FRIDA KAHLO’S BIOGRAPHY describes her attitude toward marriage to Diego Rivera as progressing from blissfully bourgeois, to vengefully dishonest, and ultimately to comradely complacent. The chronology of her marriage coincides significantly with her development as an artist. When she was considered an adoring wife, her painting was presumed to be a hobby; disillusioned by marital infidelity, her creative work became a career; and concurrent with accepting the particularities of her relationship with Rivera, her painted production came to be considered a commemoration of their personal and political partnership. Kahlo’s self-portraits generally are treated as autobiography, with the artist as author who “wrote” her life story with paint and brush. Thus some paintings are interpreted as shedding light on the emotional development of her marriage and the progression of her professional career. In this chapter, I assert that in postrevolutionary Mexico the social category of artist generally was a masculine one and that Kahlo crossed a gendered boundary between wife and artist. Interpretations of her paintings thereby inscribe gendered social prescriptions. The point of my analysis is not to contest biographic readings of Kahlo’s paintings or to dispute the evolution of her marriage to Rivera but rather to examine how her autobiographical self-portraits offer a vehicle for critical insight into social/historical contexts in which Kahlo negotiated a role between the categories of wife and artist. I demonstrate where paradigmatic gendered boundaries alternately have been inscribed, resisted, and transgressed in interpretations of the paintings. And I consider the ways in which Kahlo’s creative productions signify complex social mediations at the point of production as well as interpretation.

      Frida and Diego Rivera (figure 1), produced in 1931 after two years of marriage, generally has been interpreted as a wedding portrait showing that Kahlo embraced the role of a nurturing wife who set up the household, cooked, and delivered Rivera’s meals while he worked, sometimes around the clock, on large-scale commissioned mural paintings. Robin Richmond asserts that Kahlo painted infrequently just after the marriage because, as she traveled with Rivera, she focused on “being his decorative consort and learning how to cook.”¹ In her view, “Diego is the huge untameable [sic] bear of a painter, while she sees herself as the tiny-footed, docile dove, hardly able to contain his massive energy in her little hand.”² Rivera’s “massive energy” can be considered literally to refer to his passionate drive to paint murals. Or it can be considered metaphorically to corroborate Hayden Herrera’s contention that the double portrait foreshadows the nature of their relationship as Kahlo first grew intolerant of, then later assented to, his infidelity.³ Analyses of the composition presume to identify Kahlo’s thoughts and propose that the artist intended to document her private emotions.

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

      Figure 1. Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931. Oil on canvas, 39⅛″ × 31″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.

      In her discussion of the 1931 painting, Herrera cites a statement that Kahlo made in a 1950 interview: “I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody’s husband and never will be.” Herrera suggests that the quotation is relevant to the painting in that Kahlo suspected Rivera’s philanderous nature early in their marriage and accordingly portrayed the couple’s hands “in the lightest possible grasp” to signify that Rivera was “unpossessable.”⁴ Herrera proceeds, in her description of the painting, to compose character analyses of both husband and wife, arguing that because Kahlo placed the couple’s hands in “the exact center of her wedding portrait,” the painting indicates that the “pivot of Frida Kahlo’s life was the marriage bond.”⁵ Herrera thereby infers that the painting illustrates Kahlo’s feelings toward Rivera and her marriage and that she narrowed her identity to a strictly domestic persona. Conversely, Herrera describes Rivera in association with his painting career, a significant public role: “As firmly planted as an oak, Rivera looks immense next to his bride. Turning away from her, he brandishes his palette and brushes—he is the great maestro. Frida . . . cocks her head and reaches toward her monumental mate. She plays the role she liked best: the genius’s adoring wife.”⁶ Herrera’s interpretation emphasizes the distinction between husband and wife. Rivera is active; he not merely holds but “brandishes” his palette and brushes. Kahlo is comparatively passive, her movement tentative or incomplete—she “cocks her head” and “reaches toward” rather than firmly looking and grabbing hold. Herrera’s interpretation is saturated with gender stereotypes. Rivera is “the great maestro”; Kahlo is “the genius’s adoring wife.” Herrera also suggests that Kahlo “has given the general outline of herself and Diego the same shape as the initial carved on Diego’s belt buckle—the letter D,” insinuating that Kahlo metaphorically surrendered her individuality to sustain his.⁷ Herrera applies a masculine stereotype to characterize Rivera’s self-promoted, exaggerated machismo in terms of both his profession and his libido, and she uses a feminine stereotype to ascribe a domestic role for Kahlo. However, in so doing, she contradicts her own account of Kahlo’s overt challenges to prescribed feminine behavior.

      Beginning in 1922, Rivera aggressively sought Mexican government commissions to execute large-scale murals. The mural program was initiated by minister of education José Vasconcelos, who championed having Mexico’s history painted on the walls of public buildings as a means to teach an illiterate, uneducated labor force in urban Mexico.⁸ At first, numerous artists were employed; eighteen muralists secured commissions, and they, in turn, hired assistant painters and craftspeople. But the government program soon abated during the 1923–24 presidential campaign as politicians explicitly disassociated themselves from the communist philosophies that many muralists promoted. After the election, only Rivera continued to receive commissions. He became internationally acclaimed and was a veritable tourist attraction from 1923 to 1927, as he worked on the three-story patio walls of the Ministry of Public Education Building. Although political and critical debate over the artistic merit and content of his murals consistently grew, his commission was endorsed financially until the murals were completed. Word of his long work days and large-scale projects fed his mythic status as a powerful artist who literally devoted himself to producing art that championed national unity. He incorporated the precolonial past and indigenous peoples into a pictorial narrative of Mexico’s history without backing down to political criticisms of his work. In addition to his artistic virility and political conviction, Rivera’s reputation was based on his ruthless temper, competitive drive, and renowned womanizing. In short, he appeared to epitomize the stereotypes of masculine artist and Mexican machismo by being professionally ambitious, sexually aggressive, and politically outspoken.⁹ The binary relationship of husband and wife assigns women the opposite qualities, seeing them as passive, faithfully submissive, and domestic.

      By Herrera’s account, Kahlo did not embrace these feminine qualities. She was fiercely independent before her marriage to Rivera and had consciously