Immortal
I had heard of Frida Kahlo, but had not seen her paintings or known that she was in Paris for a showing of them, included in the prestigious exhibit of Surrealists organized by Andre Breton. That was mostly Breton’s fault. He had met her in Mexico two years previously, in 1937, and spoke about her with such admiration that I was certain that he had been smitten by more than her art. Breton usually did some interesting things, but this exhibition was horribly organized, completely out of control. He hadn’t even secured a gallery until well after the date written on my calendar for the opening, and so I was not well disposed to attend when I finally received the notice.
But I knew the work of several of the artists exhibiting at the show and was friendly with most of them, and would have likely gone even had I not been obliged by my acquaintance with Duchamp’s lady friend Mary Renyolds. It was Marcel Duchamp who introduced me to Frida, after he told me that she was a genius and a Mexican and a surrealist. “I know Diego Rivera’s work,” I told him. “Mexican communist, far too good for his ideology.”
Marcel handed me a glass of champagne. “Frida is his wife. But you must come and see the show tomorrow. I think you will be surprised. Besides, I have a piece and Mary will be there.”
I sighed. A wife, with some ambition and, no doubt, some very minor talent. A good relationship with Rivera was worth hanging a few of his wife’s canvases, but I knew there would be nothing positive I could say about them. Still, a new piece from Duchamp was an event and probably worthy of an article all on its own.
From time to time, I would write some pieces on art for a current magazine. I can no longer paint, so to write about art is the closest I can come to producing it again. Though the essays were infrequent and the magazine had only a small circulation, they had garnered me something of a reputation as a critic. I found it quite distressing. In my own time I had been well received by the critics, but my time had been long ago. For decades at a time I avoided galleries and paintings because they made me sad in a distant, detached way. At times, looking made me remember what I had had and what I had chosen to give away. Still, that misery was less than the melancholy tht had threatened to kill me many times before debt and prison did the job for them.
“No, no Adam, Frida is not just a wife,” Duchamp insisted again when I arrived at the opening. “She is herself a painter, a brilliant painter in her own right. Nothing like Diego. Come, her canvases are hung just over there.”
He led me around a corner, and then I was struck by the most powerful paintings I had seen in almost a century, and it had been a great century for art. It was not the color or the design that entranced me, but the pain, the power, and the delicate balance between mortality and eternity. The unwavering strength of her gaze looked out through the bonds of torment and the victor all at once.
All the paintings were about women, women splattered with ruby blood lying in ochre beds while men watched, women surrounded by scarlet hearts and pale blue tubes and the steel gray paraphernalia of death, women’s faces on the bodies of babies and animals. But the most frightening, most arresting, were the women alone, rendered in colors that seared the brain, their gaze staring out, challenging the viewer. These women were all one woman, all with a singular face, angry and proud and intelligent and in pain.
The colors were frightening, pink and green and red jostling each in madness that still was harmonious. I did not know how she had done this, and I had been considered a good colorist. While her palette was clear and bright, the overall effect was neither happy or naïve. These paintings screamed with rage, with power, the women unseen by men, the Mexico unseen by Europe.
For four hundred years I have worshipped art. True art, the expression of spirit, the communication from a soul I no longer possess, is the one thing that has never lost the power to move me. I have loved in the shadows and at the edges of humanity, and in this long time I have come to feel distance from the truly living. But when I see a painting that speaks beyond the senses, that expresses the desires of an existence I have almost forgotten, then I come closest to the life that I have lost.
Indeed, the revelation of a truly great work will nourish me as deeply as blood. Blood is life, it is true, but so is art. Some very few others of my kind understand this.
And since art, like blood, comes from the center of livingness itself, our kind cannot produce it. It appears that whatever creativity or talent we had in life remains below when we rise from the grave. Oh, we have not lost the techniques, can paint perfectly good copies or play an instrument with great skill. But since we do not have pain, we cannot express longing to be free of it, nor, unburdened by mortality, can we create a response to survive an inevitable death.
These paintings that hung before me, these were the most vivid, most stunningly living images I had ever viewed. All of what it was to be human was contained, everything of fear and desire, of suffering and the desire to be immortal. To be remembered.
How long I stood before them, transfixed, I do not know. Only that Duchamp broke my communion by ushering over the subject of the portraits that had consumed me.
In the flesh, Frida Kahlo was as powerful as her work. Even she herself could capture only a pale imitation of her intensity in her eyes. I was shocked at how tiny she was, and thought that so much passion, so much fire condensed into so small a frame could only result in a volcano.
She wore the colors of a volcano, large yellow and blue flowers in her braided hair, and her blouse and shawl were embroidered with vines and trees and birds. A volcano at rest, seething underneath, Vesuvius biding its time to explode again. She was the only being in the room wrapped in red and green instead of the ubiquitous black, like a Madonna amid the saints.
“Frida, may I present Adam Mersel?” Duchamp was saying. “Adam is our conscience, which is to say, he will scald any painter whom he does not regard as honest. Unfortunately, we are all a passel of rogues. But we are fortunate that he is too erudite to descend from the Olympus of his taste to berate us for our inadequacies too often. So we invite him and keep his glass full and introduce him to the most beautiful women in the hopes that he will be too busy to write another one of his cruel and brilliant reviews.”
“Marcel, I protest,” I exclaimed. I would have said more had Frida not laughed just then.
“Well, then,” she said, slipping a delicate hand over my elbow, “we shall have to make certain that you are suitably convinced that all dishonesty among the artists here is only in bed and never on canvas. So tell me, honestly, what do you think?”
I drew a deep breath and stared deep into those burning eyes. “I think that yours is the most brutal and terrifying and utterly unforgiving work I have ever seen. It is also among the most beautiful.”
She searched my face for something, some hint that I was merely flattering her or lying.
“I have been accused of many things, and most of them are true,” I told her. “But I have never, in any way, been less than perfectly candid in my opnions about art. Ask Duchamp, if you like.”
“You would not be kind to a woman because you wished to seduce her?” Her voice was merely curious; there was no hint of judgment in her tone.
It was my turn to laugh. “I have rarely been called kind, and have never noticed that it would help a seduction in any case. No, if I want to seduce a woman I might flatter her beauty, but not her work. Usually it is best not to speak at all,” I told her. Strange, I thought at the time, that I felt so free to speak with candor.
“Yes,” she agreed thoughtfully. “Yes, you are right.” And then she laughed, rich and raucous, and grabbed two glasses of champagne from the waiter. She tossed one down her throat and raised an eyebrow when I did not do the same.
“Is there tequila in Paris, M. Mersel?” she demanded.
“There must be,” I answered carefully. “Everything eventually