Frida Kahlo: The Paris Months
By Cam C.
Frida Kahlo’s journey in 1930s France displays the struggles of being a woman in the art world. Kahlo fought to pave her own path in the industry, which included challenging male expectations of a woman’s appearance by growing out her unibrow. She further separated herself from the era’s art trends by shunning the label of surrealist, which isolated her from Paris’ art circle. Her works were not the products of dreams like other popular pieces of that time, but instead inspired by the ongoing revolution in her home country of Mexico.
While in France, Frida uniquely represented her heritage, culture and womanhood by exploring the surrounding society. Mostly, she utilized her own pain when exploring the pain of being a woman living in a misogynistic culture on the canvas. She manifested the pain of being Frida Kahlo.
At the height of her career in 1938, Kahlo prepared her first solo exhibition in New York, where she shocked audiences with her new painting “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.” The piece is a gory scene that depicts Hale’s tragic suicide and replicates the desperate sentiment of a lonely woman. The painting also mirrored the hopelessness that Kahlo felt in her personal life at the time. Her husband, acclaimed muralist Diego Rivera, had filed for divorce after years of violent fights and a string of affairs. This time was different though, as Diego had developed a romance with Frida’s younger sister.
Back home in Mexico City, life as a communist revolutionary was filled with a series of characters parading around the home she had shared with Diego for inspiration, shelter and, at times, out of control parties. The space that she and Diego shared was part home and part studio, where they created pieces that revolutionized Mexican culture. She expressed pride in her heritage and used imagery reminiscent of folkloric art made by artisans, which can be seen in her famous self portrait, “Autoretrato como Tehuana” or “Self Portrait as Tehuana.” Her compositions were full of colors and loud characters. Frida especially focused her artistic capacities on expressing the pain inside her body. She wanted to portray the brokenness of her body and spirit - the result of both early age polio and a tragic bus accident.
One of the most notable characters who stayed in the Rivera-Kahlo household was Leon Trotsky, a political refugee who organized meetings of the Mexican Communist Party. Trotsky invited Andre Breton to the home, where Breton became entranced by Kahlo and her art. Breton took it upon himself to organize an exhibit of her work in Paris so that a European audience could fall in love with her work as well.
In France, Frida was met with a distinctive cultural divide. When she arrived in 1939, Europe was a cluster of prestigious artists with names that now hold the biggest legacies in the art world.
Frida was thrown into the middle of that movement without knowing anybody or having an understanding of the culture. Despite being surrounded by the biggest egos in the art industry, she wasn’t afraid. In fact, she made an impression on the surrealists working in France, which was no easy feat. Not only was she a Mexican artist in a European world, but she was also a woman - a very loud, outspoken and unapologetic woman.
In a letter written by Wassily Kandinsky to his friends Anni and Josef Albers, the surrealist painter described his encounter with Kahlo as the following:
“There's a recently opened mexican art show. With old pieces of mexican art, esculpures, interesting [...], there's also popular art and finally a big amount of paintings created by Diego Rivers’s wife, that have a strong surrealist tone. She was there, in person, with a typical mexican dress; she was stunning. Apparently she always dresses like this, The show was full of women with eccentric appearances (in Montparnasse spirit) but no one could compete with the mexican dress.”
Frida’s work was featured in the Paris exhibit “Mexique,” which was organized by Michael Petitjean and Andre Breton. They promised her a venue to show her work in, so she submitted 150 paintings without knowing if the place was big enough for her paintings. In the end, it didn’t matter because the setting wasn’t for her; she was part of a collective show full of pre-colonial artifacts, sculptures and pictures taken by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, a known Mexican photographer. Kahlo was reasonably very upset by this. Breton had brought her out of her comfort zone with the promise of her own show, yet she was received with a wall for her to put her canvases on. Not only that, but Breton also forgot to pick up her paintings from customs, so the paintings were gathering dust when Friday went to retrieve them. Both her artwork and reputation were disrespected that day, and a friendship was severed as well.
When the mean around her didn’t give her the accolades she deserved, she moved past it with dignity. She wrote to her friends back home in Mexico about the experience:
“Since I arrived things haven’t been great. I got mad because my exhibit is not ready. My paintings were quietly waiting in the customs office cause Breton didn’t bother to pick them up. You have no idea what type of vermin Breton is, along with almost all of the surrealist artists. In few words they’re all sons of bitches…”
The show wasn’t all disaster, however. She did get to sell one of her pieces, “The Frame,” or “El Marco,” a self portrait filled with Mexican symbols and colors that are popular in Mexican folklore, such as birds and flowers. This piece required her to experiment with mixed mediums. It was created with a frame she purchased in Oaxaca. The frame was meant to be used with religious imagery, but she decided to frame a self portrait with it to lift herself to saint level. This piece can be traced as the first piece of art purchased by a big institution such as The Louvre. It was then added to the Musee Jeu de Paume collection.
After the French government acquired the piece, it disappeared for a period of time, as the changing political climate made it impossible to keep safe. The Nazi Party ransacked the museum to find painting that weren’t permitted in the Reich, and the piece subsequently vanished from the vault. It was later found in the 70s and ended up at the Palais de Tokyo Musée d'art Moderne. It now lives peacefully at the Pompidou Center.
Frida’s experience in Paris wasn’t all bad. In 1939, Frida had a romantic liason with Michael Pettijean, an organizer of the Mexique show, and spent the rest of her time in Paris with him. Their romance came to an end when Frida had to return to Mexico. She gave Michael a self portrait called “The Heart” (“El Corazon”) as a parting gift.
Michael’s son writes in his book “The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris” about growing up with the painting in his home.
“I remember the painting (The Heart) hanging on the wall in the living room when I was a child. It was small and eye-catching, framed in faded red velvet. The image disturbed me for a long time with its stark depiction of a huge, bleeding heart lying on the sand, and a woman with no hands whose body is pierced by a metal rod and whose eyes seemed to stare at me. I felt a lot of vertigo if I looked at it for too long.”
“The Heart” is a romantic, beautiful portrait of Frida at her most emotional, when the passion and love she was experiencing at the time overcame her. It is a tribute to Petitjean, her conflicting feelings for France and the art world that tore her apart piece by piece and never gave her recognition.
When she came back to Mexico, she was brave once again. She talked to Diego about their relationship, knowing that she wanted to be loved and respected now. She prioritized herself, knowing that the art scene was a man’s world and she only had herself to rely on. Frida came back from Paris a braver woman, allowing herself to feel the sadness of her divorce, the anger of being unappreciated, the hopelessness of a falling city and passionate love.
Cam C. is a freelancer writer that explores the expression of femininity and tries to tear down the toxicity behind it. Find her on Linkedln.
Sources:
Jessica Boissel. (2015). Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky: Friends in Exile: A Decade of Correspondence, 1929–1940. Yale University Press.
Marc Petitjean. (2020). The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris. Other Press NY