MEXICO CITY — The Museo de Arte Moderno is nearly vacant when I visit. It feels unnatural to enter a quiet space in Mexico City. This is a place where the streets clamor, in the best possible way. Clean-up crews usher in the morning with clanky carts and the swish of straw brooms. Bells sound, horns honk, little dogs in sweaters bark at larger ones, and sidewalk grills sizzle. The ever-present recorded voice of a circling pick up truck, “Se compran colchones,” trickles down the block. It is a city of sound as much as sight.
But today, most of the museum’s visitors move in slow motion, silently drifting through a few rooms that hold selections from the permanent collection, one of which displays the museum’s star attraction, Frida Kahlo’s “The Two Fridas” (1939).
This is the painting I came to see. Yet I wander into the room with trepidation, almost aloof to its gaze. The painting has become both an icon and a cliché. It feels too familiar. Like many of Kahlo’s works, it has inspired more tote bags and children’s books than scholarship. I scan the painting, breathe it in, and wander off. After a stroll, I return. Slowly, its weight, materiality, and richness of color emerge, as well as something more intimate — the path of Frida’s touch.
Kahlo produced this painting in 1939 in response to her divorce that year from the celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. They had married 10 years prior, when she was 22 and he was 42. This was neither the first nor last upheaval in their challenging partnership, but Frida chose to immortalize this breakup specifically — not as a tear-stained private journal entry or in a letter to a friend, but as a monumental physical object meant to be shared with the public. At five feet eight inches square, this is the largest painting Kahlo ever produced.
Not only is this work visually powerful, but it represents a missing chapter in art history. I had felt its singularity at the museum but couldn’t identify it. Was it just another self-portrait by an artist whose insistence on being seen countered the subservient roles of most women of her generation and beyond? Nearly half of Kahlo’s extant 143 paintings are narrative self-portraits. However, “The Two Fridas,” as described on the museum label and in other texts, is a breakup painting. It is an elegy to severed unions and heartache. Despite the fact that most of humanity has shared the devastating emotional turmoil of a breakup, the topic is strangely elusive in the history of art. “The Two Fridas” may be the only well-known historic painting created by a woman about the demise of a relationship. It is thus a powerful reminder of what is missing from patriarchal (and often misogynistic) historic records — that the internal and external conditions of women’s lives had little significance to a world intent on delineating the masculinized terrains of industry, politics, war, colonial booty, wealth, sex, and the controlling ordinances of religion.
Historian Erika Billeter stated in a 1993 catalog essay, “Frida Kahlo is the first artist in history to have departed from the male principle of art. She escaped and created her own iconography.” In the words of Diego Rivera, her paintings “acknowledge the special capacity of the woman to look truth in the face, even, with an eye on cruel reality, to endure suffering.”
In the 1930s and ’40s, Kahlo and her cohort of women artists in Mexico were reacting to centuries of discrimination as well as rigid Catholic-influenced social conditions. Domestic violence, teenage marriages, and male dominance existed alongside romantic idealizations of women as mothers and saints. In an important act of autonomy, Frida eschewed European Modernism, of which she was fully aware, to employ the languages of her culture’s precolonial histories. Wisely, she refused the “Surrealist” label applied to her work by leading practitioners such as André Breton in Paris. She could not be colonized.
While historic accounts and formal analysis can define and inform an artwork, they are not equivalent to standing alone in a museum in Mexico City, face to face with Frida, listening to what she worked so hard to tell us.
The “Two Fridas” sit side by side on a bench holding hands. If they weren’t dissected and bleeding, they could be any two women enjoying the day in Chapultepec Park. Choppy gray clouds stir dramatically behind them. They stare directly at the viewer, either seeking empathy or challenging us to understand the enormity of this emotional breach. One Frida wears traditional Tehuana clothing, much like her mother wore as a schoolgirl in a family photo at Casa Azul. The other Frida wears a lacy white dress, similar to a Victorian wedding gown, that is cut open at the chest to reveal a cross-sectioned human heart.
Frida on the left is bleeding through a severed artery that she clamps with forceps to move the blood in the other direction, back through the heart, through the veins, and into the intact heart of the other Frida. This Frida’s veins exit her blouse and wrap her exposed arm like squid tentacles, then exit the shirt to encircle a small portrait of Diego that she holds in her fingers. The body and soul that has fed Diego in previous years seems to continue to feed and nurture this photograph — a token of memory.
The couple filed for divorce after Diego, once again, had an affair, this time with Frida’s sister, Cristina. Frida also had infidelities with men and women, but not to the extent of Diego. In a letter to Frida, her friend Dr. Leo Eloesser tried to put Diego’s philandering in perspective: “Diego loves you very much, and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves: one, painting, and two, women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous.”
Because few people were in the museum on the day I visited, I asked the guard if I could use an empty chair to sit and draw the painting. She agreed and I dragged the chair over, feeling almost embarrassed at my audacity to ask for a front seat at the skirts of a national icon. I began drawing with a stub of a pencil fished out of my purse. Almost immediately, with my fingers as conduits, I noticed more. The vein that wrapped around Frida’s arm suddenly resembled tefillin, the Jewish practice of wrapping an arm with a leather strap holding a tiny box with a prayer inside. (Frida claimed her father was of Jewish descent; this has been refuted.) I noticed how wide the berth of her seated torsos were — rooted, stable, mountain-like — and how the spots of blood on her white dress mimicked the little red flower pattern, a perfect metaphor for how Diego has soiled the beauty of their lives.
The round photograph of Diego that the Frida on the right holds is tiny, like a coin or souvenir. From the Renaissance onward before the birth of photography, the painted miniature was often a private gift between lovers, perhaps a soldier going off to war or an exchange in marriage. The scale indicated that it was for the beloved only, held in the palm like a talisman of longing. The tiny photograph of Diego has shrunk him in scale and age. No longer dominating her with his physical presence and demonstrativeness, this token of memory is more like a piece of jewelry or a fragment of a broken vessel. It is as if Frida is picturing how the remains of a lost relationship become incidental, inadequate, shrunken. The arteries of the heart try to wrap it, nurture it, but no life can be resuscitated. Her double portrait feels resolute — not sad. Both Fridas stare out at us with a look of flat acceptance.
Months before making the painting, Frida accepted an invitation from André Breton to visit Paris, where she explored the Louvre. It has been written (attributed to a verbal account by her friend Fernando Gamboa) that she was impressed by two double portraits of women: Théodore Chassériau’s “The Two Sisters” (1843) and the anonymous “Gabrielle d’Estreés and One of Her Sisters” (c. 1594). The two sisters in Chassériau’s work (the artist’s actual sisters) are dressed identically and appear similar but with different expressions — one skeptical, one bold. The Fontainebleau School portrait depicts two sisters sitting in a bath, nude from the waist up. Gabrielle, the one on the viewer’s right, is the mistress of King Henry IV of France. Her sister, Julienne-Hypolite-Joséphine, Duchess of Villars, reaches out to pinch Gabrielle’s nipple. This gesture was apparently an allegory of fertility in the Renaissance. In both portraits, the women look directly at the viewer — not captive in the paintings but confrontational, meeting each glance that comes their way. The act of pictorial doubling, whether in sisterhood or verisimilitude, expands the emotional range of the work beyond a fixed, inflexible notion of identity.
Historically, marriage provided women a means of stability whereby they could raise children and occupy a clearly designated role. But its shadowy opposite, divorce, often brought financial ruin. Single women continue to lack defining roles, and often divorced women face heightened discrimination combined with diminished social status, even today. Frida owned her own home. The Blue House was built by her father and after his death Diego assumed the debt and put the home in Frida’s name. But she remained vulnerable, suffering many physical ailments as she struggled to establish her own identity as an artist. During the year of her divorce, a doctor’s notes state: “Renal colobacteriosis with high fever. Continued backbone fatigue. Ingests great quantities of alcohol out of desperation (almost one bottle of cognac daily).”
Despite challenges, Frida refused to be shamed by Diego’s philandering. She painted her way to a visibility that defied social pronouncements for women to suffer quietly while men moved on quickly. She plucked heartache from the ranks of popular music and elevated the refrain to the highest standard of fine art. In addition, she corrected the historic record where omission was used as a means to obliterate, contain, and deny agency to all but the ruling class.
It has been nearly 90 years since Frida found the language to visually explore this uncharted domain. Surprisingly, in the span of the ensuing decades, few works have been added to the thematic lexicon. I can only think of two: Sophie Calle’s “Take Care of Yourself” (2007) and Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” (1998).
I stumbled upon Calle’s work at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Calle had received an unexpected breakup note from her partner through the disembodied means of an email. In response, she asked her friends to aid in her understanding by analyzing it. “Take Care of Yourself” resulted in 107 women and one parrot responding to the letter.
At the Biennale, banks of video screens presented interviewees discussing their reaction to her boyfriend’s email. The project was oversized, transgressive, and maybe impolite. It seemed ridiculous to invest this much time in what most would consider a private anecdote possibly tinged with retribution. But Calle’s project wasn’t ridiculous. It was riveting. It lingered in my mind for years. Like Frida, she shared the human validity of the personal (of telling one’s own story) while achieving agency (or at least perspective) over the pain.
Tracey Emin, after a devastating breakup, stayed in bed for days. When she finally stood up and surveyed the room, it looked like a crime scene. She decided to present this physical record of mental anguish as a work of art titled “My Bed” (1998), complete with the actual bed, used tissues, vodka bottles, stained sheets, condoms, a pregnancy test, etc. This evidentiary tableau, essentially a shipwreck, lacks the usual interpretive and transformative role of art. It is the thing itself — paused — an extension of the actual conditions of the breakup. Like Frida’s painting, it allows for the lingering contemplation of rupture.
That lingering, or the “pause,” is what art does so effectively, providing time, place, and space to reflect. Frida understood this. Her 60 self-portraits are like pages of a journal, marking the specific conditions of her life, evidence of her own existence and a reflection of other women. At Casa Azul, now the Frida Kahlo Museum, crouched quietly, almost innocuously, on a shelf are a pair of modest folk-art ceramic clocks. On one, she painted the date of her divorce, September 1939, along with the words, “Se rompieron las horas” (the hours are broken). On the other is the date, place, and time of her remarriage to Diego, “San Francisco California, 8 diciembre 40, a las once” (December 1940). Both clocks’ hands are locked in place, holding histories, honoring the pause.
Though Diego included images of Frida in his murals, ironically, he made just one freestanding portrait of Frida throughout his career, in 1935. This easel painting measures only 14 by 9 3/4 inches. It is painted on a found or discarded asbestos shingle. She is depicted frontally, wide-eyed, unsmiling. I can imagine Diego on the other side of the picture plane, both of them locked into an unyielding forever gaze.
Back at the Museo of Art Moderno, a new guard waves her finger at me and says that I cannot sit in front of the painting and draw. I drag my chair back to the wall, embarrassed. Entering this territory to which I am not entitled and then being reprimanded feels too close to larger themes of privilege. Within my sense of shame, I exchange a glance with “The Two Fridas.” They look back at me, reminding me that it takes courage to be visible, to take up space, to speak your truth.
