Carole Maso - Beauty is Convulsive - The Passion of Frida Kahlo

Falling off that ludicrous pedestal. The plaster cracking. Your corset. Breaking into arms and legs. Dance away. Resilient one. Trying to keep up. A three-legged race.

Men ascend with passions, compliments flirtatious but—

You are driving in a Lincoln Continental convertible with Doctor Polo. Jangling. Charms. You ask for a double tequila.

Caught in the buzz and hum

the festival of the sun.

Beauty is convulsive or not at all.

I love you Frida next to the next to the painting sound, the scraping sound don’t go.

I love you next to the solitude.

Her increasingly dark and silent theater, her darkening verandah of invitations, talons, treacherous birds, monkey, songbook, her wrought-iron

Men ascend look:

A love-lorn woman with a cup of poison fallen dead at her blue door

Cupped, her hands reveal a little bird, a box, solace, a 3 7 9

Her very blue door, then door of earth, you wave the fetus cackle babble drugged: abyss oblivion sorrow

Papá!

You see birds, the planets you see a little deer and you see your father closing the aperture now.

hourglass

pyramid

a deer with 9 arrows — confined to an apparatus

In Aztec mythology and iconography the image of the deer stands for the right foot.

Crimson

Crimson

Crimson

Crimson like the blood

that runs

when they kill

a deer

The names in pink on her bedroom door:

Maria Felix

Elena Vdsquez Gdmez

Marcela Armida

Irene Bohus

Maria Félix you cry!

Viva la vida she scrawls on my breasts. And I am trying to extricate myself — in anticipation of the end.

Coward, she hisses.

Viva la vida.

Her ruined leg.

Oh Valentin, Valentina, she croons

I too know how to die. But if

they’re going to kill me

tomorrow, why don’t they

kill me now?

Hair on fire wayward halo angel garden fur and there yes good no yes oh paint no scrape it hurts like that right there — opening — to reveal 9 arrows — sorrow, nails and roses, upside down, now up, now down, hold there, oh look — oh love— Comb my hair Cristina

Arrange my hair with combs now

Color of poison

Everything upside down.

Me? Sun

and moon

feet

and

Frida

Heartbroken

She pictures the V

a little

free

Viva

Holding a melon on the eve of her death

Trying to let go of—

3 7 9

tenacity and wildness

of the day

of the night

A perfect day: make love, take a bath, make love again.

And we force feed her tubers and the end.

Men ascend with the pine box looking for your body but

She closes her eyes recalling her twin votives: vision, devotion

She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.

She clutches a tequila and a sugar skull. Against the blue door she poses a moment longer. Then she walks one-footed down the hall, poor paw, poor paw

and she says live once more, and she says love

arranges the fruit: watermelon on the dark earth

once more

the ripe red

love, love

Viva la vida

And she picks up a brush.

To love you very much with an M

as in music or mundo.

All the things you held and hold …

and everything and everyone you loved

and all you wanted feared and—

your jokes:

Frida clung to her sense of the ridiculous; she loved to play, and on days when her natural exuberance won out against pain, she created a stage from the semi-circular metal contraption designed to keep her right leg raised, and produced puppet shows with her feet. When the bone bank sent a bone extracted from a cadaver in a jar labeled with the name of the donor, Francisco Villa, Frida felt as vital and as rebellious as her revolutionary bandit hero Pancho Villa. With my new bone, she cried, I feel like shooting my way out of this hospital and starting my own revolution.

your disdain your rage

absurdity of the maimed and desperately decorated

your handful of black charms suns moons and stars

your handful now of nights and days left

your Diego votives: venga

Without flinching you hold your pain that cup of mysterious universe

your viva la vida

your joie de vivre

And you make love freely to the world — burning

gracious, overflowing wayward halo cup on fire

And you play the jeux de la vérité in Paris, the game of truth and when you refuse to tell your age your punishment is to make love to the chair — which you do — beautifully.

laughing lovely chalice.

The project was conceived and executed in the spirit of fun. No one presumed that a great work of an would be produced. The style combined the broad, simplified realism of Rivera with the awkward primitivism of the pulquería mural tradition. The subjects — town and country scenes based on the bar’s name (The Little Rose) and the theme of pulque — were delegated according to each student’s predilection. Fanny Rabel recalls that her job was to paint a little girl. She also put roses in the pasture.

All you held, and gently:

Her students agree that Frida’s teaching was completely unprogrammatic. She did not impose her ideas on them; rather she let their talents develop according to their temperaments and taught them to be self-critical. Her remarks were penetrating, but never unkind.

balancing hope, exchanging fires

All you saw:

drawn to the vision, dreaming one:

a purple carnation

a red ribbon in her hair

her lips are crimson

eyebrows like swallows

monkey, skeleton, exposed heart, a blood-red ribbon

a paw

at the fetish altar

flower of life

shells symbols of birth, fecundity,

a scallop and a conch intertwined by the roots

from the magenta frame flowers, fruit, Frida, a red vein

She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing

Fanny Rabel: Frida’s great teaching was to see through artist’s eyes.… She did not influence us through her way of painting, but through her way of living, of looking at the world and at people and at art. She made us feel and understand a certain kind of beauty in Mexico that we would not have realized ourselves.… She did not impose anything. Frida would say, Paint what you see, what you want. We all painted differently. Followed our own routes. We did not paint like her. There was lots of chatting, jokes, conviviality. She was not giving us a lesson. Diego, on the other hand, could make a theory about anything in a minute. But she was instinctive, spontaneous. She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.

Delirious chalice:

She took huge doses and mixed them in the most unorthodox ways. Several times when Raquel Tibol was helping Cristina care for Frida she watched her put three or more doses of Demerol into a large syringe and add various small vials of other narcotics.

Without flinching you hold and are held by pain:

Ella Paresce, an American pianist who visited Frida often, remembered how one cast almost killed her. Frida had allowed a friend who happened to be a doctor, but with little experience in applying casts, to put a plaster corset on her one afternoon while friends were over. Everyone watched and laughed along with Frida as he molded it to her body.