The Shape of a Pocket (9 page)

17
Frida Kahlo

They were known as the Elephant and the Butterfly – although her father called her the Dove. When she died, more than forty years ago, she left behind a hundred and fifty small paintings, a third of which are classified as self-portraits. He was Diego Rivera and she was Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo! Like all legendary names, it sounds like an invented one, but wasn’t. During her lifetime she was a legend, both in Mexico and – amongst a small circle of artists – in Paris. Today she is a world legend. Her story has been told and retold very well – by herself, by Diego, and later by many others. Victim of polio as a child, horribly crippled again in a bus accident, introduced to painting and communism by Diego, their passion, marriage, divorce, remarriage, her love affair with Trotsky, her hatred of the gringos, the amputation of her leg, her probable suicide to escape the pain, her beauty, her sensuality, her humour, her loneliness.

There’s an excellent Mexican film about her, directed by Paul Leduc Roseinweig. There’s a beautiful novel by Le Clezio called
Diego and Frida.
There’s a fascinating essay by Carlos Fuentes which introduces her Intimate Diary. And there are numerous art historical texts placing her work in relation to Mexican popular art, surrealism, communism, feminism. Yet I have just seen something – something you can only really see if you look at the paintings rather than the reproductions. Maybe this thing is so simple, so obvious, that people have taken it for granted. Anyway they don’t talk about it. And so here I am, writing.

A few of her paintings are on canvas, the vast majority are either on metal or Masonite, which is as smooth as metal. However fine the grain of a canvas, it resisted and diverted her vision, making her brush strokes and the contours she drew too painterly, too plastic, too public, too epic, too much like (although still so different from) the Elephant’s work. For her vision to remain intact, she needed to paint on a surface as smooth as skin.

Even on days when pain or illness forced her to stay in bed, she spent hours every morning dressing and making her toilette. Every morning, she said, I dress for paradise! Easy to imagine her face in the mirror with her dark eyebrows which naturally joined, and which with her kohl crayon she emphasised and transformed into a black bracket for her two indescribable eyes. (Eyes you remember only if you shut your own!)

In a comparable way, when she painted her pictures, it was
as if she
was drawing, painting or writing words on her own skin. If this were to happen there would be a double sensitivity, because the surface would also feel what the hand was tracing – the nerves of both leading to the same cerebral cortex. When Frida painted a self-portrait with a little portrait of Diego painted on the skin of her own forehead and on his forehead a painted eye, she was surely confessing – amongst other things – to this dream. With her small brushes, fine as eyelashes, and with her meticulous strokes, every image she made, as soon as she fully became the painter Frida Kahlo, aspired to the sensibility of her own skin. A sensibility sharpened by her desire and exacerbated by her pain.

The corporeal symbolism she used when painting body parts like the heart, uterus, mammary glands, spine, to express her feelings and ontological longing, has been noticed and commented upon many times. She did this as only a woman could, and as nobody else had done before. (Although Diego in his own way sometimes used a similar symbolism.) Yet it is essential to add here that, without her special method of painting, these symbols would have remained surrealist curiosities. And her special method of painting was to do with the sense of touch, with the
double
touch of hand and of surface as skin.

Look at the way she paints hairs, either those on the arms of her pet monkeys or her own along the hair-line of her forehead and temples. Each brush mark grows like a hair from a pore of the body’s skin. Gesture and substance are one. In other paintings drops of milk being expressed from a nipple or drops of blood dripping from a wound, or tears flowing from her eyes, have the same corporeal identity – that is to say the drop of paint does not describe the body liquid but seems to be its double. In a picture called
Broken Column
her body is pierced by nails and the spectator has the impression that she was holding the nails between her teeth and taking them one by one to tap in with a hammer. Such is the acute sense of touch which makes her painting unique.

And so we come to her paradox. How is it that a painter so concentrated on her own image is never narcissistic? People have tried to explain this by quoting Van Gogh or Rembrandt, who both painted numerous self-portraits. But the comparison is facile and false.

It is necessary to return to pain and the perspective in which Frida placed it, whenever it allowed her a little respite. The capacity to feel pain is, her art laments, the first condition of being sentient. The sensitivity of her own mutilated body made her aware of the skin of everything alive – trees, fruit, water, birds and – naturally – other women and men. And so, in painting her own image, as if on her skin, she speaks of the whole sentient world.

Critics say that Francis Bacon’s work was concerned with pain. In his art, however, pain is being watched through a screen, like soiled linen being watched through the round window of a washing machine. Frida Kahlo’s work is the opposite of Francis Bacon’s. There is no screen; she is close-up, proceeding with her delicate fingers, stitch by stitch, making not a dress, but closing a wound. Her art talks to pain, mouth pressed to the skin of pain, and it talks about sentience and its desire and its cruelty and its intimate nicknames.

One finds a comparable intimacy with pain in the poetry of the great living Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman.

that woman begs for alms in a twilight of pots and pans
that she’s washing furiously / with blood / with oblivion / to ignite her is like putting a gardel record on the phonograph /
streets of fire fall from her unbreakable
barrio /
and a man and a woman walking tied
to the apron of pain we put on to wash /
like my mother washing the floors every day /
and the day would have a little pearl at its feet.
*

Much of Gelman’s poetry has been written in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is about the
compañeros –
including his son and daughter-in-law whom the Junta made
disappear.
It is a poetry in which the martyred come back to share the pain of those bereaving them. Its time is outside time, in a place where pains meet and dance and those suffering grief make their assignations with their losses. Future and past are excluded there as absurd; there is only the present, only the immense modesty of the present which claims everything ever, except lies.

Often the lines of Gelman’s poems are punctuated by strokes, which somewhat resemble the beat of the tango – the music of Buenos Aires, his city. But the strokes are also silences which refuse entry to any lie. (They are the visible antithesis to censorship which is invariably imposed in order to defend a system of lies.) They are a reminder of what pain discovers and even pain cannot say.

did you hear me / heart? / we’re taking
defeat someplace else /
we’re taking this animal elsewhere
our dead / somewhere else /

let them make no noise / quiet as they can be / not
even the silence of their bones should be heard /
their bones, little blue-eyed animals /
who sit like good children at table /

who touch pain without meaning to /
saving not a word about their bullet wounds /
with a little gold star and a moon in their mouths /
appearing in the mouths of those they loved
*

This poetry helps us see something else about Kahlo’s paintings, something that separates them distinctly from Rivera’s, or any of her Mexican contemporaries. Rivera placed his figures in a space which he had mastered and which belonged to the future; he placed them there like monuments: they were painted for the future. And the future (although not the one he imagined) has come and gone and the figures have been left behind alone. In Kahlo’s paintings there was no future, only an immensely modest present which claimed everything and to which the things painted momentarily return whilst we look, things which were already memories before they were painted, memories of the skin.

So we return to the simple act of Frida putting pigment on the smooth surfaces she chose to paint on. Lying in bed or cramped in her chair, a minute brush in her hand, which had a ring on every finger, she remembered what she had touched, what was there when the pain wasn’t. She painted, for example, the feel of polished wood on a parquet floor, the texture of rubber on the tyre of her wheelchair, the fluff of a chick’s feathers, or the crystalline surface of a stone, like nobody else. And this discreet capacity – for it was very discreet – came from what I have called the sense of double touch: the consequence of imagining she was painting her own skin.

There’s a self-portrait (1943) where she lies on a rocky landscape and a plant grows out of her body, her veins joining with the veins of its leaves. Behind her, flattish rocks extend to the horizon, a little like the waves of a petrified sea. Yet what the rocks are
exactly
like is what she would have felt on the skin of her back and legs if she had been lying on those rocks. Frida Kahlo lay cheek to cheek with everything she depicted.

That she became a world legend is in part due to the fact that in the dark age in which we are living under the new world order, the sharing of pain is one of the essential preconditions for a refinding of dignity and hope. Much pain is unshareable. But the will to share pain is shareable. And from that inevitably inadequate sharing comes a resistance.

Listen again to Gelman:

hope fails us often
grief, never.
that’s why some think
that known grief is better
than unknown grief.
they believe that hope is illusion.
they are deluded by grief.
*

Kahlo was not deluded. Across her last painting, just before she died, she wrote Viva La Vida.

*
From ‘Cherries (to Elizabeth)’. Juan Gelman,
Unthinkable Tenderness
, translated from the Spanish by Joan Lindgren (University of California Press, 1997).

*
From ‘Somewhere Else’, Juan Gelman, ibid.

*
From ‘The Deluded’, Juan Gelman, ibid.

18
A Bed
(
for Christoph Hänsli
)

On the hotel bed there is no body, nor on the bed beside it. In the English language the situation can be condensed into one word:
no body
becomes
nobody.
One cannot ask: Who is nobody? Or maybe one can ask (as the water pipes in the next room gurgle) but no answer will come.

Nobody is nobody and both beds are empty. There is not even a crease, a trace. There is nobody.

Nobody is your beloved or mine, and nobody is every couple who once occupied this room. Over the years they add up to thousands. They lay sleepless. They made love. They sprawled over the two beds pulled together. They pressed tight against one another in one twin bed. They went home next day or they never met again. They made money or lost it. They betrayed one another. They saved each other.

Nobody is here and the beds in all their anonymity are empty. Or I might say: full of absence, but this suggests a sentimentality, a regret, which your paintings do not allow.

Yet simply because we have lived, we cannot forget as we stand in front of your canvases – and they are life-size – we cannot forget, and you do not want us to forget, what beds promise. Beds promise more than any other man-made object. They promise like nature does when benign. Perhaps this is why beds are so hard to paint? Even in this one-star hotel with cheap synthetic sheets the beds promise like nature does.

The range of their promise is huge, from the modest to the voluptuous, from the timid to the ecstatic, from a pain’s small relief to the great pain of happiness, from a little rest to death.

No wonder that in hotel wardrobes there’s often a card to hang on the door handle, which says: DO NOT DISTURB.

And no wonder, Christoph, that you paint, whilst not changing anything, whilst following the example of Velazquez, that you paint these bedroom walls, papered or painted, as if they were infinite. Infinite like the sky or the sea? No. Not at all. Infinite like promise. Even a bed’s smallest promise partakes of infinity … Sleep.

Sleep. You are awake and painting, but we, lulled and half asleep, whisper unaccountably and recklessly to the absence: Come, my heart, I’m here, and we whisper this to nobody.

One of your canvases is about such a whisper. It’s of an unmade bed and a crumpled duvet. The infinite wall is behind. For centuries painted sheets and draperies have featured in European art. Danaë reclines upon them. The body of the dead Christ is laid out on them. They receive the marvellous body and are moulded by it. But here there are only the traces, only an absence.

I was here. And now I too have left. There is nobody.