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 and sexual activity.
Presumed tension over gender roles, symbolized by rumors of Kahlo’s and Rivera’s extramarital sexual relations, is inscribed though unexamined in Herrera’s discussion of their divorce as well as in her interpretation of Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. In the painting, Kahlo wears a man’s suit, an explicit masculine affectation. Her hair is cut short, and she is surrounded by the shorn locks while still holding a pair of scissors. The song lyrics above her read, “Mira que si te quise, fué por el pelo, Ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero” (If I loved, it was for your hair, Now that you are bald, I don’t love you any more). Based on these aspects of the painting and on the assumption that Kahlo was both furious and thoroughly devastated by the divorce, Herrera concludes that the painting represents Kahlo’s irrational reprisal. She contends that “retaliation [against Rivera] is expressed” by Kahlo’s decision to cut her hair.89 Herrera notes that Kahlo holds the scissors “near her genitals” and points out that from them a lock of hair “hangs between her legs like a murdered animal [symbolizing] a violent rejection of femininity.”90 And Herrera laments that because Kahlo has attacked her own sexuality, she “has committed a vengeful act that serves to heighten her loneliness.”91 Thus the song lyrics, according to Herrera, indicate that Kahlo mocked her recklessness by painting a self-portrait that is “nothing more than the illustration of a popular song.”92 In other words, Herrera sees the painting as illustrating the depths of Kahlo’s despair and the futility of her irrational response. In Herrera’s view, Kahlo not only suffered from Rivera’s absence but also from her own foolish decision to cast aside her femininity (by dressing in a suit and cutting her hair) and then finding only loneliness in its place. Herrera further surmises that Kahlo recognized the uselessness of rejecting femininity and adopting a masculine persona, suggesting that the song lyrics represent a self-mockery indicating Kahlo’s acknowledgment, in the painting, that the “symbolic cutting away of vulnerability and attachment does not, of course, arrest the malignancy of sorrow.”93 The painting thereby represents, in Herrera’s interpretation, Kahlo’s anger, despair, and realization that acquiring a masculine image is futile.
Herrera’s interpretation reinforces gender codes without evaluating how the painting may employ them as a means to critique or subvert moralizing social prescription. And her interpretation has set a precedent. Richmond reiterates Herrera’s contention that the painting is “a vengeful picture,” explaining that Kahlo “holds the scissors in front of her genital area with intent, in fantasy, to maim her betraying husband, whose enormous suit she wears.”94 Also, Richmond asserts that Kahlo associated her long hair with sexuality and strength. In the painting, “it is all over the floor, like spilled blood. She looks out of the painting at Diego with a slight smirk on her face. He, too, loved her hair, and now, like him, it is gone. She has become a man without her man.”95 By stating that Kahlo dresses in Rivera’s clothing and that he is the intended audience for this self-portrait—“She looks out of the painting at Diego”—Richmond disregards Kahlo’s professional success in