And More Frida

I’ve been living within two blocks of one of Mexico’s most popular attractions for a month.  It was only a matter of time before I braved the lines and went to the Frida Khalo museum.

A fellow pilgrim at the hostel, Maya from Japan, and myself got an early start and only had to wait 45 minutes on line with the tour buses pulling in to disgorge further hordes behind us and the T-shirt and pastry vendors working the crowd along with the lady going back and forth with the sign you could scan to buy Internet tickets and the periodic eddies in line as groups circled and grinned for a backed-off cellphone before the, yes, actual blue wall of the famous Casa Azul.

The Frida circus is a triumph of personal iconography, and her image is essentially the art-world version of the walking Mickey Mouse who gathers crowds of children at Disneyworld.  For every savant of twentieth century painting come to be breathless over brushstrokes there are a hundred customers paying simply for the privilege of offering homage to the image, and the great wink is the fact that Frida herself is the party most complicit in the transaction.

Somewhere between the famous “Eyebrows!” is a painter, a studio, and a story, and the Casa Azul offers a wonderfully disarranged and overcrowded venue for trying to find them.  The home, which was shared by Khalo and Diego Rivera during their (in)famous marriage(s), is gargantuan enough to encompass a block-long line of lunch guests, and one mingles through a vast courtyard garden full of fountains, pools and inexplicable floral pyramids at the foot of a bombastic stone castle full of stairs, terraces, sunken dens and lofty ceramic-pot crenellations.  If one doesn’t come away impressed with the spoils of artistic fame one need only pause before the spectacle of what was once a domestic breakfast patio now given over to a repeating movie about the hostess’ sex life.

Indoors the traffic is more regulated, and here one confronts the enigma of Frida’s art, which vacillates unpredictably between a soft delicacy of technique and a primitivism that approaches flat-out incompetence.

Portrait of Frida's father

Frida and Stalin

Watermelons

Frida’s two most famous attributes are likewise contradictory, being the crippling pain of a disabled body coupled with the magnetism of a seductress, and the museum presents both in sufficient quantity to render them forever unentangleable, but what I didn’t expect was the focus on a third attribute: her involvement with Communism.  Only in Mexico, perhaps, would a museum so unapologetically lay out such evidence—ranging from the “Frida and Stalin” painting quoted above to a bedside collage of Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to the several photos of her alongside Trotsky to (I swear) a medical corset painted with the hammer and sickle—without denting attendance in the least.  There hovers just beyond my reach some relationship between the iconography of Frida’s art and the art and iconography of Communism, with the timing such that I’m not sure which influenced which...or whose pain and seductiveness whose...

Upstairs things settled down.  Here was Frida’s studio, and all else faded away before the hard tools and efficient arrangements of an artist at work. 

After that we got to see the bedrooms (with Frida’s death mask!), the kitchen (with “Frida” and “Diego” spelled out in colored stones on the wall), and a gruesomely “surgical” exhibit of her medical supports, undergarments, and prosthetics arranged in harsh light against white tile.  Finally there was another exhibit of her clothes, and, of course, the inevitable gift shop.

But to me the studio was the heart of the journey: the craft beneath the crafty, the workspace beneath the wealth and, hidden in the castle tower as it were, the functioning magic spell of art, being the transcendence of pain through light.