PASSION FOR FRIDA: 27 YEARS OF FRIDA KAHLO ARTWORK
An Essay about an Artist's Private Obsession with Frida Kahlo
By F. Lennox Campello
In 1975 my parents took their first vacation ever, at least in my memory. As Cuban exiles, the American tradition of yearly vacations was as removed from their routine as the Cuban tradition of “Nochebuena” is from American Christmas holiday customs. Anyway, they decided to go to Mexico City for a week with another couple from New York, which is where my folks had been living since leaving Cuba as political refugees in the early 60’s.
In 1975 I was finishing my first year in the US Navy, where I had enlisted right after High School, and stationed aboard USS Saratoga, homeported in Mayport, Florida. I had turned down a New York State Regents Scholarship and a Boston University scholarship to satisfy my desire to see the world before I went to college.
Mexico City and its nightlife and food (and how far a dollar went) made such an impression upon my parents and their friends, that the one-week trip became two, and eventually they spent nearly a month in that huge, dirty city, enjoying the food, scenery, clubs and markets. They also asked me if I’d like to join them for a few days, and since they were paying for it, I got a few days leave and flew to Mexico City for about five days of my own, unexpected vacation.
I hardly spent any time with them. As a 19-year-old teenager, my interests were more focused on girls, cheap booze and plenty of great things to do. It was while visiting a museum in Chapultepec Park during the last few days of my visit, at the insistence of a cute American Jewish tourist girl whom I had picked up at my parents’ hotel, and who was a Frida Kahlo fan, that I accidentally discovered Frida Kahlo.
I remember walking into the museum salon where the “Two Fridas” hung. It was love, or more like witchcraft, at first sight. This large, spectacular painting swallowed my visual senses and attention as no work of art would do again until I first saw Velasquez’s “Las Meninas” at the Prado in Madrid eight years later.
At that first exposure, and the ones that followed as I tried to absorb as much of Frida Kahlo as I could in my remaining Mexico City days, I became an addict for the work and imagery of this Champagne Communist Mexican virago. I recall sitting down in the room where the “Two Fridas” was hung, and copying the painting through a pencil sketch done on gift wrapping vellum paper from an earlier touristy purchase of a huge, saucepan sized solid silver belt buckle and brown cowboy etched leather belt that I wore for years and that thankfully has now been lost. Kahlo left me gasping for knowledge about her and her work. Her imagery was like nothing I had seen before, even in my childhood’s New York atmosphere that often included day-long trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the Met, MOMA and many other New York museums.
The more of her work that I discovered, the more I became obsessed with learning about her. In 1975 and the first few years that followed, this wasn’t exactly an easy task. In those years Kahlo, at least in Mexico, was still Diego Rivera’s wife, who also happened to paint. Those first few pencil drawings on thin, gift-wrapping paper (I gave one to the girl who took me to the museum), were the beginning of easily a thousand or more pieces of artwork that I’ve done since then about Frida Kahlo, including even a comic strip for a short-lived artsy magazine that was published in San Diego for a few short months in 1976. Somewhere out there a six panel strip where Kahlo seduces Jimmy Carter still may exist – scary!
In 1977 I started college at the University of Washington, and Kahlo’s imagery truly surfaced with alarming frequency (to my professors) during this period. She appeared everywhere! Even in my abstract painting classes, where I was issued a letter of warning from the school. There was Frida, in a little white box inside my Jackson Pollock copy, and she was also in my Color School knock-off, and even in my Mark Rothko look-alike canvas. Washington was big on drip painters and stripe painters in those days, and the appearance of anything representational, as her face was, in any of the works done under the stern watch of those professors was a close guarantee for a nearly failing grade, as my warning letter (and also dismal grades) testifies. It didn’t end there; we had a class where students were required to study and emulate the work of a master. I chose El Greco's “The Annunciation,” and did a pretty decent job of copying the Spanish-Greek master’s original, down to the palette and brush-strokes – except that my version’s Mary had Kahlo’s unibrowed face and the Holy Mother’s garments had a certain Mexicanity to them that didn’t go un-noticed to the professor.
In my collage class, under Jacob Lawrence’s disapproving eye, I
delivered dozens of Kahlo collages (only one remains after all these years),
including works such as a rather odd version of El Greco’s “The Burial of Count Orgaz” – with
Kahlo as Orgaz and Diego Rivera as one of the faces in the crowd – which was
actually stolen from the classroom. This must have been quite a job, as this
collage was nearly eight feet tall as I recall.
In my life drawing class, nearly every model who posed had a pretty good chance of ending up with Kahlo-features, and since my favorite model weighed nearly 250 pounds, this also delivered some rather odd portraits of a Frida Kahlo with enormous pendulous breasts and gorgeous feminine flesh everywhere. In my graphic design class I created a dozen designs for US Postal stamps, including a Frida Kahlo stamp (and an Elvis stamp!). I recall that my professor liked the designs, but commented that the US would never issue a stamp honoring a Communist. I agreed and we were both wrong.
I graduated from Washington in 1981, and spent the next 12 years roaming the world, living in California (San Diego), Spain, Lebanon, Italy, California (Monterey), DC, England, Scotland, California (Sonoma) and back to DC. Frida followed me everywhere! During my times in California, I began to exhibit her regularly and she appeared often in my artwork – by then she was beginning to really come out as the icon that she currently is, and by the time that I returned to America for good in 1992, she was everywhere one could look – from postcards to earrings.
Why the obsession with Frida? I don’t really know; I’ve also focused for certain periods of time a lot of attention on Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe, and even Stephen King’s imagery – but only Frida has remained constant since 1975. My obsession with her was born out of the spectacular imagery that I first discovered as a teenager in Mexico City; imagery of pain, of blood and such ferocious femininity that it dug deep into my psyche. For this exhibition I opened storage boxes that has been closed for years, and dug out a couple of dozen pieces, many from my college days, and augmented them with some recent drawings. There are virtually hundreds of Frida Kahlo pieces that I have done over the years, and sold, traded, given away or lost, and thus this exhibition is but a tiny set of what truly exists. Most of them are simple portraits, often derived from Guillermo Kahlo’s beautiful portrait of his young daughter. That simple, brooding image has been re-interpreted over the years as collages, oils, drawings and even sculpture. I have spread them all over the many places that I have lived.
In some other works from my student days, Kahlo
shares the canvas or paper with other icons. In “Marilyn and Frida Await Elvis to Join Them in Icon Heaven,” a pen and ink wash from 1977 done a few days after Elvis died, Monroe and Kahlo look down from heaven to a young Elvis, before The King had discovered carbohydrates to an excess. I think none of us suspected that the King would become the odd phenomenon that engulfed his image after his death, but I was quite an Elvis fan and felt that he should join my other icons - so in this work, my two female icons await the young King to join them.
A year later, in “Frida Kahlo Wearing an Elvis T-Shirt” we see her in her Mexican apparel, with a T-shirt of The King under her
rebozo.
This is a 1978 drawing inspired
both by Kahlo and by a story I read in a magazine which said that within hours of Presley’s death there was a shop in New York’s Times Square selling T-Shirts
that read: “I never did like Elvis anyway.” This was very funny, but a year later, by anyone's standards it was clear that Presley had become iconified beyond our wildest expectations, and Elvis impersonators and sightings were quite common, even as The Bee Gees ruled the music world. The King had indeed been crowned, bigger in his death than anyone could have ever guessed.
1980’s “Las Siete Fridas” (The Seven Fridas) was inspired by the 1980 census, which for the first time listed an astronomical number of ways for people to describe their ethnic or racial background. My drawing transforms Frida into a Nordic, Moslem, African, Punk, Native American, Vulcan and Beatle Frida, looking remarkably like the Paul McCartney of the early 60’s (or as my son commented, like Moe from The Three Stooges!).
The 2002 charcoal drawing “Frida Alone” displays her stern, young image
from her father’s early photograph in a long empty horizontal field of charcoal
on watercolor paper. It is a lonely Frida, perhaps wondering (at least in my
imagination) why we are making so much fuss about her. This is a Frida who would
laugh if she knew that femeninists all over the world, the delicious Selma Hayek
and Hollywood, Madonna and for over a quarter of a century me, have iconified
her beyond normalcy.
I don’t care; I am currently working on yet some more Kahlo works for next year.
