Yesterday, I wrote about the passing of Leni Riefenstahl, the breathtakingly talented, visionary filmmaker who made films used as propaganda by Nazi Germany. I said her death filled me with the same sort of ambivalence as would learning of the death of other artists whose lives and work served to mask, or apologize for, evil. I gave Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as an example, since they were artists who were similarly tainted.
Frida Kahlo's 1931 portrait of herself and her husband, Diego Rivera.
In response, one Don Phillipson wrote to tell me, "The trouble with this is that people who know Frida Kahlo never 'masked or apologised for evil' may suppose her name was mentioned merely to show off that you knew it." John Kusch chimed in, saying that "I'm interested in what this evil is that her work masked or apologized for. Not all of us are so well educated that we can nod sagely at such accusations, fully certain of their truth."
Well, I know something about Frida Kahlo. I think the problem is that documentary filmmakers (and worshipful art book authors) have long been in the habit of eliding the record of Stalinists, portraying them as merely "idealists" or mentioning their associations in passing. Like it was something sort of quaint and endearing, or even "politically incorrect." Then, of course, there was the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek. It was a highly romanticized biography of Frida Kahlo that garnered rave reviews, but almost completely glossed over the most enormously negative aspects of the woman's life and work.
(Frida and Diego at a Communist rally, 1934)
It's unthinkable that anyone would do such a thing had she been a Nazi and a lover to one of Hitler's inner circle. But such kid-glove treatment is pretty typical when it comes to Stalinists, I'm sorry to say.
As Washington Monthly wrote last year, "In 1936, [Diego] Rivera, a dedicated Trotskyite, used his clout to petition the Mexican government to give Trotsky and his wife asylum after they were forced out of Norway. Rivera and Kahlo put up the Trotskys in Kahlo's family home, where Kahlo seduced the older man."
(Historical note: Trotsky and his followers, the Trotskyites, were Communists who split with Stalin. Stalin eventually had most of them liquidated.)
(Detail of Diego Rivera's The Arsenal, 1928, celebrating Communist revolt
and showing Frida passing out arms.)
Although the Washington Monthly article (which, by the way, I found over at the Volokh Conspiracy) does not mention this, Frida and Diego were both under suspicion for taking part in Trotsky's assassination. The Mexican police eventually released them due to lack of evidence, but years later both of them frequently claimed to friends that they invited Trotsky to Mexico in order to help Stalin kill him. Whether they were joking or not is unclear. But, as Washington Monthly notes:
"After Trotsky was assassinated, however, Kahlo turned on her old lover with a vengeance, claiming in an interview that Trotsky was a coward and had stolen from her while he stayed in her house (which wasn't true). 'He irritated me from the time that he arrived with his pretentiousness, his pedantry because he thought he was a big deal' she said.
"Rarely is this unflattering detail included in the condensed Kahlo story. Nor is the fact that Kahlo turned on Trotsky because she had become a devout Stalinist. Kahlo continued to worship Stalin even after it had become common knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, not to mention Trotsky himself. One of Kahlo's last paintings was called 'Stalin and I,' and her diary is full of her adolescent scribblings ('Viva Stalin!') about Stalin and her desire to meet him."
One of Frida Kahlo's last paintings, 1954's Stalin and I.)
The great Mexican writer Octavio Paz, a Nobel laureate and one of Frida Kahlo's contemporaries, has said, "Diego and Frida ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study--and of repentance . . . the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin. The two of them betrayed their great gifts, and this can be seen in their painting. An artist may commit political errors and even common crimes, but the truly great artists--Villon or Pound, Caravaggio or Goya--pay for their mistakes and thereby redeem their art and their honor."
Both Frida and Diego died as unrepentant Stalinists, knowing of Stalin's crimes against humanity and, apparently, not caring.
Frida poses before one of her husband's unfinished murals,
entitled Workers of the World Unite.
Now we all know something about Frida Kahlo, don't we?
That's ok, Dean. I'm sure the apologists will come up with a Very Very Good Explanation... :)
And I'm sure, Dean, that even after you've laid all this out in the open, there will still be commenters who will suffer brain block and who just won't get it.
Excellent post Dean.
Good post. I think you accurately describe the mix of politics and art that infused Kahlo's and Rivera's lives.
What a nice, sanitized way of describing a publicist and apologist for one of the world's worst dictators... :)
Yeah, and she wound up being on US postage stamps, too... nice piece of work for a Stalinist! Great artist, lousy judge of character.
Well, now, wait a minute. Only a fraction of her personal output through her lifetime was overtly political, and, while one of her many lovers (aside from Trotsky) WAS a Soviet spy, we don't have any direct evidence that she herself was on the Soviet payroll.
Most of her art was not political propaganda. Most of it deals with personal issues, including medical problems she had, injuries she suffered as a child, and so on. Also, toward the last few years of her life, her childish clinging to Stalin, whose crimes were revealed only a few years before her death, may have had more to do with denial mixed with acute alcoholism and pain pill addiction, which is what killed her. She probably wasn't exactly in a rational state of mind toward the end there (you can see how badly her painting skills had deteriorated just looking at that 1954 portrait with Stalin as compared to her earlier work).
You should read that Washington Monthly piece I linked. It's really a very good overview of her life, and the politics of her life both before and after her death.
Dean -- thanks for the information. I know that your readers are waiting with baited breath for Stalin apologists to defend Kahlo and her various lovers, but I'm not one of them, so I'm happy to disappoint on that count.
There is a lot in Kahlo's art that speaks of empowering people, fighting tyrrany, and working for social justice. In Kahlo's time, Mexico was a corrupt country, where wealth bought power and many people lived in squalor, unable to own their own land, run their own businesses, or control their own fate. Women of the lower classes in Mexican culture had limited options. Kahlo's art spoke to that.
Also, it's funny that you talk about the Mexican police. Even today, they are notoriously corrupt and easy to bribe.
All that notwithstanding, Kahlo's support of Stalin is unsupportable. Stalin was a murderous dictator, just like Hitler was, just like Pol Pot was, just like Saddam Hussein was. To support a murderous dictator because of some abstract ideal -- whether socialist, communist or capitalist/democratic -- is folly.
Kahlo's mistake was to extend her politics beyond her scope of knowledge. When you try to abstract and idea and then apply it to a situation you have no firsthand knowledge of, how can you expect to be right? Kahlo's callous dismissal of Stalin's crimes belies a willful ignorance that I find eerily reflected in popular sentiments on Iraq today.
Thanks for the update-- I *had* wondered what you were going on about.
By coincidence, I was reading the following, from Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, the same morning I read your post:
"The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos' and added, enviously, that 'artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.' . . .
"As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class -- personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy -- are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them." p.416.
What he said. Nobody escapes responsibility, least of all artists.
Great post Dean! Very interesting. A great use of this medium. It's the sort of thing I'd like to do on my blog more often.
Nice light, Dean, into a dark corner.
FYI, Trotsky was killed (in Mexico) while working at his desk. The assassin came up from behind and hit him repeatedly on the head with an iron bar.
As someone who know a lot of "artist" types, and also "writer" and "poet" types in the midwestern city I live in, I am not at all shocked by what Dean's post had to say about Kalho or Rivera, or what one of the commens had to sy about Stockhausen. Except for a few, most of these artist poseurs are vapid, superficial, non-intellectual types, who would nt be able to see the hypocrisy in their stance if someone hit them obver the head with it.
This comment is directed at both this excellent Kahlo post and the one above, on Hollywood.
I've often wondered what draw communism/socialism has for artistic types. It is somewhat understandable in Mexico given the living conditions. But outside of perversely unfair living conditions it is quite hard for me to phathom.
For instance, I can see why Afghan women once embraced Communism. I can't see why Hollywood directors would. It seems very counter-intuitive. And the hypocrisy of using the capitalist system while expousing the benefits of communism (insert Picasso and others here) astounds me. And not from children or idealistic teens. From full grown adults.
I run in an artsy crowd. Am somewhat artsy myself and the degree to which Communism is idealized among these people is astounding. And I'm not talking about stupid people. I'm talking about people who are reasonably intelligent and educated and rational, until socialism or communism is the topic. Then they become rabid apologists. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard, "But communism has never been implemented properly," I'd be wealthy.
I don't get it. If any of you can direct me to some enlightening reading on this, I'd appreciate. It's like a puzzle I can't solve. Of course, maybe I can't solve it because logic doesn't work for me here. A 16 year old kid I worked with in a collaborative studio told me, "Art is irrational, so what do you expect." I don't see art as irrational, but maybe he has a point.
CBK
Am I the only person who notes the finger-painting quality of her "art"?
CBK,
Have you ever met a fully mature artist? I mean, an artsy type of person who is absolutely reliable and able to take care of business with dispatch?
I haven't - so, I go soft on artists; but I also demand that artists stand for freedom...so, I grind my teeth when I hear artists lauding whatever totalitarian beast happens to be popular at the moment.
Mark:
Go see a dentist then; artists are here to call it the way they see it. Tough shit if you (or I) don't agree.
Go see a dentist then; artists are here to call it the way they see it. Tough shit if you (or I) don't agree.
We're ALL here to call it the way we see it. I see most "art" as crap. Do you want to make something of it? :)
Well, my husband is a fully mature artist (except when he's sick ;) ). And yeah, I've met others. But they are few and far between. Most do tend to be self-centered and more concerned with feeling than fact.
Artists don't necessarily call things as they see it, Ara, the also call it as they wish it were or could be. Because art doesn't have to be about reality. In fact, rarely is about reality.
CBK
Go see a dentist then; artists are here to call it the way they see it. Tough shit if you (or I) don't agree.
Ara, look at the context that we're discussing this. We're not debating the merits of Andy Warhol. We're talking about the moral implications of glorifying a mass murderer. One can 'see' the Ukranian famine the way one sees the Holocaust - it might be artistic expression, but it's also reprehensible.
CBK,
So, how long a spell on the rack did it take to turn your artist husband into a responsible person?
Kidding!!!
Delighted to hear that there are at least a few artists who can act responsibly.
Ara,
George beat me to it - but thats the essential: I don't care what the artist says, but an artist in order to be a true artist, must be absolutely committed to freedom...to use one's art as a tool for totalitarian propaganda is to negate all that art is supposed to be.
I posted this on Sheila O'Malley's blog, where she commented on your post here; I wrote most of this before I read the comments here. I am glad to see Dean's further elaboration about Kahlo's work and the end of her life, as well as John's note of Mexico in Kahlo's time, both of which are important points to consider when looking at Kahlo's work and politics. I was a little hard on Dean below, writing before I read the comments here. I also was writing in response to what Sheila wrote more so than what Dean wrote above but I think my points are relevant here, too.
---
I'm a big fan of Frida Kahlo. I wasn't impressed by the Frida movie (but I saw it on an airplane); it was breezy and superfical, missed a lot of stuff, including her art, which is as much of a crime (if not more so) than glossing over her politics. In my opinion the movie did not do justice to the whole of her life. How can you show the complexities in a Hollywood movie, especially realizing how complex this woman's life in particular was? What we got was a scratching of the surface. There is a better movie yet to be made out there.
I'm not a fan of Kahlo's because of her politics - in a sense they are an irrelevance. As Jonathan Richman once sang, "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole," and apparently he was one hell of an asshole. If I limited my appreciation of art, music, creative work to those who shared my politics, I'd have a very bland outlook.
I think the guy at the Oscars was wrong; Frida is dead, she has no opinion on anything going on today. No one ever gets it right when they attempt to speak for the dead. If your man didn't have the courage to speak out against the war in his own voice, he shouldn't have tried to use Frida's.
I think Dean is anti-Communist and that fuels his position against Frida; his post read to me as someone whose bottom line is his politics: "if they are communists I have no time for them." That's fair enough, that's his right. But his quote from Octavio Paz gives a better perspective: "The great Mexican writer Octavio Paz, a Nobel laureate and one of Frida Kahlo's contemporaries, has said, "Diego and Frida ought not to be subjects of beatification but objects of study--and of repentance . . . the weaknesses, taints, and defects that show up in the works of Diego and Frida are moral in origin. The two of them betrayed their great gifts, and this can be seen in their painting. An artist may commit political errors and even common crimes, but the truly great artists--Villon or Pound, Caravaggio or Goya--pay for their mistakes and thereby redeem their art and their honor."
Frida's art moves me. I relate to it, I connect with it. I've read biographies of her (which did not seem to me to hide her politics as Dean suggests), I've studied her. At the end of her life, when her 'adolescent scribblings about Stalin' were written and the portrait of herself and Stalin was painted, she was extremely ill. You can see that in the painting itself, which looks as broken and physically tortured as she herself, bedridden and immobile, was. Her life was confused, all over the place, twisted, tortured, warped, physically and mentally. It's all there, in her paintings, and I am not surprised that it is there in her politics, too. You must also understand some of Mexican history at the time she lived to see why she and Diego came to hold the politics they did. Does any of this excuse their beliefs? Do they need to be excused?
Knowing more about Kahlo gives more depth to her paintings, just as knowing about Tennessee Williams or Ernest Hemingway contextualizes their work and brings a deeper understanding of why they were saying what they said. In both cases that knowledge can both add to and detract from their work. This goes for all artists, of any stripe. Paz argues for a deeper study and understanding of Rivera and Kahlo, and he is right. The Cult of Kahlo is not enough; her art is powerful and her life condensed can be 'beatified' but that's the easy way out. What is the mainstream but the easy way out, however?
Dean's opinion shows more about himself than it does about Kahlo and her opinions. It is quite possible that Kahlo's politics are not made much of not because people want to hide them away or make little of them, but because in the context of her importance they are beside the point. The art is what we are looking at, and the politics are all there. It is also possible that, knowing her politics, when we look at her art, and study it, we can learn from their 'weaknesses, taints, and defects'.
---
I'm not apologizing for Kahlo's support of Stalin. Because I appreciate her art does not mean I agree with her politics. Life isn't so simple and if there's one thing I understand from her art that's it.
Thank you for your time.
Not bad, Carrie.
Not bad at all...
(quick! what movie is that quote from!? heh)
Casey
Carrie,
The problem comes in when people like Kahlo are presented as some sort of heroic icon...like the near-deification of Che Guevera...a rather insane, half-educted murderer who, apparantly on the strength of a romantic photograph, has been transformed into an all-encompassing symbol of resistence to oppression by people who gloss over the number of people Che murdered....
Her art has that "socialist realism" look about it (where everyone is looking off into the distance; why is that? Did somebody cut one? ...ed note, yes, that joke is stolen...) which, in my view, makes it worthless propaganda...Nazi art frequently looked like that, but we don't present it today, nor do we laud its practitioners.
There is, in the end, nothing worthwhile to learn from such people - it doesn't matter that you might be able to show the person was unbalanced by certain things; we don't listen to insane people, either. The left, all of it in its entirety, is and was and always will be distilled evil. As we have written the Nazis out of the book of civilized humanity so, too, should we write the leftists out - they are an aberration, a sickness, a cancer on the human body politic.
robroy: "most of these artist poseurs are vapid, superficial, non-intellectual types," [etc.]
As opposed to (say) a solid, deep, intellectual as yourself? I don't want to sound like I'm attacking you, but don't you think that is, at least, overbroad?
CBK: "I've often wondered what draw communism/socialism has for artistic types... If any of you can direct me to some enlightening reading on this, I'd appreciate. It's like a puzzle I can't solve.
I think I can answer your question. You first mistake is listening to a 16-year-old... :) She/he was completely wrong to say that "art is irrational." Art deals with symbols, and (hence) must address at some level a rational translation of those symbols into personal experience.
Actually, you have the (beginning) of the answer already in your reference to "the degree to which Communism is idealized among [artists]."
The answer lies in the word "Idealism." This hearkens back to the Platonic concept of the world of the Ideal; the world of perfect form.
Platonic Idealism lies at the very core of Western Civilization's ideology of progress: to approach, and then embrace a perfect world. A world where there is no evil, no ugliness, no imperfection. By derivation, this is the world both of King's Dream, and Lennon's Imagine. A world where the human condition is perfectible.
This is exactly why Communism has been so popular, and why intellectuals find it so attractive.
As a rule, 20th Century intellectuals have been, if not anti-religious, at least areligious. Very few have embraced Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. I feel that this is due to a self-imposed division between "rationality" and "faith." It is not necessarily irrational to have faith in something. In fact, it was faith in the lawfulness of God's Creation that helped establish the scientific model. There can be no rational inquiry, no progress, if there is no order.
Communism filled the gap for the rationalists who rejected religion. In fact, many observers have claimed that Communism is a secular religion. There is no God, but there is a prophet (Marx), a dogma (The Manifesto), saints (Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao), and a schism (Trotskyism vs. Stalinism, Stalinism vs. Maoism).
This is why Communism is so attractive to artists. Since they are already oriented towards to Platonic Idealism, it follows that they prefer rationality over faith.
They can indulge the human need for certainty, guidance, and order, without the use of faith.
So, CBK, I ask you: can you now understand why artists find Communism so seductive?
Mark, are you not talking about Diego Rivera's work, rather than Kahlo's, when you speak of 'social realism' and 'staring off into the distance'? From your descriptions and comparison of Kahlo's work towards similarities with Nazi propaganda art, I can only conclude you haven't seen many of her paintings; if you're going on what Dean posted here - one of which is her standing in front of a Rivera mural - you're not basing your opinion on even a thimbleful of representation. Go look at her paintings first before you condemn her work as 'worthless propaganda'. You'll see how silly that sounds - especially given the bulk of her work was self protrait. What was she propagandising, when she painted herself and her monkey and cat?
Your casual dismissal of so much humanity - certainly when coupled with a display of ignorance about one person in particular you are all too willing to dismiss on the word of her politics - is something I cannot - and will not take seriously. It's the sort of thing that leads towards exact what you are claiming to hate.
I think it's a bit easy to just shrug and say that all artists are mush-mouthed dimwits, or that most art is carp, or that Frieda Kahlo's paintings have a fingerpainting quality about them. Could you replicate one of her paintings?
Any art, like any vocation, requires training and skill. That doesn't necessarily translate to a realistic or well-formed political world-view. I know lawyers who think that all public utilities and government services should be privatized, despite the social chaos and economic inequality that would cause. They want all private schools, no public. They want an end to all entitlement programs and safety nets. I would not call that a well-formed world-view.
The issue is personal experience. It's easy to say "FLAT TAX!" when you've never been poor, and it's easy to say "COMMUNISM!" when you've never been truly oppressed.
John, John, John, your blatant prejudices are showing, ma boy... :)
Of course, in your world view, anyone who believes in private enterprise or tax reform is (apparently) an unfeeling rich SOB.
Pity this isn't the case... {grin}
Actually, I'm not sure that (very specifically) utilities like electricity and water can be truly privatized in our culture. If nothing else, they would be whipsawed back and forth between "GOUGERS!!" AND "SOCIALIST/WASTRELS!!" whenever there is a scarcity or a glut.
Also, it depends on what you mean by "private" school. Todays public schools are, really, subject to a terrible degree of micromanagement from county, state, and federal levels. Me, I think we should let a local community decide what's good for their kids. Yes, you'll get some terrible local abuses, but can you say that federally-mandated programs are any better? The more we regulate schools, the worse things get. Check out how overall scores are generally trending down; examine all the examples of high school students who couldn't (for example) place Haiti on a map even after Clinton's intervention there; recall the pathetic position of American students on a worldwide scale.
Shit, the politically-correct Left (please don't claim it's the conservatives) are castrating great literature because it's "offensive," such as the word "nigger" in Huck Finn... If you leave control at the local level, you can avoid a lot of that.
(ok, I'll admit that most conservatives have a problem with certain issues, like gay rights. Give 'em time; they're still getting used to not saying "Negro," ok?* But seriously, there are conservatives (like Jonah Goldberg) who have been arguing that it is in the best interest of conservatives to at least agree to civil unions for gay/lesbian pairs, and I doubt you have a good idea of how much abuse they've had to take for saying things like that...)
*Ok, a cheap shot. Most leading-edge conservatives really are for a truly color-blind society, which I find rather ironic. :)
hey im a hot sexy strong young man looking for a female like Frieda Kahlo. any takers?