Becoming Frida Kahlo, episode 2: "Love and Loss," a.k.a. "Frida and Cristina" (PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Tuesday, September 26) at 9 p.m. I put on KPBS for a couple of documentaries, including the second episode of a three-part miniseries called Becoming Frida Kahlo. I’d missed the first part of this the previous week but the second part proved quite compelling. It dealt with the years 1930-1937, much of which was spent in the United States, where her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, was fulfilling commissions for heroic murals inside capitalist institutions like the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, Henry Ford’s office buildings in Detroit, and Rockefeller Center in New York. Rivera was actually a Communist, but he didn’t mind taking the capitalists’ money as long as they didn’t tell him what he could and couldn’t paint. So he played a double game, filling the murals with veiled but unmistakable references to the workers’ paradise Communism would supposedly create. Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico on July 6, 1907 to a German immigrant father and a mestizo (part-Native, part-Spanish) Mexican mother. During her lifetime she was far less famous than her husband – the publicity surrounding them was basically DIEGO RIVERA!!!!! (and his wife also paints). In 1925 Kahlo and her then-boyfriend were involved in a major traffic accident on a bus which put her in pain for the rest of her life. It also forced her to abandon her ambition to go to medical school and become a doctor – though this also accounts for the meticulous attention to medical detail in her later paintings, particularly her stunning self-portrait, “Henry Ford Hospital,” which she painted after she suffered a spontaneous miscarriage after four months of pregnancy in 1932.

She and Rivera met in 1927 at a Communist Party meeting and married two years later. Since Rivera was in his mid-40’s and had already been married twice, it wasn’t surprising that he continued to pursue extra-relational activities even during his marriage to Frida – and she had more than her fair share of them as well, sometimes with women as well as men. This episode officially was called “Love and Loss,” though some sources have the title as “Frida and Cristina” – Cristina being Kahlo’s sister, with whom Rivera had an affair. Though Frida had forgiven Rivera’s previous infidelities, him having sex with her sister was the final straw: they divorced in 1939, though they remarried in 1940 and this time they stayed together until her death in 1954. Their stay in the U.S. coincided with the worst of the Great Depression and both Rivera and Kahlo were conscience-stricken over the money they were making from the rich while they could see hundreds of thousands of poor people starving on the streets. They first came to San Francisco, where Rivera got a commission to paint a mural for the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and, not surprisingly, started an affair with the woman tennis player he’d selected to appear in the mural as the Spirit of California. Kahlo also had a special exhibit at a San Francisco gallery, but it was only as a loss leader for her husband’s work and one reviewer of her show savaged it, saying that she’d never have got a show if she hadn’t been married to an artistic superstar. Later the couple moved to New York and hobnobbed with the rich and famous of the time, and still later they moved to Detroit for Rivera’s commission to paint murals for Henry Ford. This was right around the time when Ford ordered his private security force to fire on unarmed auto workers picketing his factory demanding higher wages and union recognition, and even for a “trickster” couple like Rivera and Kahlo it’s hard to imagine, especially in today’s world, how they reconciled taking money from a major capitalist who literally had his workers’ blood on his hands.

The Riveras’ stay in the U.S. came to a bitter and ignominious end when he got a commission from the Rockefeller family to paint a mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center – only he sneaked an image of Vladimir Lenin, Russian dictator and founder of the Soviet Union, into the painting, called Man at the Crossroads and depicting humanity literally at the crossroads between a capitalist hell and a communist heaven. The Rockefellers demanded that Rivera remove Lenin’s portrait from his mural. Rivera refused, and Kahlo got a tip from someone inside the Rockefeller organization that the mural was about to be destroyed. She got one of her women friends (and former lovers) to sneak a Brownie box camera into the center to take pictures of the mural so Rivera could reconstruct it elsewhere, and this documentary featured the woman’s granddaughter reading from the diary her grandmother had kept about Frida and their relationship. This documentary savors the irony that it was ordinary working people, the proletarians whom Communist ideology regarded as the revolutionary class that would destroy capitalism, that meekly followed their bosses’ orders and jackhammered Rivera’s masterpiece into oblivion. (At the invitation of the Mexican government, Rivera repainted the same mural in 1934 in the lobby of the Palacio des Bellas Artes in Mexico City, retitling it Man, Controller of the Universe. I got to see it there when my mother, my brother and I spent a summer in Mexico in 1967.) Rivera was thrown out of the U.S. after the Rockefeller imbroglio and his commission to paint a mural for the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress world’s fair was cancelled, though he got paid in full for the Rockefeller mural that was destroyed. Later the Riveras resettled in Mexico, Diego Rivera started his affair with Frida’s sister Cristina, and he and Frida broke up over it at least in part because Frida had long been jealous of her more conventionally “beautiful” sister.

This episode ends in 1937 but a third show in the series concludes with the rest of Frida’s life, including long periods in hospital and her ultimate death on July 13, 1954 from her ongoing illnesses. It’s ironic that the respective places of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the art world have flipped; when they were alive he was the superstar and she the also-ran, but as the art world has made a fetish of “inclusion” and in particular adding works by women and people of color to the artistic canon, Frida’s star has risen while Diego’s has fallen. Charles saw the computer opened to Frida Kahlo’s Wikipedia page this morning and he commented that Frida Kahlo has become so iconic that plenty of people of Mexican descent hang reproductions of one of her many self-portraits on their walls, alongside the Mexican flag and Our Lady of Guadalupe.