She might have been a big ol’ commie, but Frida Kahlo produced some of the most beautifully intimate and torturous self-portraits the world has ever seen—and that will always move me nonetheless. However, she wasn’t the only artist enthralled by communism at the start of what we now call the Mexican Modernism movement.
I recently saw Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa featuring renowned Mexican artworks from the private collections of Jacques and Natasha Gelman. The exhibit not only explored Frida and Diego Rivera’s tempestuous marriage but also how modern artists in post-revolution Mexico sought to rebuild a national identity and celebrate the history of the land itself. As children of the revolutionary decade, it’s no surprise that politics—particularly Marxism—deeply influenced the work of Frida Kahlo and many of her leftist contemporaries during this great renaissance. And it got me thinking, of course…
Now, as a semi-capitalist pig myself, I don’t necessarily blame people back then for being swayed by communism. I’m sure the thought of a classless and egalitarian society where workers weren’t exploited by their elitist overlords sounded great after more than three decades under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz—which ultimately led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
But as we’ve seen with socialist and communist countries in recent memory, some kinks definitely need to be worked out. Who am I to judge though? I was so woke in my youth that I had not one, but two copies of The Communist Manifesto.
Did I read either copy as a young radical Lefty? Of course not! There’s got to be a joke there somewhere—reader’s choice.
After the revolution
Regardless, the Mexican Revolution inspired noble efforts toward land reform and social equality, particularly access to economic and educational opportunities for all citizens. As the Constitution of Mexico was drafted in 1917—officially ending the revolution—the Russian Revolution began that same year, as did the formation of the Mexican Communist Party. By the early 1920s, Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union served as the best alternative to capitalism and imperialism among many revolutionary thinkers across Mexico.
At the same time, the new Mexican government (based on a democratic system) aspired to unify the politically divided nation. For many, the revolution delivered Mexico back to its people who fiercely rejected the “elitist values” associated with bourgeois European influences that long reigned under the dictatorial Díaz regime.
The time had come to celebrate Mexico’s history and cultural heritage by rediscovering its roots, customs, and traditions. Emphasis on the working class, Indigenous populations, and the ancient traditions of the Old World was key to Mexico’s new leadership that looked to the arts to help instill this new sense of national pride.
Under President Alvaro Obregón (1920-24), a new public art program was formed to commission artists to paint the story of Mexico on the walls of churches, schools, and other civic buildings. In 1921, Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos (who participated in the revolt against Diaz) led the charge on this latest initiative and contracted the talents of José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, or los tres grande as they would later be known, to paint these monumental public murals to reach the widest audience possible.
Frida Kahlo, the start of something
Vasconcelos believed art could inspire social change. And this was the exact idealistic post-revolutionary world a then 15-year-old Frida entered when she enrolled at the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City as one of 35 females in 1922—the same year the Soviet Union formed.
But political views even among students reflected the divisiveness seen on the national political stage. While radical students read Karl Marx and rejected religion, conservative students despised revolutionary reforms and fervently upheld Catholicism.
The same year Frida started school, a then 36-year-old Rivera began painting the Creation in the Preparatoria’s amphitheater—his first government-commissioned mural. But the promise of a new artistic hope didn’t last long as these same conservative students eventually vandalized the Preparatoria’s new murals the day Vasconcelos resigned as minister of education in 1924.
While her education encouraged her political young mind, Frida’s tragic bus accident on September 17, 1925, transformed her into the artist we know today. She was left with multiple broken bones throughout her body, along with serious internal injuries as a steel handrail tore through her abdomen. During her recovery at home, as she lay “bored as hell in bed” in a full-body plaster cast, her parents set up a lap easel for her and mounted a mirror above her bed’s canopy so she could begin painting herself. And so her rebirth as an artist began.
Her political views also intensified during this time. In 1927, Frida became an active member of the Young Communist League—attending workers’ rallies and giving speeches herself. The following year she joined the Mexican Communist Party where she reconnected with the larger-than-life Rivera.
Though “officially” they met the following year when she asked for a critique of some of her work, including her first Self-Portrait, while he painted his grand Mexicanidad on the walls of the Secretaría de Educación Pública.
Either way, there was no denying they were a match made in Communist non-heaven. Rivera soon added The Arsenal to his all-encompassing mural with Frida standing militantly in red as she distributes weapons to workers—hammer-and-sickle flag in the background. Rivera also flanked his Communist queen with the likes of other zealous comrades such as artists Tina Modotti and Siqueiros. The Mexican power couple married a year later on August 21, 1929.
But Mexico didn’t quite turn into the Marxist utopia revolutionary leaders thought it would. Even Rivera soon found himself in a predicament as those on the right viewed him as an “agent of the revolution” while many Stalinists saw the muralist as a “painter for millionaires” and attacked his friendships with government officials. The final straw came after he accepted another government commission to paint a public mural, this time at the Palacio Nacional, that resulted in Rivera’s expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party. Frida quite soon after in solidarity.
And if this didn’t piss the commies off enough, Rivera’s ironic acceptance of multiple commissions across the United States—including his highly controversial Man at the Crossroads mural—probably really set them off.
But the muralist didn’t mind taking commissions from the Mexican government or American capitalists. After all, didn’t Lenin counsel fellow comrades to influence the system from within? As Rivera saw it, this was his chance to create public revolutionary art (or communist propaganda) to glorify the cause in the land of capitalism.
And Frida was by his side the whole way, no matter how much she despised Gringolandia.
Frida goes to America
Frida and Diego ventured to the United States at the end of 1930, residing in San Francisco initially before heading over to Detroit and New York City for his work. She kept up with painting as well.
Where Rivera often painted large-scale public murals to visually communicate the history, politics, and plight of the class struggle, Frida painted smaller, intimate paintings of what was immediately around her. Subjects consisted of friends, family, still lifes, and most importantly—herself. But it’s during their three-year stay in America that her views on the world really began to unfold on canvas.
Personal trauma aside, Frida grew quite critical of the U.S. during this period, writing to her mother: “Witnessing the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who are cold and have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires, who greedily grab everything, has profoundly shocked [us].”
Frida soon painted Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932), which represents her longing for Mexico. And judging by her resting bitch face, she’s certainly not in the mood as she dons an uncharacteristically fancy pink dress and lace gloves. But in an act of defiance, she holds a lit cigarette in one hand and a Mexican flag in the other—showing us where her loyalties lie.
There’s a clear distinction between both countries. On the left, Frida showcases the indigenous culture of ancient Mexico with an Aztec temple, fertility sculptures, and flourishing native plants in the foreground. In direct contrast on the right side, an American flag nearly becomes lost in a cloud of industrial factory smoke, while skyscrapers and inventions of the modern world command the scene. Instead of plants, machines sprout from the earth with electrical cords as roots, though one sly cord creeps across the border, symbolizing America’s seemingly exploitative nature.
Diego, on the other hand, really dug America or perhaps just really enjoyed his stardom in the land of the free. Either way, Mexico began to represent the past in his mind as he believed a worldwide revolution would only happen in an industrialized nation. But Frida didn’t buy this notion, reflected in her next political commentary My Dress Hangs There (1933) she began painting while residing in Manhattan—the capital of capitalism as far as she was concerned. Though I won’t argue with her there.
The scene is certainly chaotic, to say the least. Frida pokes fun at Americans’ preoccupation with indoor plumbing (not as common in Mexico at the time) and competitive sports as she depicts a giant toilet and golden trophy propped up on pedestals like valuable works of art. But her empty Tehuana dress serves as the focal point, expressing that while her dress may hang in the city, Frida herself is far removed from the superficial nature of American capitalism.
Behind her dress, big business and religion dominate the middle ground with a red ribbon connecting the Trinity Church to Federal Hall on Wall Street while crushing the collaged masses of the Depression years at the bottom of the painting. Among crowded skyscrapers, a Mae West billboard stands out, representing vanity and celebrity obsession as buildings burn below. A garbage pail also overflows on the right with disregarded commodities and some questionable human organs.
Frida was done with Gringolandia. After many heated arguments, Frida and Diego returned to Mexico at the end of 1933 once he completed his murals at the New Workers’ School in NYC.
Returning to the motherland
Life became no easier for Frida once the couple moved back to Mexico City. A sulky Diego blamed her for their return, and eventually had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina. As gut-wrenching as this was for Frida, she got hers in due time by having an affair with Rivera’s dear friend and Mr. October Revolution himself—Leon Trotsky.
After his banishment from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Trotsky was granted political asylum in Mexico thanks to a very persuasive Rivera, who was also previously expelled from the pro-Stalinist party. The Russian revolutionary hero arrived in Mexico City in January 1937 with his wife Natalia Sedova. Months after their affair ended, Frida and Trotsky remained close as she gifted him her Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky on his birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7, 1937.
Self-assured and oh-so seductive, Frida teases her ex-lover with her feminine beauty as she presents herself between two curtains clad in an elegant dress with plump red lips and flowers woven into her hair. She holds a flower bouquet and a document that reads: “To Leon Trotsky, with all my love, I dedicate this painting on 7th November 1937. Frida Kahlo in Saint Angel, Mexico.”
Due to personal and political turmoil, Rivera and Trotsky’s friendship eventually dissolved. The Russian leader left Frida’s painting behind when he moved out of Casa Azul at the request of his wife (duh). On August 21, 1940, Trotsky died after he took a pickaxe to the skull the day before. Diego and Frida were both suspects in Trotsky’s assassination though only the latter was thrown in jail for a couple of days.
In addition to politics, all time and space were apparently on the mind of Frida Kahlo once 1945 rolled around. She produced Moses based on Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), finishing the painting only three months after reading the book.
The central focus depicts the birth of Moses—representative of the birth of all heroes. The infantile hero is surrounded by female reproductive organs with a massive radiating sun above that the artist described as “the center of all religions, as First GOD and as creator and reproducer of LIFE.”
On both sides of baby Moses, we see various historical heroes or the “big wigs” of history as Frida referred to them—from Budda and Jesus Christ to Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler (though she saw him as the “lost child” of the group). Fun fact: she dropped the “e” from the original German spelling of her name—Frieda—due to the rise of Nazism.
Moving on, below these “heroes” are the masses engaged in warfare that prop up the winners of history while the gods across all religions and mythologies dominate the sky above. Dividing the scene below are two ancient tree trunks, which Frida often used in her works as a symbol for the cycle of life and death.
“Always revolutionary, never dead, never useless”
Until her death, Frida was wholeheartedly devoted to her political faith. Before leaving this world behind in 1954, the Communist queen painted two more political works that same year, including Self-Portrait with Stalin which she began working on after his death in March 1953.
Once a Trotsky sympathizer, Frida’s loyalties now lie with Stalin as she sits in front of a large portrait of the indisputable Soviet leader elevated on an easel as a globe hovers next to it. But due to her declining health and various medications, the artist was unable to paint with the same precision we’ve seen in her previous paintings.
In her last political work, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, Frida stands confidently in a leather orthopedic corset with a red book in hand, perhaps the Communist Manifesto. To the right, we see Karl Marx’s floating head in the sky with a hand coming out the side—wringing the neck of an American eagle with the head of Uncle Sam (the original title was Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism, after all) while the opposing side shows a peace dove flying over the globe.
Two oversized hands support the artist that appears to come from the god-like white-bearded Marx in the sky—allowing Frida to let go of her crutches as she accepts her fate. And it reminds me of something she once said: “I am nothing but a “small damned” part of a revolutionary movement. Always revolutionary, never dead, never useless.” Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954. Diego draped her coffin with a hammer and sickle flag, making sure his devoted wife was “always revolutionary”—even in death.
Ironically, as we now see, Frida Kahlo became one of the most commercialized artists of all time with her image plastered over all types of commodities—from t-shirts, mugs, and purses to an actual damn Barbie doll. And she probably would have hated it all.
Even though she loathed America, the country I will always call home (despite its imperfections), Frida’s life, work, and commitment to artistic expression will always hold a special place in my heart. Just because you sometimes disagree with someone politically, doesn’t mean you can’t empathize with or learn something of value from them. This has taken me nearly my whole life to learn. We’re all human, we all suffer. Of course, Frida lived in a completely different time and place. Who are we to judge with our contemporary eyes?
As far as I’m concerned—Frida Kahlo is one of the GOATs.
Mariza Morin 