After spending her childhood in Mexico under the influence of Frida Kahlo, the writer Jennifer Clement reflects on how she carried the artist’s revolutionary spirit into the high-octane counter-culture of Eighties New York
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE SAN ÁNGEL NEIGHBOURHOOD OF Mexico City in the Sixties, the Studio House – where Frida Kahlo lived with Diego Rivera – was my second home. Most afternoons after school, I’d go there to see my best friend Ruth María, Rivera’s granddaughter, who lived there after her grandfather’s death. The presence of Kahlo and Rivera, great artists and lovers, whose legendary passion led them to marry and divorce twice, inhabited the rooms. I was encircled by the smell of oil paints, which still lay out in used tubes alongside brushes and bottles of turpentine. Rivera’s death mask cast in bronze lay on a table. His face was there for all of us to look at, and I could kiss his cold metal cheek on a dare.
Only by looking back on my childhood and youth while writing my memoir The Promised Party did I understand how deeply I’d been influenced by Kahlo’s surrender to artistic freedom. Later, living in New York City in the Eighties, when I knew Jean-Michel Basquiat, I found a similar kind of independence and courage on his canvases. Both artists were painting portraits of their lives and their place in the world, and their integrity was inspirational.
On hot afternoons, Ruth María and I liked to cool off in Kahlo’s bathtub, and we bathed in her world. It felt as though she were nearby, as her objects lay everywhere – her hard black hairpins, half-used bottles of Sanborns orange-blossom cologne, and a tortoiseshell hairbrush that was always beside the sink waiting for her return. One of Kahlo’s most famous paintings, What the Water Gave Me, depicts a scene of her lying in this tub. A whole universe of her life floats around her body in the soapy liquid, like rubber ducks and toys in a child’s bath. There’s a volcano, one of her traditional Tehuana dresses, a dead hummingbird, two female lovers, a woodpecker, a seashell with a bullet hole, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship setting sail, and a woman drowning.
When we weren’t taking baths or afternoon naps on Kahlo’s bed, Ruth María and I spent our days together running around the neighbourhood. We liked hanging out in the street in a Mexican-Dickensian world of street sweepers, rubbish collectors, gardeners and vendors selling exotic birds from Mexico’s jungles, where the feathered creatures were organised in one cage over another in a tall scaffolding. Juan O’Gorman, the great architect and muralist who designed Studio House, lived a block away and was always at my home. A younger generation of artists with new visions that moved away from muralism and nationalism
