Pink Lipstick Kisses

In 1929 she became the third wife of the fat, bonhomous painter Diego Rivera. They became an iconic star couple, known to the public just by their first names. Their friends included Leon Trotsky, Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. Their home drew “addas” composed of people like poet Pablo Neruda, painter Andre Breton, film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, of ‘Potemkin’ fame. In Paris, she stayed with Dada painter Marcel Duchamp and had an affair with Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (who said “she’s very pretty… all my girls are pretty”). Painters Miro and Kandinsky were Frida fans, while in New York she hung out with American painter Georgia O’Keefe.

The tempestuous marriage of Diego and Frida was marked by many love affairs. Frida was bisexual, but Diego had no objections to women, it was male lovers he raged against. Through it all, Frida’s bushy eyebrows, her shadowy mustache, her elegant swan neck and long Mexican skirts and braids created a sensation. Herrera, Frida’s biographer, says: “In talking to those who knew her, one is continuously struck by the love people felt for Frida Kahlo. They acknowledge that she was caustic, yes, and impulsive. But tears often form in their eyes while they recall her. Their vibrant memories make her life sound like a short story from F. Scott Fitzgerald — full of fun and glamour, until its end in tragedy.”

But in fact, Frida’s bravado hid terrible pain and tragedy. In September 1925, when she was just eighteen, the schoolbus she was going home in was rammed by a tram. A metal bar impaled her, her spine was fractured and her foot broken. For the next 29 years till her death, she was in unrelenting pain. A body brace, many operations, abortions because of her broken pelvis, the heartbreak of being abandoned by the men she loved: it was really too much for one fragile human being to endure by any reckoning. But Frida poured out her anguish by painting her life and condition in such powerful, terrifying images, independent of her husband’s style, that Picasso wrote to Diego, “Neither Derain, nor I, nor you are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.”

Her work was collected into an exhibition for the first time in Mexico City in April 1953, less than a year before her death. Frida came heavily drugged, lying on a four-poster bed. Say Mexicans in epitaph, “Not self-pity, but strength.”