How San Francisco Ignited the Right Stuff in Frida Kahlo

Part Two: The evolution of Frida

Hola Amigos!

Though much has been written about Frida Kahlo, one of the most celebrated women artists of our time, little is mentioned about her travels to the United States and specifically San Francisco in the 1930s, a period that shaped her voice as an artist. Her year in San Francisco also made a lasting impact on the city's local art scene.

Frida in America*—The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist, by Celia Stahr,¹ documents her time in Gringolandia, as Kahlo nicknamed her neighbor to the north. According to Stahr, no other author has explored her body of work in depth while she lived in the States, and there hasn't been a major Kahlo biography since Hayden Herrera's in 1983. However, Suzanne Barbezat's 2016, Frida Kahlo At Home,² does a fine job portraying key aspects of the artist's life and works with many visuals. The following overview of Stahr’s Frida in America follows Kahlo and Rivera through the first half of their two-year trip to the north.

To San Francisco by train

Shortly after her marriage in 1929 to Diego Rivera, famous for his art and politics, the couple traveled from Mexico City to San Francisco. Rivera had been commissioned to paint a mural at the Pacific Stock Exchange. This would be Frida's first trip outside Mexico. After seeing friends and art dealers in Los Angeles, they continued by train to San Francisco.

The tracks followed the Pacific, and in the train car she sketched a picture of San Francisco which she had dubbed before seeing it, "The city of the world." This drawing, now lost, included a city scene with rectangular skyscrapers and the ocean along with a self-portrait.

Ralph Stackpole, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivers, San Francisco, 1930

At 23, more than 20 years younger than her famous husband, she was a novice painter while Rivera was at the height of his creative powers. When they stepped off the train, Rivera recalled he was "almost frightened to realize her imagined city was the very one we were now seeing for the first time."

Family ties

Born to Guillermo Kahlo, her German father, and Oaxacan/Tehuantepec mother, Matilde Calderón, Frida planned to go to medical school and studied at the Prepa in Mexico City. Her university plans changed abruptly in September 1925. On the way home from a shopping trip, the city bus she was on was hit full speed by a trolley. In the accident, a metal pole impaled her pelvis, leaving her spinal column broken in three places along with a broken collarbone, pelvis and some ribs. She was in the hospital in a full plaster body cast for a month, but returned home six weeks later.

Accident, 1926. By Kahlo. Pencil on paper

Though told she would never walk again, in three months she began to walk haltingly. Part of her rapid recovery was due to the strength training she received with her father's help after contracting polio at age six. Guillermo trained her to be a strong athlete which provided her the freedom that usually only came to males in that era.

The accident’s effects

Kahlo's accident irreversibly changed the course of her life—from a student studying medicine to a budding player in the world of art. After her medical studies were interrupted, her drawing and painting took on greater significance as her physical movements were curtailed.

Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderón. Photo La Casa Azul

Before the accident, Frida always accompanied her father, a professional photographer, on photo shoots. He suffered from epilepsy and Frida's presence was a safeguard for her father and his equipment should a seizure occur. While he tested settings, she would often serve as a model and learned to pose at an early age. This served her well as she gained fame.

Due to physical limitations after the accident, she could no longer help Guillermo. Her mother realized Frida needed a creative outlet and hired a carpenter to create a lap easel. Matilde also suggested placing a mirror atop the bed's canopy for self-portraits. Soon Frida began applying pigment to small canvases and began drawing what she knew best—her friends and family. One of her early influences was the art of Leonardo Da Vinci. She tested using his techniques and symbolism in her paintings and iconic retablos.

Comrade Frida

After the accident she was introduced to the Communist party through a friend, Tina Modotti, an Italian American photographer and political activist who'd lived in Mexico since 1923. Through Tina's influence, Kahlo committed herself to communism after reading extensively about the Russian Revolution, and Tina re-introduced her to Diego Rivera. She'd previously met him when he was painting a mural at the Ministry of Education where she goaded him off his scaffold to look at one of her paintings. He was impressed and later said her painting revealed "an unusual energy of expression and precise delineation of character."

Mexican Folkways, 1927. Publisher Tina Modotti

By 1928 they began seeing each other after his divorce from second wife, Lupe Marín. Though a notorious womanizer, something about Frida kept Rivera coming back. It could have been her blunt honesty or raw talent as an untrained artist. Along with that, her unconventional beauty was combined with a quick mind and sharp wit. Their interest in both art and politics ignited the relationship, plus they were attracted to the importance of creativity, black humor, and a passion for social justice.

They'd see each other at Tina's meetings and afterwards Rivera would take her home. There they'd discuss painting and its importance to a new post-revolutionary indigenist movement, Mexicanidad, a popular topic in Tina's magazine, Mexican Folkways, where Rivera served as art director. The magazine’s articles discussed excavations of Aztec sites, regional crafts and music, children's art, and photos of Mexico’s diverse people and regions.

As her relationship with Rivera evolved, in 1929 she joined the Communist Youth League. At that time she went into her full gender-neutral fashion look, donning overalls, no dresses, completed by a little black iron and sickle pin she wore on her collar.

But when they married later that summer, Frida stepped out with a new look. Her wedding ensemble was a long ruffled skirt, white peasant blouse, and rebozo shawl—simple street clothes. This outfit aligned her with working class indigenous women, indicating she was part Indian, thanks to her mother's family roots. Soon after, she began wearing a prominent jadeite necklace engraved with an Aztec symbol, the olin, found on the carved Aztec Calendar Stone. The glyph represented the movement required to shift from one world into another, Stahr wrote.

Frida Kahlo, 1930. Photo Edward Weston

Metaphysics and symbolism

Kahlo was a student of metaphysics and revered alchemy, the transformation of matter. She was well aware of symbolism and how it could stir the masses. Her peasant blouse emphasized her leftist leanings as a woman of the people as well as her purity as a young bride. She identified as a mestiza who was proud of her country's revolutionary ideals. The rebozo conveyed allegiance to indigenous women throughout Mexico.

In her marriage dress and in the first portrait she painted as a married woman, Self Portrait, Time Flies, she laid out an intricate mythic framework of her desired alchemical union with Rivera. Rivera came to mysticism through his father, a Freemason and Rosicrucian. Kahlo came to it through her studies in all schools of philosophy at Prepa and through books shared by friends. Metaphysics was at its height worldwide in the 1920s and 30s and the inquiring mind of an intelligent teen was like a sponge in water. Frida soaked it up and went on to use many symbolic principles in her paintings and retablos.

Self Portrait, Time Flies, 1929. First painting after wedding

In San Francisco, Kahlo literally stopped traffic from the moment she stepped off the train. Her ensemble had locals halting mid-street to stare at her huaraches under a long peasant skirt, green striped shawl, and dangling earrings as they made their way to Montgomery Street, part of the old Barbary Coast where the artists' co-op was located where they’d live. "Even in this bohemian section of San Francisco," remarked photographer and friend Edward Weston, "the sight of this unknown Mexican woman created excitement."

Weston's photos of Frida during her San Francisco stay along with those of Imogen Cunningham would come to be known as the best taken of her in that period. He captured her physical strength along with her political strength as an indigenous woman, helping to establish this important symbol of her identity.

"Frida was creating a new persona of the indigenous Mexican woman by combining the traits of beauty and intelligence," Stahr wrote.

Some of Kahlo's caricature can be attributed to a Mexican beauty pageant when she was 15, La India Bonita. It was sponsored by publisher Felix Palavicini, a former revolutionary, who wanted to validate Indian female beauty. A young Nahuatl-speaking 14-year old became the new face of Mexican indigenous women.

In San Francisco Kahlo solidified her "La India Bonita" persona and brought together indigenous pride with a modern twist. Her long peasant skirts also served another purpose: they covered up her right leg and injured foot.

Diego's studio was on the top floor of the co-op where he worked daily on sketches for his new mural. With Diego absent, Frida painted "almost all day long," she wrote her mother. She wanted a San Francisco exhibition and worked hard to create enough paintings for one. From the beginning of their relationship, wrote Stahr, they related to each other as painters and things didn't change in San Francisco.

Rivera and Kahlo hung out with artists, rubbing shoulders with prominent writers and photographers. Kahlo met and bonded with Dorothea Lange shortly before her Depression era photographic journey through America. Forming friendships with women artists on this west coast sojourn became a great source of strength for Kahlo. She made art weekly at the co-op with Lucile Blanch and a young Pele deLappe. They painted wildly inappropriate things, swore, smoked, and laughed.

For Kahlo, this was a time of creative freedom allowing her to delve into taboo topics which helped her to find her own voice. San Francisco's MOMA stated, "Her style moved from a broad, mural-like handling to a folkloric mode based on 19th century Mexican portraiture."

In that era, women had to take advantage of any opportunity that came their way. Soon Frida's experimentation would pay off. Though women were banned from the Bohemian Club where male artists gathered, they formed the San Francisco Society of Women Artists with organized exhibits at the Legion of Honor. Though not a member, Frida’s American art debut took place at one of the society's annual exhibitions and in it, she displayed her marriage portrait.

A physician with heart

In the city, their life included meandering walks, late nights, and hours of painting. Her leg began to ache. Through friends she met Dr. Leo Eloesser who became a stabilizing force in her life. He gave her thorough examinations and made recommendations that improved her physical and mental well being. The doctor clicked with both Kahlo and Rivera, and their friendship was lifelong. Frida said he had the heart of a musician. With a medical practice by day, he played viola at night. He also spoke fluent Spanish making communication easy.

Frida's most profound experiences on the west coast would occur north of the city. When neighbor and sculptor Ralph Stackpole and his French girlfriend Ginette whisked the two away to Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, 70 miles north, she was in awe. Though off limits to women, Stackpole would have been able to get Frida in as a guest. She wrote her mother that she felt reverence when she stepped onto the grounds, in the presence of thousand year old redwoods.

Luther Burbank’s influence

Shortly after that adventure, Stackpole and Ginette took them to Luther Burbank's house in Santa Rosa. Though the horticulturist had been dead four years, his widow, Elizabeth, discussed her husband’s legacy in depth. Burbank had created more than eight hundred varieties of hybrid fruits. He had been inspired by Charles Darwin, writing, "Nature selected by a law the survival of the fittest...the fitness of the plant to stand up under a new or changed environment."

Kahlo’s painting of Luther Burbank, 1931

They walked his gardens to feel his presence. The grounds were "magical," Frida said. An avid admirer of alchemy, "Luther must have seemed an alchemist, transforming existing varieties of plants into new ones," wrote Stahr. Back in her studio, Kahlo was inspired. Her 1931 Portrait of Luther Burbank shows him partly as soil and partly human, a major departure from her paintings up to that time. Many art scholars consider this to be her creative breakthrough.

By living in a foreign country as Kahlo began to define her artistic path, she was exposed to a kaleidoscope of new sights, experiences, and ideas. Her encounters at the Bohemian Grove’s ancient redwoods and viewing Luther Burbank’s gardens had a profound effect on her, along with her weekly creative experimentations she enjoyed with women artist friends. Though her art drew upon a vast body of knowledge rooted in her Mexican upbringing, she synthesized it with new experiences she'd gained in California. It was the perfect storm for a creative-inventive-intuitive like Kahlo. Not only did San Francisco have the right stuff, but so did Frida Kahlo.

PART THREE: New York, Detroit, class struggles and upheavals encompass the last year of the Frida and Diego Gingolandia roadshow. Tune in for their finale! Next week.

*Frida lived in Mexico which is North America. The author Stahr's Frida in America refers to the United States of America.

1. Celia Stahr. Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist. (St. Martin’s Press. 2020).

2. Suzanne Barbezat. Frida Kahlo at Home. (Frances Lincoln. 2016).