April, 2008The Border Between Mexico and the United States: Frida Kahlo and Capitalist Culture“High society here turns me off and I feel a bit of rage against all these rich guys here. I have seen thousands in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep. It is terrible to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger” - Frida Kahlo The first thing to grab our attention is the flash of pink; a frilly, girlish, and somewhat ridiculous party dress, complete with proper elbow-length white gloves. We cannot tear our eyes away before they are locked with the intense direct gaze of her dark, serious eyes. Her body language is poised and genteel, but her expression is confrontational, possibly even hostile. She stands on a pedestal as a child might stand on an orange crate to look taller, her petite body slicing the canvas in two. The left side is an agrarian, mythical and earthbound landscape. To the right, a dismal, impersonal and mechanized world. For Frida Kahlo, there is no mutually beneficial marriage between the two sides. Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, 1932, shows that she sees their differences as irreconcilable. In the 1930s, murals by leading Mexican painters were in vogue with United States patrons. These public commissions bridged a cultural relationship between neighboring countries, suggested a commitment toward the common good, and fed the egos of the wealthy capitalists who had the good taste to initiate them. Despite the questions it raised toward his credentials as a communist, Diego Rivera accepted a number of these commissions from leading industrialists between 1930 and 1933. Kahlo accompanied him during his lengthy stays in the United States and developed a contempt for a capitalist “Gringolandia” that revealed itself in her paintings. Were it not for her deep commitment to Rivera, Kahlo would surely have preferred to stay in Mexico. She, like many Mexicans of the 1920s and 1930s, held profound feelings of nationalism for her country and its people. Kahlo and Rivera were both outspoken Marxists and members of the Communist party until Rivera was expelled for his questionable dealings with the Calle administration and American industrialists. The United States had in recent years interfered with Mexican trade and labor, and had more or less supplanted Spain as the evil imperialist force against which Mexicans could direct their disdain. So deep and long-held were Kahlo’s feelings of anti-imperialism that she participated in an anti-American rally just 11 days before her death in 1954 (Helland, 397). Kahlo’s paintings express her connection to “La Raza” (the people) in her naïve, folkloric painting style, her tendency to both wear and depict herself in traditional Tehuana dresses, and her portrayal of Mexican indigenous culture. My Nurse and I, 1937, a painting completed a few years after her time in the United States is one example of Kahlo’s identification with Mexico’s indigenista. Kahlo represents herself as an infant with an adult head who nurses from the breast of an Indian wet-nurse. Not only does this image reaffirm Kahlo’s sense of connection to Mexico’s nature, her nurse’s Teotihuacán mask speaks of her reverence for Mexico’s indigenous culture and expresses her skepticism of modern society. Kahlo’s use of indigenous culture should always be interpreted as an anti-imperialist political statement (Herrera, 123). For the U.S. imperialists that Kahlo reviled, the Mexican cultural renaissance was a fashionable fascination. So great was the reverence for Rivera that his patrons, at least at first, seemed not to care about his Marxist leanings, or about the fact that he had painted unflattering portraits of many of them. “Nowhere else has avowedly proletarian art been so loftily sponsored by capitalist patronage,” commented art critic Max Kozloff (Herrera, 115). Perhaps since the United States was going through the Great Depression, Rivera’s patrons, in an attempt to conceal their greed behind a façade of concern for common good, hoped to appeal to a left leaning public by suggesting that their priorities were with public welfare, rather than private gain (Herrera, 136). It seems that Kahlo’s commitment to Marxism was deeper than Rivera’s, and this caused discord in their relationship. As a closet bourgeois with a huge ego, he loved to be wined, dined and feted by his wealthy patrons. Kahlo chastened him for being a communist while “wearing a capitalist’s tuxedo” (Herrera, 136). In San Francisco, New York, and Detroit, Kahlo experienced first-hand the economic imbalances, snobbery and narrow-mindedness of American society. She was amazed that the posh and pretentious society could attend frivolous parties and drive luxurious cars while desperate people lined up in the streets for bread. Her mocking sense of humor and hatred for high society grew more pointed and biting the longer she stayed in the United States. She delighted in scandalizing society matrons with wide-eyed innocence as she praised communism and used English cuss words in mock ignorance of their meaning. The exotic Tehuana dresses that caused gringos to stare in amazement were also important expressions of Kahlo’s anti-imperialist identity. In Mexico, she believed that women who did not wear the traditional dress didn’t belong to the people and were therefore mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wished to belong (Herrera, 123). By flaunting her Tehuana dresses in the face of United States society, Kahlo showed them that she did not aspire to be a part of their world. It was perhaps these very society ladies whom she mocks in her frilly pink dress and long white gloves in Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States. With a sense of provocation and impropriety she holds a cigarette in one gloved hand and a Mexican flag in the other. She felt particularly ambivalent toward the city of Detroit, where Rivera had been commissioned by Henry Ford to paint Detroit Industries, 1932, a mural on the theme of modern industry and the American proletariat at the Detroit Arts Commission. It was here that her contempt for the American culture began to play itself out so clearly in her work. The ugliness of Detroit’s industrial landscape was deeply abhorrent to Kahlo. Unlike Rivera, who celebrated the marvels of mechanized industry as a path to a socialist utopia, Kahlo saw machines as an ominous threat. This is not surprising considering the injuries that plagued her throughout her life were caused by the collision of two modern machines. In Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States nonspecific machines resembling automatons have a menacing presence as ominous smokestacks belch their noxious fumes into the sky, forming the flag of the United States. This ambivalence toward industrialized culture may also be seen in My Dress Hangs There, 1933, a work she completed after she and Rivera left Detroit for New York where Rivera had been commissioned to paint his infamous Man at the Crossroads, 1933, at the center of American capitalism, in the lobby of the RCA Building of Rockefeller Center. This satiric portrayal of a dystopian wasteland is Kahlo’s counter reaction to Rivera’s utopian Detroit Industry. It summarizes her views on American capitalism, stupidity, hypocrisy, and greed with biting irony. Here a crowded cityscape overflows with the accoutrements of the bourgeois lifestyle. She mocks the American obsession with plumbing and competitive sports by placing a toilet and a golf trophy upon pedestals that look like classical columns. She juxtaposes depression era suffering with symbols of decadent wealth with collaged photographs of masses standing in breadlines and subjected to police brutality with Manhattan’s cold, anonymous capitalist monuments. Clearly big business in 1933 is prospering quite well, but the masses in the streets are not the beneficiaries (Herrera, 174). False spirituality is symbolized a dollar sign imposed over a crucifix on Trinity Church. It is clear what she believes Americans truly worship, regardless of any public posturing. It is a timeless work. Much of what Kahlo saw in American culture over 70 years ago remains true – in some cases to an even greater extent - in our society today. In My Dress Hangs There and Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, Kahlo expresses not only her ambivalence toward the United States, but also her pride in, and her longing for her own country. In Self Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States, the pyramid, skull, and figurine are all symbols of pre-Columbian, specifically Aztec society. For nationalistic and Marxist young artists who came of age following the Mexican Revolution, the Aztecs were the most important pre-Columbian society of all, because of their associations with socialism and communism. As independent political leaders of a socialist society, the Aztecs were seen as the ideal pre-Columbian culture and the embodiment of a heroic indigenous past. Kahlo identifies with the mystical, native culture of Mexico, as well as its Aztec history and its connectedness to nature. She sees the United States, in its blind movement toward modernity and industrial progress, as incapable and undeserving of realizing this. Instead, it is a parasite, treating Mexico as something to exploit, something to take from, something to drain dry. This is symbolized by the electrical cords that run under the earth to draw power from the roots of indigenous Mexican plants, while the factories send plumes of noxious fumes in return. It is interesting to note that from the point of the view of the audience, Marxist Mexico is on the left, and capitalist United States is on the right. Whether this placement is intentional or not, the relative placement of the two landscapes seems to make a statement about the polar ends of the political and economic spectrum. However, from the artist’s point of view, Mexico is on her right-hand side while the United States is on her left hand side. Could she be falling back upon ancient and medieval presumptions that the right side of one’s body is always associated with what is right and good, while the left hand side is sinister and controlled by evil? She clearly wanted to leave the United States and return to Mexico’s agrarian beauty. This caused friction in her relationship with Rivera. Despite his proclamations to be of “La Raza” and his insistence that Kahlo wear the Tehuana dress, he seemed quite comfortable of with his capitalist circles and wanted to stay in New York. In a heated argument with Kahlo he held up a painting of a desert cactus and screamed “I don’t want to go back to this!” to which Kahlo replied, “I do want to go back to this!” The one thing that stands apart from the dystopian cityscape in My Dress Hangs There is Frida’s forlorn and empty Tehuana dress hanging, on a clothesline against the corrupt and hypocritical wasted Manhattan skyline. Where is the presumed occupant of this empty dress? Hopefully back in Mexico where she longs to be. BIBLIOGRAPHY Helland, Janice. “Culture, Politics, and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo.” The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary, eds. HarperCollins. New York, NY. 1992. Herrera, Hayden. “Beauty to His Beast: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera.” Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. Chadwick, Whitney, Courtivron, Isabelle, eds. Thames and Hudson, New York, NY. 1996. Hererra, Hayden. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. Harper & Row Publishers, New York, NY. 1983.
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