What Did Frida Kahlo Sound Like? This Mysterious Recording May Tell Us

Frida Kahlo is best known for her unibrowed face, extravagant clothes and overall unique style made famous by the myriad self-portraits she produced. You would think that, having died in 1954, Kahlo would have had plenty of time to go on radio talk shows, television, or anything that would have recorded her voice. However, for many years it was believed her voice had died with her. Now, thanks to the National Sound Library of Mexico, we may very well have a 1-minute, 29 second clip of the Mexican painter’s voice.

The recording features a woman reading from Kahlo’s essay “Portrait of Diego,” which was written as part of a retrospective for her husband, Diego Rivera’s 50 years of artwork. The library believes this could be the first known recording of Frida Kahlo’s voice, a recording made, possibly in 1953 or 1954, for the pilot episode of “El Bachiller.” The show was named after Álvaro Gálvez y Fuentes, aka El Bachiller or “The Bachelor,” “the main documentalist of the voices of his time.” Thanks to many of El Bachiller’s recordings, we now know what many important Mexican artists, writers, and poets sounded like, including Diego Rivera and his rival painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

“He is a gigantic, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze,” the recording says in Spanish. Here’s more of what the recording of the reading says as translated by Agence France-Presse. “With an Asiatic head from which dark hair grows, so thin and fine that it appears to float in the air, he is a gigantic, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze,” what is thought to be Kahlo’s voice reads liltingly, in Spanish.
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“His high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost come out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids — like a toad’s. They allow his gaze to take in a much wider visual field, as if they were built especially for a painter of large spaces and crowds.”

Though Frida was an artist in her own right, appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine and having had exhibits of her work all over the world, she was still overshadowed by her husband, one of Mexico’s best and most important muralists, for most of her lifetime. In the 1970’s, an international fascination with Frida kindled new studies on her life and work.

The Library’s director, Pável Granados assures many people go in looking to hear recordings of her voice but to no avail. Now, however, this could finally change.
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