Frida Kahlo and D. H. Lawrence: Mexican Monobrow vs English Red Beard

Frida y Lorenzo (SA/2026) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and English writer D. H. Lawrence never met. 

 

For while he spent a significant amount of time in Mexico between 1923 and 1925, Frida was just a teenager then, even if already moving in the political and artistic circles of Mexico City [2].

 

But they could have met. And one suspects that if Lawrence had died in 1940 rather than 1930, they may very well have crossed paths at some point.

 

It's doubtful, however, that they would have got along ...

 

 

II. 

 

For while they moved in overlapping bohemian circles and shared close mutual friends, they were very different characters belonging to different generations, classes, and cultures, who held very different views on politics, religion, and sex: she was a Marxist atheist who liked to screw around; he wasn't and didn't. 

 

Oh, and Lawrence had been rude about her husband, Diego Rivera, judging his artwork as a failure that stripped the indigenous peoples of Mexico of their complex history and humanity by viewing them through an ideal political lens and turning them into little more than avatars of socialism [3]. 

 

Somehow, I can't imagine that would have endeared him to her ... 

 

 

III. 

It's ironic, therefore, that when Vogue published a review of Kahlo's solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery (NYC, 1938), the reviewer gleefully reported that people were discussing her paintings as "looking like D. H. Lawrence on canvas, all fertility and gore" [4]. 

 

This widely circulated quote permanently linked their names in art history, leading many to assume a personal connection between Kahlo and Lawrence which - as we have indicated - didn't actually exist. 

 

And so we are left to fantasise a meeting between them and overlook the likelihood that they would have detested each other. Indeed, it's easier to imagine her smashing a bottle of tequila over his head (or vice versa) than the two of them playing nice together or making whoopee. 

 

Having said that, I think it's highly likely that Frida Kahlo and Frieda Lawrence would - despite a 27-year age gap - have hit it off had they had the opportunity to meet ...

 

 

IV. 

 

Why do I say that? 

 

Well, for one thing, not only did they share the same name [5], but Kahlo was, in fact, half-German. And so, while Spanish may have been her primary language, Frida konnte Deutsch sprechen und schreiben [6] and would have been able to chat with the German-born Frieda Lawrence in her native tongue.

 

More than this, there were striking similarities in their temperaments and each fully embraced an unconventional lifestyle: Frieda Lawrence was defined by her fierce commitment to emotional honesty, sexual liberation, and the rejection of bourgeois conventions [7]. 

 

She would have admired Kahlo's unapologetic approach to both her art and her love life and found Kahlo's fierce intelligence, sharp wit, and dramatic flair captivating. 

And Kahlo, for her part, would surely have found Mrs Lawrence a kindred spirit - one who valued living with vital intensity and knew how to guard her own identity and freedom whilst married to an internationally famous artist. 

 

The fact that Frieda also spent many years living in Taos, New Mexico and was deeply immersed in the landscape and the culture of the American Southwest, would probably have intrigued Kahlo also.  

 

It's a shame that their mutual friend, Georgia O'Keeffe, never thought to arrange a meeting ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The image is based on a passport picture of Lawrence taken in 1921 and Nickolas Muray's iconic photo of Frida Kahlo wearing a traditional Mexican shawl (known as a rebozo in Spanish) taken in New York, in 1938, prior to her solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Visit  artsy.net to view the original colour portrait. 

 

[2] Kahlo was born in July 1907 - so was almost 22 years younger than Lawrence, who was born in September 1885. When she had her fateful accident on 17 September 1925 in Mexico City, aged eighteen, Lawrence had just turned forty and was on board a steamship bound for England. 

      Coincidentally, however, he had almost died in Mexico City himself earlier that year having contracted typhoid, malaria, and a severe bout of flu. He fell so ill that he entered the American Military Hospital and it was there that doctors officially diagnosed his advanced tuberculosis, bluntly informing his wife, Frieda, that he had less than two years to live. 

 

[3] Lawrence didn't produce a dedicated essay on Rivera; instead, his commentary is scattered across fictional works, travel essays, and private letters from his time in Mexico and New Mexico in the 1920s.

      His most sustained (if veiled) critique of Rivera is found in chapter III of The Plumed Serpent (1926): the protagonist Kate Leslie visits the University in Mexico City to look at some newly painted murals (a direct reference to the real-life murals Rivera and his contemporaries were painting on the walls of public institutions at the time). Channelling his own disdain through Kate, Lawrence describes the works as full of caricatures of wicked capitalists and saintly proletarians and notes that the Indians painted on the walls look like flat wooden symbols rather than living human beings. For Lawrence, Rivera was ultimately just another bourgeois bohemian engaged in lazy political posturing. 

      Finally, it is worth noting also that Frida Kahlo's extensive personal library is still preserved at her home turned museum - La Casa Azul - in Coyoacán, and while she owned a vast collection of international literature, Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent is not noted by historians or curators as a prized volume in her collection. 

      In fact, her friend, the American photographer Edward Weston - who also knew and photographed Lawrence during the latter's visit to Mexico City in 1924 - noted in his diary that the intellectual elite in Mexico at the time largely rejected Lawrence's novel as an inaccurate and exoticised view of their nation. 

 

[4] See Bertram D. Wolfe, 'Rise of Another Rivera', Vogue (1 November, 1938).

      Wolfe was an interesting figure: highly active as a communist, art critic and biographer, he later rejected Stalinism and became a fierce anti-communist intellectual. While living in Mexico in the 1920s, he befriended Rivera and wrote extensively on the Mexican mural movement. He also recorded conversations with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, which remain vital primary sources for researchers into her life and work. 

 

[5] Frida's father, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in the golden city of Pforzheim, moved to Mexico in 1891 (aged 19) and changed his name to Guillermo Kahlo. She permanently dropped the 'e' in her name in 1935 as a political gesture (naturally enough, she wasn't keen to be seen as half-German following the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933), although she also wanted, as an artist, to align herself closely with the people and culture of Mexico. 

 

[6] The multilingual Miss Kahlo also spoke French and English fluently and had familiarity with the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl. Spanish was the main language used at home when she was growing up with her three sisters primarily because her mother, Matilde Calderón, was of Oaxacan and Spanish descent and did not speak German. 

 

[7] Frieda famously abandoned her children and her status as a professor's wife in England to run away with a penniless and relatively unknown young writer (Lawrence), in 1912.  

 

 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for suggesting this post. 

 

 

My Pagan Self Revealed (Reflections on a Mexican Devil Mask)

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus 

and would rather be a satyr than a saint

I.

I have already written elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark about how, for me, the way to move beyond the ruins of the late 1970s was not via a poppy new romanticism or a shameless embrace of free market capitalism, but, rather, towards a post-punk paganism inspired by a wide range of influences including Nietzsche, Lawrence, Jung, Crowley, McLaren, and Jaz Coleman.*

Thus, after 1982, I defined myself less as an anarchist and more as an anti-Christ and the task, as I saw it then, was to aggressively confront Occidental reason and Christian morality with its absolute Other by promoting a pessimistic vitalism tied to an anti-modern politics. 

In other words, safety pins were replaced by horns on head and the vintage Mexican devil mask that I can be seen holding in the photo above became the face of my soul; i.e., my essential self is a concealed self, a disguised self, the product of playful dissimulation. This is what Wilde refers to as the truth of masks and those who are profound enough to be superficial will understand the philosophical importance of this fact.  

II. 

The native peoples of Mexico have had a thing for the making and wearing of masks for millennia; i.e., long before the Spanish arrived - or the tourists. Obviously, the masks had a ritual and magical significance and were worn during religious ceremonies and festivals. Sometimes they had human features; sometimes animal.

And sometimes they incarnated deities, demons, or devils; the latter often having real horns and images of snakes, lizards, or frogs added to the usually grotesque facial design.

Although my mask is hand-carved from wood, traditional masks were also made from other materials including clay, leather, and wax. After the Conquest of Mexico (1519-21), the Spanish outlawed indigenous beliefs, but Christian evangelisers were happy to exploit the love of masks, dance, and spectacle to propagate their faith amongst the natives.

Often, however, rather than successfully replace old cultural traditions with entirely new forms, masked events became a strange amalgamation of paganism and Catholicism. It was Carnival - but not as the Europeans originally understood it.

Today, masked festivals remain very popular and prevalent in parts of the country with large numbers of native peoples and old customs and beliefs live on, if only in a commercialised and aestheticised form.           

* Note: Readers interested in this earlier post to which I refer - with my reflections on Pagan Magazine - can read it by clicking here. And for another post on the truth of masks, click here. 

Day of the Dead (Essex Style)

Day of the Dead 
SA / 2019

In Mexico, November 1st is a day of celebration in which the people remember friends and family members who have died and, perhaps, recall also their Aztec past, prior to European colonisation, allowing them the opportunity to decorate their homes with marigolds and loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present in which only life is sanctified.

Watching over events is the goddess Mictēcacihuātl, queen of the underworld, who renders the flesh and washes the bones of the dead; she who threatens to one day swallow all the stars in the heavens above.

Meanwhile, in grey-skied Essex, one sad-looking crow sits on a wire-mesh fence overlooking the train tracks and unlovely Romford landscape where, in a sense, every day is given over to death and there seems to hover a doom so dark one feels as if one might lose one's mind.

"Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? Is that the truth?"*

* D. H. Lawrence, 'We die together', Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 544.

A Character Study from The Plumed Serpent: Cipriano (First Man of Huitzilopochtli)

General Joaquín Amaro (1889-1952)

Mexican revolutionary and military reformer

According to an explanatory note in the Cambridge edition of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence probably based the character of General Viedma - or Don Cipriano - on several real-life figures from the time, including Emiliano Zapata and Joaquín Amaro.

Like the latter, for example, Cipriano was an officer in the Mexican army, of native Indian origin (Zapotec), who possessed a real talent not only for military strategy but also institutional reform. Unlike Amaro, however, Cipriano also had "a little black beard like an impériale" and was fluent in English (having been educated in London and Oxford), even if the language sounded "a little stiff on his soft tongue" [21].

Lawrence being Lawrence - that is to say, a racial fetishist with a particular penchant for dark-skinned, dark-eyed foreign men who still have something of the goat-footed god Pan about them - he's very keen to emphasise Cipriano's ethnicity and how, underlying his superficial assurance and good manners, lay something fierce and primitive; he was a man who seemed to be "perpetually suspecting an ambush" [22] and had a savage gleam in his black, inhuman eyes.     

Perhaps that's why Kate, the 40-year-old Irishwoman at the cente of this peculiar work, is both drawn to him and repulsed: Cipriano could appear to be awfully nice and kind, but he also had a "heavy, black Mexican fatality about him" [24] that made her want to get away from him. Like Michael Howard, Cipriano has something of the night about him. His eyes were not merely dark-coloured, they were as black as jewels "into which one could not look without a sensation of fear" [67].    

Kate observes him at the dinner table:

"His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light [...] and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage [...] that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins." [67]

And this is despite the fact his god-father was an English bishop who oversaw his education and welfare and wanted him to become a priest. Still, Kate is also alert to what she imagines to be the "dark, surging passion of tenderness" [71] that Cipriano is capable of. She puts this down to his being an Indian. However, as Lawrence suggests in his next novel that even English gamekeepers can feel such tenderness, perhaps it's rooted more in phallic masculinity than race. 

One day, Kate and Cipriano have tea together. Again, Lawrence can't resist the opportunity to write of the latter's eyelashes and the way that his eyebrows tilted "with a barbarian conceit, above his full, almost insolent black eyes" and it's clear with whom his erotic fascination lies. Indeed, poor Kate is dismissed as "one of the rather plump Irishwomen, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes" [81] - i.e., of no real sexual interest.   

She may have her own feminine charms and mystery, but, for Lawrence, Cipriano is the main attraction; "he had a good deal of magnetic power", undiminished by his years spent in England. Indeed, his education "lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness." Despite his diminutive stature, Cipriano also has real presence and substantial being: "He made the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller" [82].

For Kate this makes Cipriano curious, but it quickly has the potential to become suffocating. And malevolent - even satanisch.

Although, clearly, his real love is for Ramón (whom he finds both compelling and incomprehensible), Cipriano decides he wants to marry Kate. He looks at her with "a strange lingering desire in his black eyes" [187] and sees her as a fresh-faced flower, despite her age. He doesn't merely want Kate to become his wife, however, he wants her to become the incarnation of a goddess by his side - just as he is the incarnation of the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli, armed with a serpent of fire.

The absurdity of this idea makes Kate laugh. Kate informs Cipriano that it is her intention never to remarry and that she doesn't much feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon. But still she can't help admiring his body: "How dark he was, and how primitively physical, beautiful and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh!" [201]

For all that, it's Ramón who really tickles her fancy and touches her inside. Cipriano seems only to offer her submission and horror. But then, as he says, why not accept a bit of horror in life; horror is real and belongs to an economy of the whole. He feels a bit of horror for her too; her light-coloured eyes and white hands. Horror is what adds spice to life; it gives the "'sharp, wild flavour'" [236].

Kate is not entirely convinced by Cipriano's uncanny logic, however. In fact, she think's he's simply trying to exert his will and get one over on her: "Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant [...] how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to [...] death?" [236, 246]    

Ramón sometimes sees something of this deathliness in Cipriano too; he knows him to be a man who thrills at the thought of power and longs for a holy war fought with the entire world if need be. (The German hotel manager who describes their neopagan revolution as just another expression of national socialism isn't far wrong.) If he can appear comical, ultimately the demonical little figure of Don Cipriano is not to be laughed at. 

When next they meet, Kate again notices the physical presence of Cipriano:

"Cipriano  made her a little uneasy, sitting beside him. He made her physicaly aware of him, of his small but strong and assertive body, with its black currents and storms of desire. The range of him was very limited, really. The great part of his nature was just inert and heavy, unresponsive, limited as a snake or lizard is limited. But within his own heavy, dark range he had a curious power. Almost she could see the black fume of power which he emitted, the dark, heavy vibration of his blood, which cast a spell over her." [310] 

Once Kate has tuned into the ancient phallic Pan mystery, she can conceive of marrying Cipriano, with his small hands, slanting eyes, and the "tuft of black goat's beard hanging light from his chin" [311] ... Not to mention his huge erection that rises suddenly in the twilight when the power of his blood is up and to which Kate is obliged to submit with supreme passivity, as beneath an over-arching absolute.

This, for all its highfalutin religio-literary language, is Lawrence (as narrator) simply indulging his BBC fantasies. He uses the character of Kate as a kind of sexual go-between between himself and the figure of Cipriano. It's odd to say the least, but something he often does in his fiction.      

Eventually, Cipriano achieves his deification and becomes-Huitzilopochtli. Even his soldiers can see the change in him; as if he has grown wings with dark feathers, like an eagle. And how does he exercise his second strength? Again, strangely - but not surprisingly, knowing Lawrence - he makes all his men cook and clean and do their own laundry, grow vegetables and paint the barracks. 

Doing chores and jobs about the place was Lawrence's idea of fun - and Cipriano's method of instilling some discipline in his men. For that was what was needed; not machine discipline, of course, imposed by outside authority, but sacred inner discipline. He also encourages them to dance the old dances to the beat of the drum, so that they might gain power over the living forces of the earth. This they do semi-naked, smeared with oil and red earth-powder, their limbs glistening with sweat.  

 

Cipriano loved to dance and loved also to watch his men dancing by firelight. He also enjoyed making long marches across the wild Mexican country and camping out beneath the stars. If he and his soldiers captured any bandits, Cipriano would strip them and tie them up. Those he judged to be beyond redemption he would stab with a knife to the heart, saying "'I am the red Huitzilopochtli'" [366].

Work - Dance - March - Camp - Kill: this, then, was the life of a soldier under the command of General Viedma. His was an elite force who threw off the drab uniform of regular troops and "dressed in white with the scarlet sash and the scarlet ankle cords, and carrying the good, red and black sarape" [366] (when not naked and displaying their dark and ruddy bodies).   

If all this sounds a little insane - like something from Apocalypse Now - that's because it is. Things don't get any less disturbing when Cipriano as the Living Huitzilopochtli has his coming out ceremony. To the sound of drums and brightly-coloured fireworks, he emerges from the church in his black and scarlet sarape carrying a torch and with "three green parrot feathers erect on his brow" [372].

Meanwhile, the semi-naked Men of Huitzilopochtli dance around like demons. After a song or two, the ceremony climaxes with an execution of prisoners, two of whom have their necks broken by guards and three of whom are stripped and blindfolded before Cipriano personally stabs each of them in the chest - once, twice, and three times for luck! This is followed by acts of blood play within the church (no women allowed) that make, if I'm honest, pretty uncomfortable reading.

No doubt Kate is right and Ramón and Cipriano act in good faith and all sincerity - but that's the problem, isn't it? Fascists and religious fanatics always believe in the rightness of their own deeds and their eyes always sparkle with conviction. And Kate is surely mistaken to believe that it's okay if Cipriano kills people and commits numerous other atrocities because his "flame is young and clean" [394] and he is of the gods.    

Inevitably, the novel ends with a kind of war. This releases a certain thrilling energy into the air, but "there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror" [420], which rather made Cipriano happy "in his curious Indian way" [421]. Strangely, denying his wife Kate clitoral orgasm - or "the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction" [422] - in the name of the greater sex also makes him happy.   

In sum, then, what are we to think of Don Cipriano, the First Man of Huitzilopochtli and fascist religious fanatic who loves dancing and dressing up almost as much as he loves killing helpless prisoners with a knife?

I said at the beginning he's a kind of composite character made up of various figures, and these surely include fictional psychopaths like Colonel Kurtz, as I hinted earlier. Indeed, it's interesting that Lawrence uses the phrase heart of darkness at one point, as if remembering Conrad's magnificent short novel and anticipating Francis Ford Coppola's movie 55 years later.   

The following, said by Kurtz, could quite as easily have been said by Cipriano discussing his own followers, or, indeed, Heinrich Himmler referring to members of his beloved SS: "You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ..."

It's a little depressing to think that, for a while at least, Lawrence was to insist The Plumed Serpent was his greatest achievement and that he meant every word of it ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

Note: readers who liked this post might find an earlier one, on the queer love affair between Ramón and Cipriano that lies at the heart of Quetzalcoatl (the early version of The Plumed Serpent), also of interest: click here.