Frida Kahlo‘s work flows in the opposite direction of her life: while the painter’s canvases gained worldwide recognition, inside, she was sinking into a vortex that enveloped her in a decadent spiral from which she was never again able to emerge.
Today Frida’s life is well known, studied, and disseminated through temporary exhibitions, tributes, student works, or new admirers of her work. Rivera’s constant deceptions, the years she spent bedridden, and the refuge she always found in the painting are public knowledge. The strength of her work, the biographies, and the accounts of close personalities help to build the dramatic vision of the painter presented to the world. But never before has the hell of her handwriting been as widely known as it is today.
Frida met Leo Eloesser in San Francisco, one of the more than 30 times she underwent surgery following the streetcar accident that changed her life forever. The relationship between the two went beyond the professional, and soon Kahlo and Eloesser became close friends. Not only that, the doctor’s attentive listening captivated Frida, who placed all her trust in him and with it, all her demons.
Years after Kahlo died in 1956, Diego Rivera exercised his right to keep her memoirs. In his last days, Diego kept the relics he considered most valuable in a trunk and instructed that it was not to be opened until 15 years after his death.
Ennobled as a martyr of art, misogyny, and a symbol of a life full of misfortunes by public opinion, Kahlo still keeps the last word before the media storm that her name means today. Among her memoirs, dozens of letters written to Leo Eloesse between 1932 and 1951 give an account of what the painter felt in the hardest moments of her life, especially after leaving Mexico and during the last years of her marriage to Rivera.
In 1931, with Mexican muralism buried by the political faction in power, Rivera left for the United States, and Frida went with him. Frida’s depression, caused by the miscarriage she suffered a year earlier, coupled with the couple’s stay in Detroit and the dissonance caused by the American way of life, began a gray and uncertain period from which she could never escape.
Kahlo rallied and returned to the canvas in early 1932, only to fall into a deeper depression after a second failed attempt to conceive a child in Detroit. The pain and sadness, captured in The Flying Bed (1932) are complemented by the missives she sent to the doctor at the time:
“I was so excited to have a little Dieguito that I cried a lot, but now that it happened to me I have no choice but to put up with it.” Despite the sadness of her two miscarriages, Kahlo took refuge more than ever in her works and turned to her artistic work. The Detroit period left the traits that catapulted Frida to fame, always with the promise of a more promising future but immersed in tragedy. On November 13, 1934, the painter detailed her situation to Leo Eleosse in a letter:
“I think that by working I will forget my sorrows, and I will be a little happier. There are days when I don’t even feel like moving from a chair, but there are others when I get more courage, and I’ve managed to paint a little picture, and now I’m painting a portrait. I hope that soon the stupid neurasthenia I have will go away, and I will be able to go back to my normal life…”.
The painter returned to Mexico and went through the hardest moments of her life: her first disagreement with Rivera that led to their separation, the disappointment of learning of her infidelity with her sister, the unbearable pain of her broken spine, and a case of gangrene that led to the amputation of a leg. In 1944, Kahlo wrote again to Leo about her constant ailments, a brief and fortunately premonitory missive:
“Hey, lindo: this time that you come, for whatever you want most in this life, explain to me what kind of ‘chingadera’ I have and if it has any relief or is going to end up with me anyway.”
Behind this subtle display of courage, sincerity, and daring, Frida spent the last decade of her life between health problems and a broken heart. She was able to attend the only solo exhibition of her work in a hospital bed. She wrote in her diary the last words before passing: “I joyfully await departure and hope never to return.”
The paraphernalia that transformed Frida into a patented brand that profits from her image is the echo in resonances of a life that few could have understood as fully as Dr. Leo Eloesser, confidant, and friend of one of the most enigmatic painters of 20th-century art.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
