The Wound and the Brush

By R.Z. Sheppard

FRIDA by Hayden Herrera; Harper & Row; 507 pages; $21.95

Frida, a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), is a mesmerizing story of radical art, romantic politics, bizarre loves and physical suffering that raises the question, Why hasn't someone told it all before? Part of the answer is that Kahlo was the wife of Diego Rivera, the muralist and cultural provocateur who overshadowed nearly everybody and everything he touched. He would, in fact, have dominated this book about his wife if Biographer and New York Art Critic Hayden Herrera had not put him in his place.

Rivera was both Kahlo's hero and her baby, a relationship that endured through their marriage, divorce, remarriage and intervening separations. The 300-lb. painter can be summed up in a series of lingering images: a robust hulk on a scaffold, applying bright Marxist idealizations to the walls of public buildings; a blustery reveler brandishing a revolver to ensure attention; a celebrated philanderer openly displaying his conquests; and a monumental infant seated in a bathtub full of floating toys while Frida lathers his plump breasts.

Kahlo was no passive victim of her husband's machismo. She was a tiny, tough-mouthed daughter of a photographer of Hungarian-Jewish descent and a strikingly attractive woman from Oaxaca. Frida herself had a gamy beauty that drew lovers of both sexes. There seem to have been dozens of them, including Sculptor Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary who died in Mexico shortly after a Stalinist agent put the point of an ice ax through his head. Frida initiated the affair with Trotsky, not because she found "Piochitas" (little goatee) attractive but because she thought the trysts would be the perfect response to Rivera's fling with her sister.

To friends, Rivera and Kahlo were known as "sacred monsters," symbols of "the race" that would be reborn in Communism. Pistol-packing Diego trooped about in work shoes, and Frida in elaborate peasant skirts and blouses, her hair bound with ribbons, her fingers weighted with rings. But the finery hid terrible wounds. In 1925 a bus carrying Kahlo was struck by a trolley car. Rescuers found the 18-year-old girl impaled on an iron rod, her pelvis smashed, a foot mangled and her spine bent to nearly a right angle. Frida endured more than 30 operations in her lifetime. None of them stopped the degeneration of her bones. At times she lived in braces, surgical corsets and wheelchairs, paraphernalia she transformed on canvas with a macabre vibrancy.

Physical and emotional pain became Kahlo's principal subject. She painted herself skewered, split, trussed and as a deer bristling with arrows. She was no sentimentalist. In 1938 Clare Boothe Luce, then managing editor of Vanity Fair, asked Kahlo to paint a memorial portrait of a friend who had jumped from a New York hotel window. The artist complied with a depiction of the woman simultaneously leaping, falling and finally lying dead on the pavement.

Kahlo's style was a hybrid of classical, modern and Mexican folk art. She was an impressive colorist and a meticulous technician. Some of her pictures look like blowups of the tortured figures that inhabit the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Rivera claimed that she had a bigger talent than his, a judgment that Herrera endorses. Wassily Kandinsky is said to have wept with emotion when he saw Frida's pictures in Paris. An admiring Picasso gave her earrings, and Andre Breton proclaimed her a fellow surrealist. It was a label accepted as expedient, although privately she dismissed surrealism as "a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art" and its chief theoretician as "pretentious, feckless and boring." Edward G. Robinson said nothing notable but bought four of Kahlo's pictures for $200 each.

Frida's author sensibly refrains from underscoring the political naivete of the artist and her circle. The archives, letters and memories of aging witnesses speak for themselves, and the familiar message is not hard to decipher: regardless of ideology, the rich, the talented and the powerful usually prefer to associate with each other rather than with the masses on whose behalf they argue so passionately. Kahlo's upper bohemian world had more than its share of radical chic and hypocrisy. Rivera painted murals for capitalists, and Frida disdained "Gringolandia" but sought her serious medical care in New York City.

Herrera resolves Kahlo the public figure and Kahlo the artist in a perceptive portrait of a woman who rose above a circumscribed content with a grand style. Even her funeral seems to have been an extension of a will to startle and amaze. As Kahlo's body was rolled toward the open crematory furnace, mourners surged forward to pull the rings from her fingers. "At the moment when Frida entered the furnace," writes Herrera, "the intense heat made her sit up, and her blazing hair stood out from her face in an aureole." She was a woman who knew how to make an entrance and an exit.

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.