In the summer of 1940, Frida Kahlo found herself in jail. Mexico City police suspected her as an accomplice in the murder of the embattled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Several days prior to her arrest, he’d been gruesomely offed with an ice pick. His murder - and her implication in the crime - was a dramatic turn of events, especially considering that Kahlo and Trotsky had been giddy lovers just three years earlier; she’d even dedicated a striking self-portrait to him.
Kahlo had many romantic partners over the course of her short life (she died in 1954 at 47), but few resulted in dedicated paintings—and fewer pointed explicitly to her political beliefs. The liaison with Trotsky did both. Although their romance only lasted several months, it offers a window into Kahlo’s politics and how deeply they influenced her work.
Kahlo and Trotsky first met in 1937, when the painter was 29 and the politician was 57. Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, were vocal supporters of Marxism and had been on-and-off members of the Mexican Communist Party for a decade, since 1927. Influenced by the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the century, they advocated for a populist government and believed political power should rest in the hands of the working class.
By the mid-1930s, Kahlo and Rivera both considered themselves Trotskyites. They’d followed the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism closely, and knew Trotsky as a hero of the 1917 October Uprising, which cemented Vladimir Lenin and the Socialist regime’s rise to dominance. But when Joseph Stalin assumed leadership in 1924, he consolidated power and demoted Trotsky, exiling him for good in 1929. As a result, the Communist party fractured into two main camps: Stalinists and Trotskyites.
It was Rivera who convinced Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer Trotsky political asylum in Mexico. After several years in Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova boarded an oil tanker and docked in Tampico, Mexico on January 9, 1937. Rivera was sick, so Kahlo greeted them at the port, along with a troop of armed guards.
Kahlo and Rivera offered the Trotskys their second home, the now famed Casa Azul, equipping it with guards, barricades, covered windows, and alarm systems to ensure their political hero’s safety. Sedova recalled the beginnings of the trip fondly in a letter to friends: “We were breathing purified air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cacti to the suburbs of Mexico City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, collections of Pre-Columbian art, paintings from all over: we were on a new planet, in Rivera’s house.”
It wasn’t long after the Russian couple settled in that a romance developed between Kahlo and Trotsky. The politician’s secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, remembered the pair’s blatant flirtations under the nose of Trotsky’s wife. Sedova didn’t understand English, the language in which the lovers communicated. They met clandestinely at Kahlo’s sister’s house, and Trotsky slipped love notes into books he lent her. Kahlo and Trotsky’s meek attempts at discretion didn’t prevent Sedova from discovering the affair. She gave her husband a “me-or-her ultimatum. It seems that Kahlo tired of the romance around the same time. Despite their split, the two remained friends for some time until Trotsky’s murder.
Rivera, Trotsky and Kalho were among the strangest ménages à trois in History. Rivera, a bloated, mendacious, and ferociously unattractive braggart, brought 3rd world fingerpainting to a high level. Kalho, an omnisexual weirdo, had some talent but has been vastly overrated. Trotsky was an unrepentant and twisted ideologue. His meeting with that ice-axe was well-deserved.
ReplyDeleteAmen
DeleteRight, I remember it as being an ice-axe. Way better than an ice pick.
DeleteMike, you forgot to mention Kahlo's ugly mustache.
DeleteI got to see an exhibition of her work at the Philbrook in Tulsa this summer and "vastly overrated" seem pretty accurate.
DeleteAs a Stalinist acquaintance once told me, "A chicken in every pot, and an ice pick in every Trot!"
ReplyDeleteAn affair between two really ugly people isn't something people should care about. I'd rather watch 2 hyenas mate.
ReplyDeleteShe was also a practitioner of the uni-brow.
ReplyDeleteThere is a restaurant in overland Park named for her. Food is not great.
ReplyDeleteYou could say the same for him. She looks like she had a dick.
ReplyDeleteKlaus
“Kahlo and Rivera offered the Trotskys their second home, the now famed Casa Azul, equipping it with guards, barricades, covered windows, and alarm systems to ensure their political hero’s safety. Sedova recalled the beginnings of the trip fondly in a letter to friends: ‘We were breathing purified air…A motorcar…carried us across the fields of palms and cacti to the suburbs of Mexico City; a blue house, a patio filled with plants, airy rooms, collections of Pre-Columbian art, paintings from all over: we were on a new planet, in Rivera’s house.’”
ReplyDeleteYup, communism is for the working class, not for the vanguard and the important people. Think how many comrade Mexican peasants they could have housed instead of the Trotskys. Limousine “liberals” is a phenomenon from the early days.
The whole "working class" shtick is a weak dodge to avoid the use of the word "employee". It's pretty hard to be "working", whatever your class may be, if you don't have an employer. Unless the latter is a capitalist, you're talking about the state as the employer and if a person were to stop to think for even a second about the eventuality of all employment being provided by the state or at the state's discretion, it shouldn't be hard to foresee a future of serfdom under the state.
DeleteSimply put, a "worker" is an employee...but the Leftist in the media and government will rarely refer to groups of people as employees - they'll almost always say "workers".
airbrushed her moustache. woman had an unhealing wound onnher side, probably from El Gordo Diego
ReplyDelete