next two chapters focus on how the narrative of Kahlo’s biography, including interpretations of her self-portraits, revolves around her marriage to Rivera and her health. It is difficult to separate an analysis of the artist’s marital history from her medical history because interpretations of her paintings have converged these two aspects of her life into a single persona. For example, Herrera suggests that because Kahlo’s illnesses often coincided with marital disharmony, it seems likely that she used illness as a way to sustain Rivera’s obligation to her.23 Yet it is precisely in order to rebuff such a totalization that I treat each characterization separately. Thus “Frida as a Wife/Artist in Mexico” concentrates on events that are historicized primarily in relation to Kahlo’s marriage, including her miscarriages and extramarital affairs. On one hand, she is recalled as having been an adoring wife devastated by her unfulfilled “feminine” desire to have children. On the other hand, colleagues and acquaintances recall her “unfeminine” sexual promiscuity. These divergent characterizations are made coherent in a narrative progressing from marital bliss to disillusionment and, ultimately, acceptance of Rivera’s “incorrigible” infidelity. The chronology of her marriage coincides significantly with her success as an artist. As an adoring wife, her painting is presumed to be a hobby; disillusioned by marital infidelity, her painting becomes a career; and concurrent to accepting the particularities of her relationship to Rivera, her painting is seen to commemorate their marriage. As a means for examining the coincidental progressions of marriage and career, I incorporate analyses of postrevolutionary gender prescriptions delineating the feminine classification of wife and the masculine classification of artist into interpretations of Kahlo’s self-portraits. I thereby examine the political implications for traversing masculine and feminine territories, as exemplified in interpretations of Kahlo’s life and work.
“Frida of the Blood-Covered Paint Brush” extends my analysis of ideologies inscribed in the constructed Frida persona to demonstrate how, in an author=corpus approach, Kahlo’s self-portraits are held as evidence of her physical and emotional health. The self-portraits also are used to support diagnoses of Kahlo’s “woman’s disease,” symptoms of which include hypochondria, masochism, and reprobate sexuality. Authors explicitly characterize Kahlo as obsessed with her health, arguing that a certain degree of her physical and emotional pain was fabricated and that she exaggerated her suffering in order to manipulate Rivera and others. Her self-portraits also are interpreted as overstating her pain and confirming her obsession. Zamora maintains that Kahlo created an intense, emotive pictorial oeuvre that reflects her obsession with her health and suffering.24 And Herrera declares that Kahlo “uses bodily wounds [in her paintings] to suggest psychic injury. . . . The greater the pain she wished to convey—especially pain caused by rejection from Diego—the bloodier Frida’s self-portraits became.”25 Biographers extend the consideration of self-inflicted wounds depicted in her self-portrait to suggest that Kahlo convinced doctors to perform unnecessary surgeries. In other words, the implication is that in her life, as in her paintings, Kahlo’s wounds were self-inflicted. As I demonstrate, the consequence of considering Kahlo willfully guilty of her own ill health is that her physical suffering and emotional despair are construed as “particularly appropriate and just punishment”; if only she had followed social and medical prescriptions, biographies suggest, her suffering would have been alleviated.26 Because this conclusion is extremely unsettling, though not unusual in the history of “woman’s disease,” I disrupt the symptomatic interpretations of Kahlo and her paintings by comparing the artist’s “illness” to filmic representations of diseased women, thereby showing the constructedness of Kahlo as paradigmatically diseased. And I identify ways in which paintings that allude to medical procedures also objectify medical discourse, recasting Kahlo as a critic aware of the social implications of diagnoses, rather than strictly a patient at the mercy of medical establishment.
In “The Language of the Missing Mother” and “Unveiling Politics,” I shift from focusing on Kahlo herself as the site of production and examine ways in which broader “contexts” have advanced the mythic Frida. In the first of these two chapters I present issues surrounding the debate over whether Kahlo was a surrealist. My investigation of surrealism as a “context” of production and reception implicitly analyzes how the art history canon operates. When Kahlo first exhibited her paintings in New York, she was widely received as a surrealist artist largely due to André Breton’s proclamation that in Kahlo, and in Mexico generally, he had discovered “pure surreality.”27 In subsequent years, Kahlo made a conscientious effort to repudiate her affiliation with Breton and with surrealism. Numerous scholars accept Kahlo’s disassociation, and some further argue that the surrealist movement was essentially European and had little relevance to the Mexican cultural history from which Kahlo’s paintings derived. I grant that in classifying Kahlo as a surrealist, Breton actively produced meaning, thereby imposing a femininely passive role for Kahlo as well as disregarding Mexico’s political and aesthetic distinction from Europe. However, as I examine Breton’s appropriation of Kahlo for surrealism and Kahlo’s subsequent protestations against a surrealist classification of her paintings, I establish the usefulness of considering the manifestation, in Kahlo’s work, of surrealism’s theoretical interest in the unconscious as a means to confront the implicit irrelevance of women to masculinist canons and histories. I argue that Kahlo’s paintings inscribe and resist surrealism’s woman, using the visual language of surrealism but not restricting her self-representation to the objectification of a female body as a sexualized body. In other words, the “surrealism” implied in Breton’s discovery of Kahlo is distinct from the “surrealism” of Kahlo’s paintings. To give credence to Breton’s declaration is to delineate Kahlo’s subjectivity within masculinist practice. However, denying Kahlo’s paintings critical access to the language of surrealism maintains masculinist authority; when Kahlo decidedly is NOT a surrealist, the decision accedes to patriarchal authority to assign classifications of women’s art based on histories that deny women access to theoretical production. Classifying Kahlo as a surrealist is problematic only when submitting to masculinist authority to define “woman.” Conversely, considering how surrealist language operates in Kahlo’s paintings promotes an investigation of her creative production as a site where definitions of sexual difference for women, in Teresa de Lauretis’s words, “gives femaleness its meaning as the experience of a female subject.”28
The analysis, in the chapter on “The Language of the Missing Mother,” of how a dominant language operates in interpretations of “Kahlo as woman” corresponds to my examination, in “Unveiling Politics,” of symbolic systems through which the classification “Kahlo as Mexican” has been presented. Whereas Kahlo’s paintings explicitly depicting the geographic and political juxtaposition of Mexico and the United States have been interpreted as an indication of the artist’s distaste for U.S. society, her paintings also do not idealize Mexico (though many authors conclude otherwise). I assert that while Kahlo’s paintings have been assumed to represent her fervent nationalism, they also integrate complex perspectives toward, and consequences of, defining Mexicanness. Kahlo grew up during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, a time when national identity was scrutinized, torn apart, and reformulated with successive presidential administrations, some of which lasted only a year before being violently ousted by the next political regeneration of nationalism. During the ten years of revolution, the nation’s self-definition was fluid and contested, ultimately accounting for the postrevolutionary campaign for social and political stability embodied in the Utopian view of the “mestizo,” the Mexican of mixed native and European heritage. But by the 1930s, when Kahlo produced a number of paintings that emphasized native Mexican objects and culture, a wave of “antinationalism” charged the project of defining Mexicanness with paralyzing the country’s postrevolutionary political and economic recovery. As political administrations changed and political ideologies shifted from the 1920s through the 1940s, Mexican artists actively producing socially relevant artworks incorporated references to the dynamic debates over national identity. I therefore reexamine a series of Kahlo’s self-portraits in which her ethnic dress is a significant compositional element that generally has been considered to reflect her fervent, yet strictly personal, self-identification with Mexican heritage. I elaborate extensively on this association in relation to broader historical trends and political debate.
Together, these four chapters show