking like a man,
and I'm not taking that picture. But that did not
happen at all. He was completely accepting and interested, if anything,
(04:07):
in photographing her in whatever persona she presented at that time. Yeah,
and I would even say I think he encouraged it
because on one of the photographs of Frieda, where she
is dressed in a man's suit, it says she looks
like Frieda wrote on there that it was her father's
suit that she was wearing, so he had to lend
her the suit. Therefore, I would say he encouraged it, which,
(04:31):
as you point out, seems pretty highly unusual in this
context of you know, at this point it's like nineteen
twenties Mexico. But they are in a suburb of Mexico City,
so they do have a lot of contact with you know,
the urban modern society. But nevertheless, yeah, that was highly
unusual for a father to do. But I will say this,
(04:52):
when you look at the history of women artists, typically
what you find is that um, women who were able
to venture out and become artists and you know, be
educated and even sometimes forge careers. They almost always have
a father who is supporting this, and so in that way,
Frieda is no different. In addition to his supporting ultimately
(05:15):
her choosing art as a career, he really, as you said,
he has this. Maybe it's urban liberal, unusual certainly for
the nineteen twenties, but the issue of let's say, sexuality,
what is acceptable to do, what is acceptable to show,
what is acceptable to be? He not so much her mother,
(05:35):
but he has an attitude of acceptance and encouragement. The
relationship with the mother is somewhat different. It sounds we
don't know as much about her relationship with her mother,
particularly early on. I mean, we do have a lot
of information that comes out in the twenties when she's
writing letters to her boyfriend at the time, Alejandro. Of course,
(05:55):
there's this tension that's there because of various factors. But
I will say this, I think typically in the literature
we've seen a more of a strained relationship between Freed
and her mother, and I think that's true overall. However,
what I found in my research was actually much more
of a loving, supportive relationship than I ever realized. One
(06:17):
thing I think that's important for people to understand is
that when Frieda was really starting out as an artist,
and we haven't talked yet about, you know, she had
this terrible accident when she was a teenager, but when
she is forging her out into sort of taking on
art for herself, it's her mother who suggests they make
some kind of an easel for her to have in
(06:39):
her bed while she's convalescing. And also she suggests putting
a mirror in the top of her canopy bed so
that she can look at herself and do self portraits.
And I think that's really significant that she's right there
supporting that. And when you look at letters that they
wrote to each other when Frieda was living in the
United States in her early twenties and she's writing to
her mother, a very tender relationship emerges. So I think
(07:05):
that there was a lot there that was positive as
well as some of the tensions. At the age of six,
she contracts polio, which sadly was not that unusual in
that time period, and relative to how many children did
she fared reasonably well. But it did affect her leg,
(07:27):
particularly neurologically, and she had this shorter and more withered
lower limb, which is something that she always felt or
subsequently felt I guess uncomfortable about children would tease her
or bully her about she would think of ways to
cover it up. And also importantly, she had this unusual
interaction with the teacher who examined her, already unusual to say,
(07:51):
you know, you should not basically engage in sports because
you have this situation with your leg, but I fear not,
you can basically hang out and spend time with me,
with some of these other girls who were also spending
time with me, it sounds as though there was some
sort of impropriety in terms of perhaps a lesbian relationship
or I mean, you can't really say a relationship, you'd
(08:12):
have to say this is a child, you have to
say a lesbian predatory situation. And Frieda was removed essentially
from school as a result. Yeah, I think this is
a very obviously important event that happens in her life
for many reasons. And it is really complicated, as you're
pointing out, because on the one hand, this teacher was
acting inappropriately as far as we can tell. You know, again,
(08:33):
we don't have all the details. It's hard to know
exactly what happened from what we do know. She examines
freedom says, oh, you can't participate in pe. You're not
physically able to do this, which is seems ridiculous because
her father had really trained her to be an athlete.
She was actually quite good at you know pe. But
the teacher says, no, you can't do this. So right
(08:53):
away Frieda feels that she singled out. Doesn't like this.
But then when she starts going to the teacher's room
instead to help her out, the teacher is really nice
to her. She has her sit on her lap, and
Frieda says, as an adult, I fell in love with her,
and yet this improper relationship is developing with the teacher.
And apparently there were two other girls who also were
(09:15):
in a similar situation. I think that has this impact
on Frieda on the one hand, of having this teacher say, oh,
you can't do physical activity, but yet come to my
room and I will have you sit on my lap. I'll,
you know, maybe caress your shoulders kind of thing. And
so this interesting duality that happens here. So the objective
position of excluding her in ways that are painful and
(09:40):
also insinuate that she doesn't have the resilience that in
fact she has had, but paired with this seduction, you
would call it her being very very nurturing, very caretaking,
and very over involved. And that is interesting inasmuch as
again later as we will see in terms of the
(10:00):
conflict for her about you know, to be taken care of,
is that at odds with being capable and being strong
and being resilient, and these two sides that seemed to
be at least early on set up as mutually exclusive
but obviously something most people would want both and and
and she clearly strongly wants both. So it's interesting to
(10:25):
see this early experience that she had sort of setting
it up somewhat at odds with each other, and also
of course at being noted to her as something bad
being done. What the teacher did was wrong, and in
some ways her participation in it was wrong. But these
are all formative experiences as she's moving along, and she
is clearly a very bright girl. That's obvious, right. She
(10:48):
she was a very good student, but again in the
more conservative vein that she was with her family following
originally she thought she wanted to go to medical school.
She wanted to be a doctor, and she's doing very well.
She goes to a school that actually has very few girls.
It is mostly male school. Already an intellectual in in
terms of really liking to dig into ideas and share
(11:10):
them with others and debate and discuss, and starts to
have a romantic life with a boyfriend before she has
this terrible accident. You don't see at that time in
her young life, as you often do with other artists,
a lot of involvement with artistic endeavor. Then she did
have a lot of encounters with art, but it wasn't
(11:33):
her main focus. Partly this happens because her father is
a photographer and she was his assistant. She would go
out with him when he would photograph buildings, and she
would a be there to make sure he had epilepsy,
and so if he had an epileptic seizure, she would
be there to take care of him, but also to
(11:54):
watch out that nobody stole his photographic equipment. She also, though,
was his assistant in the sense that he taught her
about how to retouch photographs, and so she worked also
with him. He also did some painting on the weekends
and also would paint with him, so she had that
from early on. And then she also you know, had
(12:15):
studied some art in school. Her father actually got her
a kind of internship with a printmaker, and you really
see her having a knack for naturalism, you know, in
her teen years. So she did have this background in
art before the accident. Her goal was to go to
medical school to be a doctor, not to be an artist.
And was that because that was a reputable thing to
(12:37):
do or a way to I don't know, make a
good living, or was it that she had felt a
drive to the science, to the interest in the science
of that, or being a helper. Here she has this
father who in some ways is being kind of an
artist in certain ways. What does she describe as, you know,
why a doctor and which obviously didn't work out. But
what is it that draws her to that? Do we know?
(12:59):
I don't think we really know explicitly. But she definitely
was very interested in the body. She was interested in
how the body worked. There are people who have talked
about who knew her in her later years when she
was in and out of hospitals and they were trying
to help her with her her health. There are assistants
(13:20):
who say that Frieda understood medicine in a way that
sometimes it seemed like she knew more than the doctors did,
so sort of a sublimation of this difficulty that she
had first with polio and the loss of you know,
the full function of her leg, and then later this
terrible accident where you know, she had to be submerged
(13:42):
in so many ways in medical care. But a father
who has epilepsy and a mother who it's not clear
what she had, but it does sound like she often
felt that she was sickly at least. But then on
this track of being this great student, she's with this boyfriend,
Alejandro on this alley bus situation, and and there's a
(14:03):
terrible accident and she is very badly hurt. She breaks
multiple bones. Later they discover, in fact, even vertebrae in
her spine have been moved out of position. But she
also was impaled by the steel rod in her pelvis,
which they pull out at the scene, has caused her
to have a pelvic fracture, but probably also impacted perhaps
(14:25):
her reproductive organs. This just completely derails her life. At
that point, she's in a wheel chair, she's bedbound, and
her mother says, hey, let's put up this mirror and
get you these paints and set up this easel in
this way. This is sort of the time when she
first really involves herself in painting herself. You have to
imagine that before she's bedridden, she's going to this National
(14:45):
Preparatory School, which was a very prestigious school in Mexico City.
It was hard to get into. Freda was one of
thirty five girls who went there, and the students who
are going there were seen as up and coming leaders
of this new Mexican ulture after the revolution. Freda was
a part of that. She was going to be a doctor,
you know, a lot of her friends were going to
be lawyers. She was a very active person. She called
(15:08):
herself a street wanderer. She loved roaming around Mexico City.
And now she's had this terrible accident and right she's
in her bed, and it was so difficult for her
to deal with on so many different levels. But yes,
she starts creating art because she's what else is she
going to do? Right she's in bed, she's working on
walking again. Because one thing that's important to understand too
(15:30):
is that she was told she would probably never walk again,
but she was determined that she would walk again. So
she is working on trying to take small steps to
walk again, but she's also creating and a number of
things happen. One is, as she is starting to walk
again finally and she's working on her art more and more,
(15:50):
she realizes a couple of things. One is that all
of her friends have moved on, because she was at
a point where she was about to graduate from the
National Preparatory School and she would have gone on to
medical school. Her friends have gone on, and so what
is she going to do? And also she wants to
help her family financially because due to the revolution, her
father really lost his lucrative job because it was the
(16:13):
government under Porphyrio Diaz who had hired him. After the revolution,
he loses that job. They're struggling financially. She wants to
help her family out financially. This is when right she
becomes very bold and she decided she's going to go
see Diego Rivera, one of the most if not the
most famous artists at that time in Mexico. And she
shows him, you know her work and says, what do
(16:34):
you think. I want to know what you think. I
don't want you to flirt with me. I just want
you to tell me what you think of my art,
which was quite a thing to tell Diego Rivera because
apparently flirted with everybody and it didn't matter what your
age or your age difference was. He was. He was
this big womanizer. Had she made him previously, Yes, he
had come to her school, she had met him, but
it hadn't been a very exciting interaction. It was just
(16:56):
sort of there. Well, she used to tease him. So
when she was going to school, he was paid Antina
mural at the National Preparatory School, and so she would
tease him and pull these pranks on him and things.
But she was just like a schoolgirl, you might say,
at that point. But now she's coming to him as
a woman who wants to make a living as an artist,
so it's a very different kind of context. And he
(17:18):
gives her a very positive response. He's impressed with her work.
He sees she has this unique i this unique vision.
He felt that typically you see in a beginner, certain style,
certain subjects that maybe are common, but he sees something
unique in her early work. And yeah, he encourages her
(17:39):
to keep going, and that was obviously an important turning
point for her. This seems like a good time for
a short break. We'll be right back. Frieda had impressed
a great painter, Diego Rivera, and Diego recognized an intriguing
(18:02):
creativity in Frieda's paintings. In choosing her subject matter, there's
this combination of her internal emotional content and a use
of interesting symbolism, which seems to be again some combination
of emotionally what's happening inside of her, but also politically.
(18:27):
She joins the communist group that is there, and she
developed some very intense political feelings, but it's also culturally
what's happening, at least in the group that she's choosing
to be part of. But it really seemed like this
unique mix that came from inside it is coming out
of her culture. Frieda was from a culture that really
understood that there was another reality, one that lives side
(18:51):
by side with the physical world, an invisible reality, one
place where we can see. This comes out of a
lot of mes American cultures, but specifically I talk about
the Aztecs. They had this concept, certainly of the invisible
or this spiritual realm. Also, of course Catholicism does, and
so she grows up in this culture and understands this
(19:13):
what we might call invisible reality. And I think also
what I've found in really looking closely at the impact
of this accident on her at age eighteen, and then
later a miscarriage that she has in Detroit, and then
also the death of her mother around that same time,
in two all of these are incidents that I feel
(19:36):
take her into this realm of these experiences with death
on a very powerful level. In two cases, I would
say near death experiences for her. In the case of
her mother, of course, it's just experiencing this profound death
of her mother. And she comes through this, I believe,
with a new sense of reality. And what does that mean, Well,
(19:57):
it's a reality again that is connected to the invisible.
I think she uses that in her artwork. Many of
her paintings contain these symbols that are to be read,
decrypted and understood. A lot of her paintings do contain
references to death or the concern about mortality in the
living or losses and emotionally you can understand where that
(20:20):
comes from. But this use of symbols and sort of
the need to read almost the painting, where does that
come from? Well, I think it comes probably from different places.
But two that I think are really important are a Catholicism. Again,
she went to church probably every Sunday for most of
her life. Her mother even had a special bench for
(20:40):
her family at the church in Coyokon where she grew up.
San Juan Batista. I went to this church and it's powerful.
It's a really beautiful, powerful church. And some of the
images that you're looking at, you know, of Christ, for example,
are very painful to look at, the blood dripping down him,
the anguish in his face, and I think, you know,
(21:01):
these were images that were made to be read. And
then again, I think if we look at as tech art,
you know, when she's coming of age, she's coming of
age at the same time that that, in a sense,
Mexico is coming of age in the nineteen twenties, right
rediscovering what it means to be Mexican in terms of
going back to a time prior to the Spanish invasion.
(21:24):
And so I think just to be able to incorporate
symbolism into her work and layers into her work was
probably natural for her, and it was just how her
mind worked. She is a woman in search of or uncovering.
I guess I'll say her many potential identities. You're saying that,
you know, one of them was being very nationalistic. But
(21:44):
the identity of you know, to be Mexican is also
to be as tech, and that seemed very important. Another
identity seemed to be the fluidity of her sexuality, which
is interesting because obviously that would be somewhat at odds
with the Catholic Church and its teachings. I mean, it's
hard to imagine that would have been considered acceptable, nor
(22:05):
might it have been acceptable to be the third wife
of an artist who is known to commit repeated infidelity
during marriage. Anyway, And in fact, her mother seems to
have not been too thrilled that she chose to marry
Diego Rivera. No, she was not thrilled. She wouldn't even
attend the wedding. She wouldn't attend the wedding, which is
(22:25):
quite a statement. The father came and sounds like he
was happy that there was a man who would marry
his daughter and support her. He was a successful artist,
but the mother felt that he was not a good
enough man for her daughter, and certainly his morals were
not consistent with the mother's correct I mean, he's a
communist he's an atheist. He was like twenty years older.
(22:46):
She didn't approve it. However, I will say over time
she did grow to love and appreciate him. I mean,
she does discuss that in letters later on. She recovers enough.
She's walking, She's demonstrated an incredible drive and resilience about herself.
She's painting and marries Diego Rivera. She's painting somewhat, but
(23:07):
really Diego is the big artist, so to speak. And
they go to the United States together, and it's really
in the years there in San Francisco and Detroit and
her experiences and her exposure to other artists in the
community and what goes on with her relationship with Diego
that further shape her artistic expression most definitely. By the
(23:30):
time she comes to the United States, in n she's
a novice artist. She's certainly working on her style, but
she really hasn't developed her own voice yet. So in
many ways, she was working on this what we might
call folk art style and wanting to really see herself
as a painter for the people of Mexico. So when
(23:50):
she comes to the United States, she's kind of, you know,
has all these different ideas in her mind. She's trying
to work through these ideas. We see her development really
pick up speed. She creates the portrait of Luther Burbank,
and that's her first I would say, sort of breakthrough
to a new style while she's in the United States.
It's a very interesting portrait of this man who was
(24:12):
a horticulturist who put forward the idea of hybrid fruits
and vegetables. He was able to create successfully these hybrids,
and so she makes him a hybrid part tree, part man.
And then underneath the tree man is his skeleton, because
he had died a few years before she came to
the United States. Interestingly, even though Diego is this in
(24:36):
some ways larger than life man, he is very ambitious
himself and very charismatic and needed a lot of the
attention focused on himself. He was nonetheless quite supportive of
her and her art. He was, I mean, to his credit,
he was very supportive and he recognized her genius. We
(25:03):
know that she had relationships with men and women during
the marriage outside when they were not married, and we
know that she toyed with the question of gender identity.
She would want to be photographed in her father's suit
or she would emphasize more traditionally masculine features and paintings,
(25:24):
or even in herself in terms of her eyebrows and
coming together and facial hair. Is there evidence that she
internally felt gender fluid. I think she felt androgynous. She
was fascinated by androgyny, saw it as about a balance
between male and female in some ways. You know, she
(25:45):
was raised like a boy because the way her father
treated her was really like the son he never had.
And interestingly, they did have a son who was born
a year before Freedom, but he died from pneumonia and
then of course contracting polio, as we talked about earlier,
brought on her father saying Okay, I'm going to train
you to box, to wrestle, to swim, so that she
(26:08):
could build up her strength, but also so she could
defend herself physically if she needed to from people teasing her. So, yeah,
in a lot of ways, she's raised as a boy,
but at the same time as a girl. And so
I think in a sense you see that combination of
the male and female throughout her life, and she seemed
to really identify as androgynous, and she carries that through
(26:30):
her art. Often emphasizing the facial hair, the unibrow. My
sense is that she really saw herself as inderrogynous. She
had really quite an appetite for the sexual world. She
appreciated the beauty of feminine things and masculine things and
vivid and uh and touching, and she just expresses with
(26:55):
all her senses. And what do we know of Diego's
acceptance of that? Was he similar to what did he
like about that? In her? I think he was similar
in a lot of ways. You know. The way that
he's described also is that even though he's known as
this womanizer, etcetera very macho, but he also is described
as very quote unquote feminine, you know when Frieda describes
(27:18):
him somewhat as a child too, but like, you know,
having almost like breath, you know, because he was overweight
and his body was soft, you know, kind of like
a woman's and a baby's. At the same time, he
was known to be able to really supposedly like listen
to women in a way that most men didn't in
that period. So they both seem to accept each other
(27:38):
as androgynous in many ways. And I think that that
was one of the probably the positive aspects of their relationship.
It's later, actually, even after the period in San Francisco.
I mean, she she goes to Detroit. She sounds like
she's very unhappy there. She doesn't feel as in tune
with the artistic community there. It sounds like she also
(27:59):
misses being in Mexico quite a bit. It's sort of
after this period that she paints some of her most
important paintings. What do we understand comes together there at
that point that enables her to do that. I guess
I would first preface this by saying, I think creative
breakthroughs are mysterious. We can't necessarily know exactly why an
artist has a creative breakthrough. However, certainly in this case,
(28:23):
there are these events that are leading up to it.
Part of it, again is all of the experimentation she's
done prior to her breakthrough paintings in Detroit. But the
other part, of course, is that she discovers she's pregnant
and she's very ambivalent about having this child. One of
the things I detail in the book is, you know,
kind of what she's going through, right, She's this ambivalence
(28:44):
about it. She goes to the doctor and she's thinking
maybe she should have an abortion, and the doctor has
her take quinine and castor oil, which I guess at
that time was something that typically women would try in
order to have a miscarriage. And so she tries it,
but it doesn't work, and then she ends up a
couple of months later hemorrhaging. She's, you know, hemorrhaging at home.
(29:05):
She's rushed to henry Ford Hospital. You know, it's described
by Lucian Bloch, who was a friend of hers at
the time, and her journal and things. As you know,
this was quite dramatic that she was bleeding so much
that it made it sound like, you know, if she
could have perhaps died. Even so, she goes through a
lot while she's in the hospital. It takes a while
for the miscarriage. She's bleeding, and then finally she sort
(29:29):
of expels the fetis and she's distraught. But I think
it's also important that people understand when a person is
ambivalent about an event and then something happens to end it.
In this case, it's actually harder than if you feel
uniformly one way or the other way, because so in
this case, you know, she lost the baby, you could say, well,
(29:50):
she'd come to accept, okay, maybe this is a good thing,
but it's unlikely that she resolved this ambivalence at all.
So then what happens is the guilt about whatever part
of you might have wished for this to happen because
you felt ambivalent from the get go is usually the
most difficult emotion to struggle with. To feel responsible in
some way even though obviously you know you weren't actually responsible.
(30:13):
That your emotions make you feel like, you know, in
some way you may have caused this, and you feel terrible.
So she's in the hospital and then she starts to create.
She starts doing some drawings in the hospital, and one
of the drawings really becomes the foundation for one of
her breakthrough paintings called henry Ford Hospital. So when she
gets out of the hospital, she's still devastating, I mean,
(30:35):
she's she's described really as is depressed and irritable, just struggling.
But she does start to paint again, and when she
creates henry Ford Hospital, you know, she's showing herself in
the bed hemorrhaging. And then she has these objects, you know,
floating above and below her that are attached to these
(30:56):
red artery like the lines. One of them is her child,
but she's in this landscape that's barren. She's not in
a hospital room, she's out in this barren landscape. But
then in the background you see Henry Ford's river rouge plant,
and so it's also industry there. It's an amazing painting
for many reasons. Just first off, the subject itself. It's
(31:19):
this taboo subject. I don't know of any other artists
who had depicted themselves having a miscarriage hemorrhage in bed
like that. People didn't even talk about miscarriages in that
period for the most part. They wouldn't They wouldn't talk about, well,
how does it feel, how are you feeling now that
you had a miscarriage? They just weren't even talking about it, right,
(31:39):
And so to put it on canvas like that was
highly unusual. But she's paints it on metal, and so
she is taking on again the style of the retablo
from Mexico. She is painting it then in this way
to make it look like an untrained artist with painted
but it also has this other worldly quality to it
(32:00):
as well. Her ability to paint. What it meant really
to her to be a woman with all of the strengths,
but all of the difficulties and the tragedies and the terror.
Her ability to do that actually repeatedly, she's sort of
gone down in history really as in many ways of
feminist artist. Even though as you say, she had this
(32:24):
androgyny about her, she really embraced and investigated and earthed
and demonstrated what it felt to her, certainly to be
a woman. I think with Freda, it's personal, but it's
not just about her personal experiences. It's also personal in
terms of her culture, always bringing in her culture and
bringing in these different layers. I think the other thing
(32:46):
that's important to understand two about freed To taking on
these taboo subjects is that she was somebody who was
very honest and blunt in the way she spoke, and
I think she often incorporated that into her art as well.
Even you could have layers of symbolism that could be
you know, uncovered at the same time, you know, just
sort of putting it out there, like Okay, here I
(33:08):
am on this bed bleeding something that we don't typically see.
She's putting it out there because on some level that
was the kind of person she was. She wasn't afraid
in many ways to just state what she really felt
this seems like a good time for a short break.
(33:28):
We'll be right back. Fleeta's health continued to deteriorate. She
has suffered pain since her childhood polio and then accident,
both back pain and leg pain. But now she had
to have toes amputated, and eventually by she had to
(33:49):
have her leg amputated due to gang green. After that
she fell into a deep depression. One of her friends
said that after the accident, you know, at eighteen, she
was quite aware of death all the time, you know,
I mean, I think she said herself, Freeda wrote something
about death dances, you know, around my bed, something like
(34:09):
that when she was recovering. So, yeah, she was always
aware of death. And of course again that's an important
aspect of Mexican culture, to a celebration of you know,
life and death. And so her latest paintings after her
health declines, freed to how how would you describe the
changes there? The paintings of the nineteen forties definitely start
(34:31):
to focus more and more out in nature with animals.
I think she becomes more powerful in a sense. It's
kind of this duality again though she's powerful, but there's
often also a look of maybe sadness too in her eyes,
but her gaze was so powerful in itself that that's
why I say, you know, when you look at them,
you're kind of grabbed by her, but you can't sense
(34:56):
a sadness as well, And then you know, you do
start to see. In ninety three she does one where
she says thinking about death, and she's got an image
of death on her forehead. Then she's got one in
forty nine called Diego and I with Diego on her forehead,
And I just feel like when you get to this
later period, there is more of this emphasis maybe on
(35:16):
this image of death suffering, like the Broken Column of
forty four shows her spinal column broken open. There's a
painting in forty five called Without Hope certainly sounds like
an sad awareness of impending mortality. It does seem like
there's more of that in the self portraits. There's sort
of this open question as to how her life really ended.
(35:38):
As she was bedridden, she was not doing well, taking
pain medications and saying that you know, this is sort
of an unbearable and untenable situation. She gives Diego his
anniversary gift a month before their anniversary. Her last diary
entrance sounds like a goodbye. I mean, it's reported that
(36:02):
she dies in the middle of the night, which wouldn't
be shocking to anyone given how infirmed she was at
that point. There seems to be a question as to whether,
in fact, this was a suicide. Well, of course, it's
hard to know, right. My sense is that she probably
was given an overdose of medication to help her so
she could die peacefully. I mean, there's been speculation that
(36:23):
even Diego requested it, but again it's hard to know.
I don't find it hard to believe that somebody, somebody
could have been free to herself. I suppose gave her
an overdose, essentially knowing that it could kill her. It
just sounds like she was probably ready. Like you say,
in terms of her last entry into her journal, you know,
she says, I hope the exit is joyful, and I
(36:43):
hope never to come back. When you look at the
things that were happening right up to that point, it
does seem like she's preparing for death, preparing to say goodbye. Right.
She is clearly in a lot of pain, and all
the things that they've tried to do for her to
help her be mobile and recover seemed to not have worked.
A lot of people say once she had her leg amputated,
(37:04):
that that was it. She just went downhill, medically downhill.
But it also sounds like psychologically, psychologically yeah, Unlike some
great artists. She certainly had success in her lifetime. I mean,
she was well recognized and admired and had shows and
had her paintings purchased and purchased by places where artists
(37:28):
can only hope to have their work shown. But then, sadly,
actually often the case, after her death and the number
of paintings is finite, she is even more recognized. But
it took a while. I mean, it wasn't immediate. Wasn't
like she died and then suddenly was known as a
great artist. I think a lot of it comes about
in the seventies, in particular due to the interest on
(37:51):
the part of art historians who really start looking at, well,
where are all the women artists? Are there great women
artists or are they buried somewhere we just have to
recover them, or do they just not exist? And so
you see the beginnings of what we call the feminist
art movement, and then also art historians really looking at
the cannon in particular, especially the Western art canon, and
(38:14):
starting to question this history that we've been told and
free to Carlo is one of the artists who is
brought back to the surface and gets looked at more critically.
And then, of course Hayden Herrera writes this significant biography
of her. She's working on it in the seventies, it
comes out in and so there are all these different
(38:35):
factors that really bring Frieda to the forefront, particularly outside
of Mexico. Do you think that there's also something about
the way she lived her life in terms of not
just overcoming so much difficulty, but her being openly bisexual,
openly embracing of her androgyny, and her being openly embracing
(38:58):
of her strong political coal views and weaving those together
in her art that later made us recognize her as
such an important female artist. Yes, I think the cliche
probably fits Frieda, which is that she was ahead of
her time. Therefore it took a later time period to
(39:19):
really understand her more fully and to to recognize her
importance both as a person and as an artist. Also,
I would add to your list that in terms of
how she dealt with her disability, the problems that she
had with walking and and the chronic pain. I mean,
on one level, she originally in her in her art
(39:39):
she sort of hides it in some ways, you could
say she hit it in her way she dressed. But
at the same time, in her art she becomes very
open about it too. She shows her wounds, she shows
her pain again, being very open and honest. And I
think that's refreshing to people. And I think today we
live in this culture where people are much more open
(40:00):
about their personal lives. So she resonates because she was
always a pretty open and honest person. She was a
champion of reducing stigma before we acknowledge that stigma was
a problem. Right. And I want to just add one
thing that I haven't addressed. Something that I find kind
of amazing about Freedo Callo, is that in everything that
(40:20):
I've looked at, you know, read about, you know, things
that she's written, works that she's created, her attitude towards
sexuality seems particularly ahead of her time. She seemed to
love sex with men and women. She says, homosexuality is good,
you know, it's natural. She just embraced the sexuality as
(40:41):
a part of life, the great aspects of life. And
again that's phenomenal considering the time period and the culture
in which she grew up. In Yes, her demonstration of
the appetite for life in this non judgmental way is
undoubtedly something that so unusual for the times, but something
we can admire and appreciate that perhaps she, in her
(41:05):
own way moved the needle for people. Part of great art,
right is how it speaks to the viewer and whether
it changes, makes change acceptable for the viewer. Certainly we
would have to put Rita Collo in that place. As
I say at the end of the book, I think
one of the reasons why she has risen to the
top and she's still there is that she was able
(41:27):
to transform the personal into something universal. Because when you
look at her popularity, not just as a personality but
her art, she's always breaking records in terms of attendance,
and her exhibits are around the world. She crosses cultures
and obviously time periods, because she's really been on this
trajectory since the nineties of her you might say star rising,
(41:52):
and that it speaks to all of us. There's obviously
something they're fascinating fascinating. Well, that wraps things up for
this episode. Thanks Cecilia Starr for joining me. Check out
her book Frieda in America, The Creative Awakening of a
(42:15):
Great Artist. If you're interested in more information about the
people we discussed on the show, you can check out
my book The Power of Different and you can follow
me on Twitter at doctor Gayale salt or at person
Ology m D until next time. Personology is a production
of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Doctor Gayl
Saltz and Tyler Clang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan.
(42:38):
The Associate producer is Lowell Berlanti. Editing music and mixing
by Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.