Frida Kahlo (1910-1954)

oil on masonite

Mr. Roberto D. Strickler, Mexico
Mr. Javier Bustos, Mexico (1962)
Thence by descent

Mexico, Benjamin Franklin Library, El Niño en el Arte Mexicano, 1944
Mexico City, Fomento Cultural Banamex, Obras Selectas del Bodegón Mexicano (Siglos XVIII-XX), 1984
Dallas, The Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Frida Kahlo, February 17-April 16, 1989
Mexico, Universidad Autonóma Metropolitana, Galería Metropolitana, 50 Mujeres en la Plastica de Mexico, February 18-May 9, 1997

Martha Zamora, Frida: El Pincel de la Angustia, Mexico, 1987, p. 323, illustrated in color, p. 384
Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, p. 161, illustrated, p. 244
Salomon Grinberg, Frida Kahlo, New York, Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1997, p. 91, illustrated in color, p. 128
Salomon Grinberg and Andrea Kattenman, Frida Kahlo, Das Gesamtwerk, Frankfurt, Verlang Neue Kritik, 1998,  no. 85, p. 142, illustrated in color, p. 251
Luis Martin Lozano, Frida Kahlo, Mexico City, Editorial Landucci, Bital, 2000, p. 234, illustrated in color

There was only the unblemished and wondrous space above the pyramids beyond heaven’s open door, in which the sun and the moon meet: a space of awesome magnificence, of microscopic smallness compared to the stars and planets yet immense compared to their structure of proportions; it is comparable to the entire universe. The girl sits at the center of the universe.

- Diego Rivera on Niña Tehuacana, Lucha Maria

 

After a separation of fifteen months Frida and Diego reunited in 1940, marrying for the second time in San Francisco on December 8, Diego’s fifty-fourth birthday.  Kahlo’s paintings, always highly self-referential, relied increasingly heavily on narrative symbolism.  Following their reconciliation Pre-Columbian motifs appear in her work with increasing frequency.  In particular, the Mesoamerican concept of duality seemed to echo the couple’s own struggle for reconciliation of their disparate yet conjoined natures.  The sun/moon iconography which was to become so prevalent in Frida’s later work, makes one of its first appearances in 1942, in this serene, deceptively simple composition, Niña Tehuacana, Lucha Maria. 1

Some scholars have read the Aztec solar-lunar dichotomy as a violent struggle between good and evil: “the battle between the Sun and the powers of the night is not only the occupation of the gods but also and predominantly, a battle of good against evil.  The mission of the Tenochca is to align himself on the side of the Sun, which represents the forces of good, in opposition to the frightful gods of the night, symbols of evil.” 2     Such an interpretation is patently contradicted by Kahlo’s composition.  Niña Tehuacana, Lucha Maria places its protagonist, like the Mesoamerican Tree of Life, at the center of a symbolic universe uniting sky and earth, night and day, and the four cardinal directions.  Contemporary anthropologists commonly interpret Mesoamerican images of duality in terms of unified halves, much like the Asian concept of yin and yang.  “To this day [indigenous communities] think of dualities in general as complementary rather than opposed, interpenetrating rather than mutually exclusive.  Instead of being in logical opposition to one another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a mutual attraction.” 3  It is clearly this mutual attraction that Kahlo invoked in Niña Tehuacana, a painting also known by the more descriptive title Sol y Luna (Sun and Moon). 

Diego too was intensely interested with Mesoamerican art and iconography, a fascination that clearly informed his wife’s work.  Throughout the 1940s and until his death in 1957 he was occupied with the construction of Anahuacalli, his museum of Pre-Columbian art and anthropology, which had begun construction in 1942, the same year in which Frida painted Niña Tehuacana.   At the same time Diego was busy at the Palacio Nacional, working on a series of mural panels devoted to Pre-Columbian cultures.

Both Rivera and Kahlo assuredly had access to illustrations from the Mixtec Codex Fejervary-Mayer which had been published in Paris in 1901 and was widely available. 4  The codex’s famous first page “depicts the god of the heart of the mountain and earthquakes at the center (which, for the Aztec, was the fifth direction) surrounded by four trees representing the cardinal points, each of which is flanked by two deities.”5  These paired deities are avatars of oppositional attributes such as beauty and decay, ecstasy and violence, themes that suffused Kahlo’s work and once again echo the theme of reconciled duality established by Frida in Niña Tehuacana.

After 1942 Kahlo employed the sun/moon duality symbol with increasing frequency, often set in a context of her health and associated with the word, “hope.” Examples includeWithout Hope (1945); Tree of Hope Keep Firm (1946); and the sesquipedalian The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Senor Xolotl (1949), a painting that again plays suggestively with male/female, life/death imagery.   Hayden Herrera describes The Love Embrace in terms familiar to viewers of Lucha Maria: “Frida holds Diego and she in turn is held by an earth goddess who represents Mexico and resembles a pre-Columbian idol.  The idol is actually a cone-shaped mountain, a reference perhaps to mountain-pyramid symbolism in pre-Columbian religion…Its slopes are half green and half brown…Frida’s way of saying that nature alternates between cycles of destruction and rebirth, life and death.”  6

As always, Frida herself provides the most eloquent description of reconciled duality in her diary:

 

“Diego. me

 Diego, universe

 Diversity in unity”

 

 

 

 

1. The most notable example of this construction prior to 1942 is Self Portrait on the Border between Mexico and the United States, painted a decade earlier. Like Lucha Maria, the 1932 self portrait presents the sun and moon iconography above the ruins of a pre-Hispanic temple.    

2. Alfonso Caso, from El Pueblo del Sol, quoted in Martha Zamora Pincel de la Angustia, p.323

3. Dennis Tedlock, Introduction to the Popol Vuh, Simon and Schuster 1996, p. 59

4. “Diego Rivera, more than his artist colleagues in Mexico and the United States, had been exposed to the simple yet profound tradition of the directions through his study of … indigenous Mexican iconography.  One finds, therefore, that the informing principle of unity in his two great environmental mural programs…is their directional orientation.” Francis V. O’Connor,  An Iconographic Interpretation of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals in Terms of their Orientation to the Cardinal Points of the Compass” Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, Cynthia Newman Helms, ed., New York: W.W. Norton & Co., p. 215

5. ibid., 218

6. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, 377-378.