Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer

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СКАЧАТЬ traversing a male-dominated domain by actively producing marketable art. Her paintings were exhibited, purchased, and commissioned. As she traveled to New York and Paris for exhibitions of her work, she interacted with well-known artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamps, and André Breton. Her patrons included Edward G. Robinson, A. Conger Goodyear, and Clare Boothe Luce. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre each purchased one of her self-portraits. But reviews of her exhibitions persistently inscribed feminine illustration as Kahlo’s primary accomplishment. For example, one review of her 1938 exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, which introduced discussion of her work with the anecdote that she had been “too shy to show her work before,” noted that “black-browed … little Frida’s pictures, had the daintiness of miniatures, … and the bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.”⁷⁹ With Henry Ford Hospital and other graphic, bloody self-portraits included in the exhibition, there is an obvious discrepancy between Kahlo’s unsettling displays of the female body and the description/interpretation of the paintings. Contradictory female stereotypes are inscribed. On one hand the artist (personified by her painting style) is dainty and delicate; on the other hand she is troublesome and untamed, analogous to the child who is not yet properly socialized. Though far less blatant than 1930s reviews, that incongruity permeates interpretations published five and six decades later. For example, Herrera characterizes Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (figure 7) as a “rueful jest,” and Richmond suggests that it is a “vengeful picture” that portrays Kahlo’s “fantasy to maim her betraying husband.”⁸⁰ Herrera and Richmond isolate Kahlo’s self-portrait from all social context beyond the interpersonal, arguing that the painting documents Kahlo’s emotions during her 1939 divorce from Rivera. Yet, they also insert stereotypes of the fallen woman, made even more menacing by a fury that further challenges the social balance between masculine and feminine ideals.

      As Kahlo enjoyed increasing professional success, her marriage deteriorated. In 1939, when she returned to Mexico from Paris, Rivera asked for a divorce. It is difficult to determine exactly what precipitated his request. Kahlo’s brief, published comments were vague. She explained that “intimate reasons, personal causes” led to “difficulties” when she returned from Paris and New York and that she and Rivera “were not getting along well.”⁸¹ Although also enigmatic, Rivera’s comments submit that Kahlo’s celebrated success was a catalyst:

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

      Figure 7. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940. Oil on canvas, 15¾″ × 11″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.

      There are no sentimental, artistic, or economic questions involved. It is really in the nature of precaution. . . . I believe that with my decision I am helping Frida’s life to develop in the best possible way. She is young and beautiful. She has had much success in the most demanding art centers. She has every possibility that life can offer her, while I am already old and no longer have much to offer her. I count her among the five or six most prominent painters.⁸²

      Rivera’s description of Kahlo as a successful and prominent painter is in sharp contrast with his painted idealization of her as helpmate produced five years earlier, marking a shift in his perception of her social position, and also reflecting his social status. Although he claimed that there were no sentimental reasons for the divorce, his statement intimates his own faded virility and vitality, highly invested masculine qualities. As he describes her life “develop[ing] in the best possible way,” he labels himself “already old,” without “much to offer her.” In other words, she professionally surpassed the “great maestro,” whose commissions were in decline. Given the social contention over women’s roles, which is implied in Rivera’s statements, Kahlo’s professional success was incompatible with her role as wife. In Schaefer’s words, “As far as the art world in particular was concerned, the ‘rules’ of artistic construction separated the male professional from the intimate discreet role of the woman.”⁸³ By the time of the divorce, public interest in Kahlo’s paintings had escalated. As she traveled to exhibition openings in New York and Paris, she metaphorically crossed a boundary from a private, feminine role to a public, masculine one. Her cultural position changed from nurturing wife to active artist, and, parallel to the paradigmatic male artist’s sexual reputation, her sexual liaisons became public knowledge. Kahlo unquestionably operated outside the parameters of idealized femininity.

      Because Kahlo and Rivera were celebrities, their lives were discussed publicly. Alejandro Goméz Arias explains, “Diego and Frida lived in the middle of a forum. The publicity, whether desired or not, was inexhaustible. For Frida, there was no private life, no silence.”⁸⁴ The sexual exploits of both artists were implicated in interviews that Herrera conducted with their acquaintances:

      Possibly Rivera learned of Frida’s affair with Nickolas Murray. . . . Some say that the source of Rivera’s problem was sexual—Frida’s physical fragility or her lack of desire made her either unable or unwilling to satisfy Rivera’s sexual needs. Other’s say that Rivera was impotent. . . . Rivera always retained an attraction to his ex-wife [Lupe Marín], and he was tied to her as the mother of his children. . . . he might have found out about Frida’s affair with Trotsky. . . . there was a rumor that Rivera was planning to marry the pretty Hungarian painter Irene Bohus. . . . Rivera is widely believed to have been romantically involved with Paulette Goddard.⁸⁵

      In listing the artists’ sexual liaisons, Herrera suggests that infidelity was the most significant factor precipitating the divorce and implies that no marriage can tolerate the breakdown of bourgeois sexual mores even if both husband and wife agree to an open relationship. A distinction between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” gendered sexual behavior invades Herrera’s list. Virility is an uncontested, celebrated masculine characteristic manifested through sexual conquests. Thus rumors that Rivera was involved with Lupe Marín, Irene Bohus, and/or Paulette Goddard verify his virility. If, as Herrera notes, Kahlo was too frail or disinterested to “satisfy Rivera’s sexual needs,” then his only option for actively proving his masculinity would have been through sexual relations with other women. The intimation that he may have been attracted to Marín, “the mother of his children,” is even more ideologically significant as a fulfillment both of his masculinity and of postrevolutionary nationalism, which endorsed the family above all other intimate relations. In other words, the rumors that Herrera lists inscribe stereotypic social traits for the paradigmatic patriarchal male, implying that Kahlo did not or could not perform a feminine role to validate her husband’s masculinity; therefore Rivera ultimately requested a divorce. The reports of Kahlo’s intimate relationships are not listed in and of themselves as grounds for divorce. Rather they are enumerated in terms of whether Rivera was aware of them. “Possibly Rivera learned of” her affair with Murray or “found out about” her sexual relationship with Trotsky, thus suggesting that her active sexual pursuits and her clandestine proclivity toward masculine sexual behavior was exposed. In a strict gender binary, if the woman is actively masculine, the man by default must occupy the feminine field of passivity and submission. Almaguer argues that in Mexican/Latino culture, “only men . . . are granted sexual subjectivity.”⁸⁶ Illustrating the foreclosed category of female sexuality, he cites Moraga’s autobiographical account of realizing her own sexual subjectivity: “In an effort to avoid embodying la chingada, I became the chingón. In the effort not to feel fucked, I became the fucker, even with women.”⁸⁷ Thus, Almaguer explains, “In order to define herself as an autonomous sexual subject, [Moraga] embraced a butch or masculine gender persona.”⁸⁸ Similarly, rumors of Kahlo’s active sexual exploits located her in a masculine realm, implicitly threatening Rivera with the possibility of residing in the feminine sphere that Kahlo had abandoned. If considered in the context of sexual gender codes, Rivera’s decision to divorce his wife exempted him from a social status construed in relation to Kahlo’s increased professional СКАЧАТЬ