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

She draws

his image on her forehead

their faces forming a single head Diego.

Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. My body fills with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent light of lightning. The dampness of the earth. Your armpit is my refuge. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel your life shoot forth from your flower-fountain which mine keeps in order to fill the paths of my nerves which belong to you.

spoken and signed with magenta kisses.

“He is enchanted with the factories, the machines, etc., like a child with a new toy. The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is, as in all of the United States, ugly and stupid.”

On its letterhead, the Wardwell called itself “the best home address in Detroit.” What that meant, the Riveras discovered after a few weeks, was that the hotel did not take Jews. “But Frida and I have Jewish blood!” Diego shouted. “We are going to have to leave! I won’t stay here no matter how much you lower the price unless you remove the restriction.” Desperate for customers, the management promised to comply and also reduced the rent.

New York:

Apparently the thought that capitalists might do well not to hire an avowed communist to decorate one of the world’s truly great urban complexes did not occur to the young Nelson Rockefeller. Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.

When an acquaintance suggested that she buy herself some stylish clothes, Frida briefly gave up her long native skirts for the amusement of wearing chic Manhattan modes — even hats — and twitching her hips along the Manhattan sidewalks in a parody of the confident strut of a Manhattan socialite. She poked fun at everything that struck her as funny, and that was a lot.

Weekly Sales in Millions!

Nine months later, after the Riveras had left New York, the mural was chipped off and thrown away…. When he repainted the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts in 1934, he placed John D. Rockefeller, Sr., among the revelers on the capitalist side of the mural, in close proximity to the syphilis spirochetes that swarm on the propeller.

American drugstores, for example, were a fantasy world. Once when she was passing a pharmacy in a taxi, the word Pharmaceuticals written on the outside struck her as so ponderous that she composed a song called Pharmaceuticals and much to the driver’s mirth, sang it loudly during the remainder of the ride.

She adored department stores, shops in Chinatown, and dime stores. Frida went through dime stores like a tornado. Suddenly she would stop and buy something immediately. She had an extraordinary eye for the genuine and the beautiful. She’d find cheap costume jewelry and she’d make it look fantastic.

In the morning when they read newspapers, Frida would burst into laughter over the little photographs of columnists that accompanied their texts. “Look at those crazy heads!” she would say. “It’s not possible. They must be crazy in this country!”

Weekly Sales in Millions!

Directly in the middle of a composite image that shows Manhattan as the capital of capitalism as well as the center of poverty and protest in the Depression years hangs Frida’s Tehuana costume. My Dress Hangs There.

… Frida mocks the North American obsession with efficient plumbing and the national preoccupation with competitive sports by setting upon pedestals a monumental toilet and a golden golf trophy…. Snaking around the cross in the stained glass window in Trinity Church is a large red S that turns the crucifix into a dollar sign … instead of showing Federal Hall’s marble steps, Frida has pasted on her canvas a graph showing “Weekly Sales in Millions”: in July 1933, big business seemed to be doing fine, but the masses — tiny, swarming figures at the bottom of the painting — were not the beneficiaries.

The garbage overflows with a human heart, a hand.

… Also their lifestyle seems most dreadful to me: those fucking parties where everything is solved after imbibing a bunch of aperitifs (they don’t even know how to get drunk in a happy way.) …

You will reply that you can also live there without aperitifs or parties, but in that case, you can never do anything and it seems to me that the most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and to become “somebody,” and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to be anybody.

and she watches—

other people dance—

at the parties the rich have, all day and all night.

and she floats—

missing home.

San Francisco Nov 21, 1930

Lovely papá,

… I send you all my affection and a thousand kisses. Your daughter who adores you

Frieducha here is a kiss

Write to me

everything you do

and everything that happens to you.

Beautiful Chabela, Tell me how Uncle Panchito, Aunt Lolita and everybody else is doing.

As soon as I arrive you must make me a bouquet of pulque and quesadillas made of squash blossoms, because just thinking about it …

turkey mole, chiles and tamales with atole

Don’t forget me here

Weekly Sales in Millions! she croons.

Pharmaceuticals!

The industrial part of Detroit is really most interesting, the rest is as in all the United States, ugly and stupid.

You watch you scrutinize your pain

and

paint it grief

and

paint it

the consolation of your face.

You watch you observe your desire

close up and afar

and

at the same time

you paint

You sanctify your pain

and

paint it

with care

love

with utmost tenderness

you watch and tend it

paint.

the limping line

you write

beautiful faltering

You double yourself

or triple yourself

placed on the various stages of your psyche

floating past now on a sponge there you go

a swooning woman with another woman

loving or with a

monkey curling

or a fetus curled up or

the self—

its thousand consolations.

Resourceful, wouldn’t you say? laughing you paint

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

Self-Portrait with Braid , or with Monkey , or with Cropped Hair

A series of self-portraits. Self-portrait with pompier. Self-portrait with young Arlesian. Self-portrait in red by a fountain. Self-portrait as lighthouse keeper. Or on the rue Saint Jacques.

What the language gave. What the paint—

drawn to the longing

Each mark a door

Each word a boat

The Chinese yin and yang sign,

a mystical griffin,

and in the upper-right-hand corner

the outlined footprint often found in Mexican codices indicating the direction of events.

a red pressure

or yellow — a yellow feeling—

Yellow—

color of madness, sickness, fear

leaf green: leaves, sadness, science. The

whole of Germany is this color.

you paint:

a skeleton running down the page or a Frida caressed by paws— reddish purple — old blood of the prickly pear, the brightest, the oldest, and brown — color of mole, of leaves becoming earth.

real and imaginary celebrating animals

and the smeared mouth.

Hayden Herrara: she would proceed as if she were painting a fresco rather than an oil, first drawing the general outlines of her image in pencil and ink and then, starting in the upper left corner, working with slow, patient concentration across and from the top downward, completing each area as she went along.