Frida and Diego's Cross-Country Journey
Part 3: Art, Fame and Controversy
Hola Amigos!
Continuing on with my reflections of Celia Stahr’s Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist,1 and Kahlo and Rivera’s US trip. This overview describes their journey as they leave San Francisco for points east— New York and Detroit.
Frida Kahlo's travels to the United States began in San Francisco where she and husband Diego Rivera lived in 1930 and 1931. Rivera, the most famous artist in the world at the time—bigger even than Picasso—had been commissioned to paint two murals in the city. If ever there was a working vacation, this was it. On the projects’ completion, they traveled from the west coast briefly back to Mexico, and from there, caught a ship via Cuba to New York, the second leg of their stateside journey. Kahlo and Rivera were no doubt the most artistically involved couple the world has ever seen. Both fed off the other's imagination, work, and inspiration, dove-tailing their way into making art that revered their native land.
During that period, scholars credit 23-year old Kahlo's creative breakthrough to an over abundance of input, not uncommon for an emerging artist in new surroundings. Her world had expanded and she was able to paint with other artists while experiencing the sights of San Francisco which she called "the city of the world." Her art also drew on a vast body of knowledge rooted in her Mexican upbringing, which she then synthesized with experiences she gained in California—a perfect storm for an emerging talent such as Kahlo.
New York, New York
In New York they stayed at the Barbizon-Plaza on Central Park South, the first music-art residence center in the US, complete with art studios, only two blocks from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Soon after they arrived they were swept up into the social lives of many prominent people. Everyone wanted to meet Diego Rivera and his wife Frida. Though Rivera was quite the social butterfly, Kahlo not so much.
Rivera would exhibit at MoMA and had also been commissioned by John D. Rockefeller's wife, Abby, to re-create a mural in their home titled Wall Street Banquet, which had featured Rockefeller, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. After consideration, Rivera declined as it was quite controversial, casting the scions of industry in a bad light.
Class struggle
In New York, Frida observed the huge disparity between the wealthy and the poor. She and Rivera, though surrounded by well-heeled patrons, kept "witnessing the horrible poverty and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires who greedily grab everything," she wrote her mother.
They visited a homeless shelter where they saw people sleeping "like dogs in a pen," she wrote. With the Depression in its third year, grim reality had set in and Rivera was inspired to paint Frozen Assets, depicting bodies placed in morgues hidden away beneath cranes of industry. They witnessed a multitude of encampments nicknamed "Hoover Valley" for the sitting president.
Harlem shuffle
After Rivera's lengthy workaholic days at MoMA, at night they gravitated to Harlem for jazz clubs and speakeasies, though Kahlo noticed disparity there, too. While the world teetered on economic collapse, shrewd Frida noted the white and middle class headed to Harlem where they danced and drank, while "feeling superior in whites-only clubs featuring black entertainers," wrote Celia Stahr, author of Frida in America.
Outspoken Frida called it out—women of color pleasing the masses. "Everything here is pure show but down deep it's all real shit. By now I'm completely disappointed in the famous United States," she wrote her mother. She wrote that near Central Park where they lived, it was beautiful with fancy shops and restaurants while the working class lived in areas reeking of garbage. New York, she said, presented a "new level of poverty."
Frida paints
In New York she stewed about injustice and in a new painting, she encapsulated a world where everything was pure show, titled Window Display on a Street in Detroit, a painting she began in New York but finished in Detroit.
Meanwhile Rivera sweated out finishing his last murals for the MoMA exhibit with five Mexican-themed murals—Indian Warrior, Sugar Cane, Liberation of the Peon, Agrarian Leader Zapata, and The Uprising.2
Meeting Georgia
At the MoMA opening, Kahlo met famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, husband of rising star Georgia O'Keefe. In O'Keefe she saw a woman who mirrored her in many ways—a painter married to a successful artist twice her age, a lover of nature and Indian culture, and a sexually free being, wrote author Stahr. It's well known that O'Keefe and Kahlo had a relationship, though neither of them spoke about it openly.
Meanwhile the world of fashion contributed to the blurring of distinctions between labels such as bi-sexual and New Woman. Both Frida and Georgia, said Stahr, utilized the androgynous look to defy stereotypical norms and to assert their own independence and power as artists.
Though they only spent six months in New York, it was a stepping stone for Kahlo. She made closer friends than in San Francisco, including getting re-acquainted with old friends from Mexico. During her last months in the city she made two drawings, both titled The Dream. They had a surrealistic quality that the art world took note of, and the second one turned out to be prophetic—it showed her being impregnated by Rivera's "seed." Later that month she discovered she was pregnant.
Motor City
The train to Detroit took 14 hours from New York, long enough to transition from the world's most vibrant city into the city of manufacturing, technology, and the midwest—a far cry from the hub of style and activity she had just left. But Detroit's train station, beautifully constructed in the Beaux Arts style, cheered Frida's heart. Upon entering Detroit proper, however, the couple was soon to find out the city, in the depths of the Depression, was 50 percent unemployed. Poverty in Detroit was worse than NYC.
The US manufacturing capital proved to be more alien to Frida's Mexican heart than either San Francisco or New York. In a city of 1.5 million, only 15,000 were Hispanic. She'd never felt more alone. And they'd arrived shortly after a five thousand person protest in front of Ford Motor had ended in gunfire, killing four.
She'd entered a war zone. Poor, unemployed people, no jobs and worse yet, no housing, as Ford had provided company housing for many workers. Adding insult to injury, the city was anti-Semitic and she had Jewish blood. She was in hell. Soon after arriving in Detroit, she realized she was pregnant, and with problems left over from the trolley accident in her broken body, she didn't know if she could sustain a pregnancy. She considered abortion but was talked out of it. Eventually her Detroit obstetrician performed a C-section, but the child did not live.
Bad news from home
Trouble, however, was not yet done with her. Shortly after the disaster of losing the child, she learned her mother was desperately ill in Mexico and a last minute trip to see her had to be arranged. With Diego commissioned for murals to both Ford and the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), he wouldn't be able to accompany her.
Luckily, artist/photographer Lucienne Bloch, Rivera's assistant and Frida's friend, said she'd join her. Tickets were booked for the daunting train ride and border crossing. They arrived September 9, nearly three days later, in Mexico City, slowed by enormous flooding in Laredo. Her sisters met her at the station as her father was also in poor condition.
Matilde, her mother, had breast cancer and died one day after an arduous surgery. Frida's entire family was beyond distraught. When she told her father about Matilde's death, "he was done for," said Lucienne Bloch. Kahlo returned from Mexico six weeks later to a city she despised and to a husband she feared was having an affair with one of his benefactors. Getting back into a routine and finding a rhythm with Diego proved challenging, wrote Stahr. When she met mythologist Joseph Campbell years later, he would tell her she had embarked on the classic Hero's Journey: bus accident, miscarriage, mother's death. After all this, she returned to Detroit a changed person.
Disgusted with everything, she demanded DIA allow her to have a studio at the museum. Separated from patrons and society matrons who wanted only to gossip and talk clothes, this gave her the freedom to concentrate on her art with no interruptions. Her painting, My Birth, was born at this time. The painting allowed her to release her fears and was considered another breakthrough.
Murals on display
Diego's hectic schedule proved successful. He completed 77 panels for the DIA's Garden Court in March 1933, though not without controversy. His Communist leanings had been written about in a Time magazine interview. Doubts failed quickly however as the DIA opened the courtyard to early onlookers to preview the murals for themselves at 10 cents a ticket. In three days, 13 thousand people paraded through and were thoroughly impressed. All malicious thoughts fell away and Edsel Ford was quoted as saying, "I admire Rivera's spirit. I believe he was trying to express his ideas about the spirit of Detroit."
Shortly before the formal DIA opening of the murals, Frida and Diego left for New York. He had been given a prestigious commission by Rockefeller to paint at the RCA Building in the new Rockefeller Center. Both were on a high: Rivera for his Detroit murals and Frida happy as she'd completed five paintings while in Detroit. A working holiday indeed.
Fiery crusader with a brush
On Rivera's arrival, New York Times reporter Anita Brenner called him, "the fiery crusader of the paint brush." He began his murals at RCA Building, titling them Man at the Crossroads. As Hitler was heating up in Germany, Rivera wanted the rich to take notice with his mural. He planned to contrast a scene of fascist warfare on the upper left side of the wall to a May Day demonstration in Moscow on the right, featuring Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary who had played a major role in the new government of the Soviet Union before being ousted by Stalin when he came to power in the twenties. Lenin was also in the mural, and not as a bad guy. Rivera planned to paint great wealth alongside desperate poverty— beauty turning to ugliness. In his murals workers would hold signs that read, "Divided We Starve—United We Eat."
As art critics, reporters, and onlookers strode in to take a look, the impression took hold that Rivera was pushing a political ideology with his mural. Things reached a crescendo when in April, a reporter from New York World Telegram checked in at RCA. He posted a story about the mural with this headline, "Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Rockefeller Foots the Bill.''
On May 4, days before the mural was to be presented, Rockefeller wrote Rivera a letter asking him to tone down the painting’s Communist influence. Rivera did not defer, and on May 9, police entered the building and were told to shut down the work if Rivera did not paint Lenin out of the mural. Rivera would not concede and was presented with a check for his work and ushered out of the building in his coveralls. The work was boarded up and the only known photographs were taken under cover by Lucienne Bloch, photographer and Rivera's assistant.
Rivera fights back
Fired up, Diego, Frida and their group of workers decided how to counter the RCA shutdown and suppression of his work. Diego would paint murals at three "Communist" schools in New York. The next day the book burnings took place in Germany to "cleanse the German spirit" and this brazen act overrode the brouhaha at RCA Center. Because of Rockefeller's decision to can the murals, Rivera lost the commission to paint at the Chicago World's Fair. He shifted his vitriol against Rockefeller to painting a mural at the New Workers School instead of at the three Communist schools as pay back.
Because of Rockefeller's act, both Frida and Diego threw themselves into workers' rights protests and political issues for the summer months. Rivera, still angered by the brushoff from Rockefeller, wallowed in indecision on how to proceed. Back in Mexico, a mural for a medical school commission awaited him. To soothe his wounds, he'd resorted to an affair with a young sculptress, and didn't keep standard hours at the New School mural. His antics were causing trouble in his marriage and he knew it, plus money was running out.
A chapter ends
Frida apparently worked well in adverse situations as she created two more important paintings in their last days in New York: My Dress Hangs Here and Self Portrait with a Necklace. When they finally boarded the Orient in New York harbor in December 1933, they both hoped to restore some balance in their relationship. Stahr wrote Frida had no idea what the future would hold. On leaving Gringolandia, she realized she had created her best art there. She had gripes about the States and had suffered the trauma of double death in Detroit, but the US was a place where her creative spirit broke through to new heights allowing her genius to soar.
In Mexico, things between Kahlo and Rivera would continue to heat up, but as for art, Frida was on her way.
Quote from Kahlo: "Perhaps it is expected that I should lament how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape."
Celia Stahr. Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist. (St. Martin’s Press. 2020).
On a personal note, these Rivera murals are some of my favorites.
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You inspired me to learn more about the artists and character's in Frida's story. Thank you for this vivid read!
A fascinating glimpse into Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's American journey, highlighting their artistic growth, and personal challenges.