Because Frida was in love with Diego Rivera, she was peripheral to and accessory to the work of los tres grandes, the three great muralists of Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. The three ranged along a spectrum of positions on the left. Siqueros was a communist and a Stalinist. He was implicated in the attacks on Trotsky, and hustled out of the country when caught. Orozco was a pacifist, who lived an exemplary life with the woman he loved and married. Diego Rivera is somewhere in between. There have even been people who say he was a capitalist. His idea of “ongoing revolution” bears some resemblance to a notion of continual progress compatible with any political position.
One of the fun things about this site is that the computer occasionally assumes the m in fridamylove is a mistake and asks “Are you searching for Friday love?” The editor has never tried that option. What would Frida Say?
What accounts for the continuing popularity of Frida Kahlo? She was an outgoing, person who made friends everywhere she went, but her paintings show a person immensely able to examine her own psyche and explore the pain she lived with. She was intelligent and able to connect with the intelligent people of her generation, but passion ruled her life. It is interesting that she had an affair with Trotsky, and knew that he was murdered by an agent of the Kremlin, in the long reach of Stalin’s revenge or rivalry. Yet when she died, she left on her easel an unfinished portrait of Stalin. It is hard to understand how she could do that, but it suggests that she was not thinking critically about the variations of Communism in Europe.
