The Colors of Life, Part 4Frida had her own activities as well. At Diego's suggestion, she started teaching in 1943 at the Ministry of Public Education's experimental new School of Painting and Sculpture on Esmeralda Street in the Guerrero district. High-school age students from poor families in the neighborhood were given free art supplies along with free instruction in painting and drawing; they also had courses in French, art history, Mexican art, and general culture. Frida taught an introductory class in painting at La Esmeralda, as the school became known, where her colleagues were leading artists and scholars, including Francisco Zuniga, Maria Izquierdo, several distinguished European emigres, and Diego.
Frida taught informally, with respect for each student. On the first day she asked the students what they wanted to paint, and they immediately asked her to pose. One student, Guillermo Monroy, still remembers the vivid impression she made: "Frida was there in front of us, amazingly still. Her hands, placed one on top oft he other, were elegant and bedecked with rings. Her beautifully manicured fingernails were long and lacquered with bright red polish. Her silky black hair was criss- crossed on top of her head in meticulous braids, beautifully decorated in the center with a tiny bunch of gaudy magenta bougainvillaea. Her filigree earrings were two small suns made of gold. Smooth skin, firm and cool. Dark, restless eyes seeing beyond earth and sky, black eyebrows joining to form the delicate wings of a bird. The freshest of smiles flowering on her red lips. At her throat she wore a necklace of fine intertwined gold chains with a charming and beautifully worked heart-shaped pendant encircled by a ring of stars. Her blouse was a traditional native huipil embroidered with red flowers on a yellow ground set off by a front panel of black, her full skirt decorated with small geometric shapes of gold and magenta. Resting softly on her shoulders was an elegant black rebozo, delicately fringed and sprinkled with tiny bunches of shamrocks."
Frida and Los Fridos, c. 1943. From left: Fanny Rabel, Frida, Arturo Estrada, and Arturo Garcia Bustos.Frida directed long conversations that stimulated her students' curiosity and imagination; she took them to off-beat places like Huejotzingo in carnival season, the nearby cities of Texcoco and Puebla, and the pyramids of Teotihuacan, "so they would appreciate what magnificent builders their great ancestors were." She wanted to better their appreciation of the arts of Mexico, especially its folk art, but also of modern murals with their clear social messages.
A few months after she began teaching, it became obvious that Frida's health would prevent her from traveling to La Esmeralda. Frida continued the course in her home; each day the students commuted to Coyoacan. At first, the entire group arrived to paint in the garden of the Casa Azul, but finally there remained only four students, Guillermo Monroy, Arturo Garda Bustos, Arturo "Guero" Estrada, and Fanny Rabel. The group became known as the Fridos.
Alberto Veraza, Frida, Guillermo Monroy, Fanny Rabel, Arturo Garcia Bustos, the chauffeur, and Arturo Estrada, Texcoco, c. 1944The students adapted well to Frida's unorthodox system of instruction: creative freedom closely linked with self-discipline, a method that required neither the teacher's constant presence at the student's side nor the taking of a paintbrush from the student's hand to correct his or her work. Frida left her students to follow their own paths, respecting their ideas and their work and treating them like mature adults.
Monroy recalls that Frida suggested that they go out in the street, "to get acquainted with life so we could understand it better and be able to paint it. We all went to the markets, the factories, the countryside, we mixed with the people.... Frida told us that direct contact with life and participation in it, not as mere spectators but as socially active citizens, would open new artistic horizons and greatly enrich our aesthetic and human sensitivity."
Self-Portrait with Braid, 1941Frida also urged them to go out and visit the sites where the great muralists were working. These artists were still very active in the early 1940s. Rivera was painting a mural in the Hotel Reforma's nightclub, another about medical history in the recently inaugurated National Institute of Cardiology, and a new series of murals in the National Palace. From 1942 to 1944 Orozco was working on the dome and choir walls of the historic old Church of Jesus the Nazarene, and in 1944 Siqueiros was creating his Cuauhtemoc against the Myth in the Center for Modern Realist Art.
Frida was anxious to give her students a chance to get started in mural art themselves. In the middle of 1943 she obtained permission for her students to decorate the wall of a tavern, the Pulqueria La Rosita, located a short distance from the Casa Azul. Two years later, Frida arranged a second mural commission for her students: the walls of a laundry facility, one of the public works of the Lazaro Cardenas administration.
At Frida's urging, her students participated in exhibitions, where the political content of their work sometimes caused them trouble with the public, but never with Diego and Frida. The couple was also supportive when the Fridos joined other students to found the Revolutionary Young Artists, a group that organized exhibitions in public parks and gardens so that their artwork could be seen by workers and the poor.
Notwithstanding the physical and spiritual closeness of Frida and her students over the years, not one of them claims to have ever seen her paint. She brought out her canvases from the studio when the class had critiques, or she would invite the students to come inside and see her work in progress. But when she painted, she worked in isolation.
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A visit with Frida was becoming obligatory for every important person traveling through Mexico City. Through her home passed the Rockefellers, Edward G. Robinson, Josephine Baker, poet Gabriela Mistral, the presidents of various countries, many ambassadors, and other luminaries. Frida enjoyed holding court. In spite of her poor health, she was at the height of her physical beauty and had polished to perfection the image she wanted to project. The impact she produced was truly memorable, and she knew it.
Except for the last years of her life, the Casa Azul was a happy gathering place where the artist frequently organized social get-togethers for her friends. There was an endless parade of notable Mexican figures, film star Dolores del Rio, writers Salvador Novo, Carlos Pellicer, and Pita Amor, movie actress Marfa Felix and her husband, the famous singer Jorge Negrete, and the leading painters. They came to enjoy an excellent meal and Frida's invincible good humor. Each year she organized posadas, the typical Christmas season parties, with plentiful confetti, pinatas, and fireworks.
Most of Frida's relatives had grown distant after her marriage to Diego. Her aunts, as religious as her mother, did not permit their children to visit the Casa Azul: the couple living there was not married in the eyes of the church, and they belonged to the Communist party. Frida's cousins laughingly recall that some of the Calderon aunts sprinkled holy water on the sidewalks as they passed the house, especially in the years when Trotsky lived there.
But Frida was once again close to her younger sister, Cristina, who came with her children, Isolda and Antonio, to visit several times a week. The children of other friends remember Frida as a "beautiful lady who smelled good, covered with fuzz like a peach," someone who let them play with all the marvelous contents of her handbag and whose use of bad words made them laugh.
In about 1944, Frida began a diary, writing in a red leatherbound book. Written in a highly creative and imaginative style, and illustrated with drawings in pencil, colored inks, and watercolors, the diary at first recorded autobiographical information and selected anecdotes but became, with the passage of time, a summation of emotional, sometimes hysterical, outpourings. It was not unusual for Frida to show the diary to friends; she sometimes even tore out pages to give to them.
All the while, at her own slow pace, Frida painted. By the mid-1940s, she was as well known abroad as in Mexico for her art, and she was frequently invited to participate in group shows. She could sell whatever she was currently painting; sometimes incomplete pictures were purchased right off the easel. This has complicated locating her work today, for in many cases no trace remains, not even a photograph and no more of a written record than "self-portrait" and a date. It also meant she never at one time had a large number of paintings for exhibition purposes.
Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1940A page from Frida's diaryAt about this time Frida created several suggestive and uneasy still lifes of fruits and vegetables, sometimes including personally significant objects. A round still life was done for the dining room of the Mexican presidential residence, Los Pinos, but was later returned, perhaps because its fruits were too voluptuously graphic. She also painted still lifes of moist, audacious flowers with pistils of phallic form that pay homage to sensuality as a manifestation of life.
But most of her work was portraiture, of herself, her friends, and relatives. Some were commissioned, many for her friend and major patron, the engineer and diplomat Eduardo Morillo Safa. He ordered pictures of himself, his wife, son, daughters, and a very moving portrait of his mother, Dona Rosita Morillo Safa.
Certainly Frida's single most frequent theme was the obsessive self-portrait, in which she appears alone or with her pets or other meaningful articles. When asked, as she frequently was, why she painted herself so often, she replied, "Porque estoy muy sola" (because I am all alone). Some theorize that she painted herself to ensure she would be remembered. Alejandro Gomez Arias suggests that Frida's continual portrait painting was "a recourse, the ultimate means to survive, to endure, to conquer death."
In letters she sent to the most casual friends as well as to those she loved most profoundly, in her youth and her maturity, Frida continually used the phrase, "Don't forget me!" In later years, she began distributing photographs of herself in great quantities, perhaps another permanent and tangible means of safeguarding her place in people's memories.
Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943The Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened, 1943Flower of Life, 1944