Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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L'America: Woman, Artist, Landscape – Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Emily Carr, Painters as Theorists of the National Imaginary / Paula Rabinowitz
Abstract: Visual artists are open to assessment as progressive public intellectuals. Drawing on three case studies – Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe and Emily Carr – this essay considers the strategies of rhetoric and (self)-representation used to position the artist as a personification of a range of political and social identities, including historically specific forms of nationalism.
<1> "Born with the Revolution, Frida Kahlo both mirrors and transcends the central event of twentieth-century Mexico. She mirrors it in her images of suffering, destruction, bloodshed, mutilation, loss, but also in her image of humor, gaiety, alegria, that so distinguished her painful life. The resilience, the creativity, the jokes...illuminate the capacity for survival that distinguishes her paintings. All together, these expressions make her fantastically, unavoidably, dangerously, symbolic, or is it symptomatic? of Mexico." [1] La chingada, America the Feminine, L'America. Symbolic or symptomatic - the woman artist stands for the nation. She (as simultaneously image and maker of images) is its visible sign, of production, of disease, of genius.
<2> First as woman, then as citizen: this is how Stieglitz marketed O'Keeffe's work and molded her career. In his apocryphal exclaim, "Finally a woman on paper!" uttered to O'Keeffe's friend Anita Politizer in 1916, Stieglitz was staging a scene that had become standard within modernism. Gertrude Stein's Three Lives of 1909 perhaps inaugurated the feminization of literary cubism. Richard Klein dates the origin of the "thin look" to Picasso's 1909 Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, which initiated a new aesthetic for the female body – angular and lean – by instructing viewers on new Cubist perspectives of the human body as a streamlined, modern machine. [2] The New Woman was a modern woman even when she lived outside the gleaming icons of modernity - America's New York. Stein's Cubist dissection of the lives of poor, working-class, Black, and immigrant women that same year was not a celebration of the New Woman we associate with modernist freedoms, nor was she even the interiorized subject Woolf unveiled. Instead she was a worker, a servant, a dreamer, an excluded one, circumscribed by desire, class and race. Not the woman riding an elevator to her high-rise apartment in chic New York (as O'Keeffe would do to her thirtieth floor flat in the Shelton Hotel), [3] she was the cleaning woman consigned to the freight elevator, the washroom, the alleys. Stein was first published in the U. S. by Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery was modeled on the Steins' collection in France. Hers was definitely not a modernist figure; yet her character studies – like Picasso's – place the dissected woman on paper at the center of modernist aesthetics.
<3> According to critic Lois Cucullu, modernism needed this figure of woman - and feminism entered into the representation of the modern nation - to effect the massive shifts in knowledge, expertise and power required of new social and economic procedures. Thus these painters first understood themselves – and more important, chose to present and represent themselves, and more important still, were offered as examples of WOMAN - in order to ease their entry into professional (art) culture. [4] This was facilitated by the establishment of zones where women could participate collectively - art schools, bookstores, settlement houses - in the social and cultural life of the nation yet remain subordinated politically and economically. Bourgeois society both needs newness, which located desire in the woman, and resists it by reinscribing the woman as upholder of tradition. Stieglitz's first non-photography show at 291 was of Patricia Colman Smith's symbolist art nouveau watercolors (1907). As the editors of 1915: The Cultural Moment note, "newness," repeated in the subtitle of their collection of essays, "The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America," moved among public and private spaces, each contaminating, and ultimately feminizing, the other.
<4> Of course, these two modes - woman/nation - as signifiers of modern culture are highly unstable, shifting between each other, overlapping and borrowing from one another. Moreover, they are hardly modern, or if modern, it's the modern of modernity not modernism; they have a long history. Donne's "Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going To Bed" casts his lover's body as a "beauteous state," "flowry meads" made visible: "O my America! my new-found-land,/ My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,/My mine of precious stones, my empery." She awaits exploration and conquest; the nation itself is envisioned as a vessel holding its population as a womb would, an empire, a ship requiring firm guidance. The body, the nation, the land, the ship, the empire unveil themselves, open to the hands of one man. Donne's speaker is ready to jump on because he knows he'll end up on top. However, almost three decades later, this new-found-land seethes as Lawrence's "Volcanic Venus;" sleeping with her is "exhausting, penetrating the lava-crater of a tiny Ixtaccihuatl/and never knowing when you'll provoke an earthquake." [5] Women's emancipation never frees her from the imaginary national landscape; it just means this connection has become potentially lethal. As Marsden Hartley noted, with O'Keeffe "one takes a far jump onto volcanic crateral ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping" because "O'Keeffe has had her feet scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors." [6] As interior subjects, women, or more accurately Woman, seethe with hidden powers to destroy everything, even terra firma. The female body may be ground, home, but it harbors explosive desires and experiences that may erupt randomly. In an era of revolutionary upheaval, woman as volcano mirrors nation as much as land.
<5> During the early decades of this century, when high modernist ideology established a ruling aesthetic corresponding to monopoly capitalism and vicious imperialism, the connections between woman and nation, thus, became explicit. For instance, an early Vanity Fair (that quintessential slick journal of modern culture) article features Georgia O'Keeffe among "Women Painters of America Whose Work Exhibits Distinctiveness of Style and Marked Individuality." What distinguishes O'Keeffe is that "her history epitomizes the modern artist's struggle out of...mediocrity...she abandoned academic realism and discovered her own feminine self." [7] This caption accompanies a Stieglitz 1918 photograph for the "Portrait" of O'Keeffe in black derby hat posed before one of her "Special" drawings. Here O'Keeffe's androgynous muted face looks off dreamily. The palladium print highlights her white blouse (or scarf) setting off her gray skin from her black coat. She is mysterious, but hardly deadly; she's no vamp, rather a serious lady. With these few words and single image, all the terms operate to reinforce each other - woman, modern, artist, America - assuring a linkage, especially crucial between modern artist and new feminine self, that is expressly national in character.
<6> Just two years later, Vanity Fair has shifted emphasis slightly. In the first of her nominations to its "Hall of Fame" (she appeared again in 1928), O'Keeffe is trumpeted primarily as "an American painter of the first magnitude." Yet the tribute concludes by noting, "she puts unanalyzable qualities of poetry and mystery before the more obvious qualities of decision and fact." [8] Here the accompanying photo, from 1923, features a dark background, out of which O'Keeffe's impassive face emerges, lit to accentuate her high cheekbones and down-turned mouth. O'Keeffe's face embodies the poetry and mystery of indecipherable qualities - again her gender is obscured - and her disembodiment suggests no place, no national identity; however, the caption insists on locating her importance as "an American." By the end of the decade, when O'Keeffe was painting New York from her perch thirty stories up in the Shelton Hotel, New York's first residential skyscraper, there was no need to call forth her mystery and femininity. Her nomination comes "[b]ecause she is an American painter who was originally discovered by Alfred Stieglitz, whose wife she is, and who made this photograph of her." It is simple: She is an American, wife of the foremost promoter of American art. The accompanying picture, probably ten years old, mimics one taken of Garbo with outstretched white neck and profile engulfed in black fur. In it O'Keeffe appears far more feminine than in earlier images; but his originary copy plays down her femininity. As wife, O'Keeffe is still gendered female, but no longer is she Woman, or more accurately androgynous New Woman; her identity as a female is considerably less significant. What we need to know about this "black and white artist of unusual distinction," this "American painter" is her "amazingly successful exhibition." [9] Successful, original, important, black and white: O'Keeffe embodies America, as subject and as wife. The slippage is complete and her name linked forever with Stieglitz's and with America assures not only fame, but money. After all, only a few months earlier Stieglitz had announced the sale of six of her Calla Lilies for the record sum of $25,000 in a letter to the editor of Art News. [10] Throughout the 1920s, when Stieglitz reoriented O'Keeffe's position from "woman on paper" - she is now "Georgia O'Keeffe, American" (as the catalogue for her first one-woman show proclaimed) - her association with the nation took on ever-greater magnitude. She exhibited regularly each year, culminating in the (advertised) huge sale in 1928.
<7> By the 1930s, nationalism counters internationalism and supernationalism. Stein is pursuing her inquiry into the nature of identity by writing The Geographical History of America (1936). Breton introduces Frida Kahlo's works to Paris as emblematic of Mexico as the pitahuya fruit she paints. When Carr joins the Group of Seven exhibits, it is not her femininity that provides identity, but her nationality, her regionalism is crucial. There was no one among the Group painting the Far West. Still, the national brand is deeply imbricated in the gendered pose of the earlier decades. National cultures need the (token) woman, as O'Keeffe served in the "Seven Americans" show, as Carr and Kahlo served for Canada's Group of Seven and Mexico's muralistas. The woman is simultaneously genius (the only one, unique) and celebrity - a mass phenomenon, the embodiment of some larger corporate entity. Towards the end of her life, Carr, as figurehead, had assimilated these two ideals: "People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh. Poor Van Gogh! Well, I suppose they have to say something. Some say I am great and some that I am not modern .... I am glad that all seem to agree that I am pre-eminently Canadian." [11] After the most recent blockbuster show, Michael Kimmelman asserted that Van Gogh's "roots remained in the Netherlands." Despite Paris and Impressionism, his source was Holland, his influences Dutch landscape and genre painting that outstripped his Parisian boulevardier veneer. [12]
<8> An icon requires a pose: the butchy Stein of Picasso's portrait, which was repeated in Carr's self-presentation with her wide skirts and skullcap; Group of Seven member A. J. Casson described Carr as follows: "She reminded me of my old Irish grandmother, little and stout, with her hair in a bun. Her manner was crusty." [13] The androgynous New Woman of Stieglitz's "Portrait" of O'Keeffe matched Stieglitz's man-about-town black cape; the exotic Tehauna Kahlo presented a mascot for the "elephant," Rivera. These images become fixtures connecting bodies to artists to works to places. In 1921, after the death of his son, Diego Rivera returned to Mexico from Europe for a second time having, in his words, successfully "rid my self of modernist residues in my work" to embark on an intensive study of Italian fresco painting, thus to "prepare myself for my new career as a mural painter." [14] Rivera's return to Mexico followed his interest in creating a new kind of art for a mass society, one that would appeal to the "proletariat [which] had no taste...but an art the people would have access to in the places they frequented in their daily life - post offices, schools, theaters, railroad stations, public buildings." The overthrow of landlord dictator, Venustiano Carranza by peasants and workers supporting Alvaro Obregon opened Mexico to Rivera's revolutionary politics. His style developed from the "esthetic exhilaration" he experienced at his homecoming. "All the colors I saw appeared to be heightened...the dark tones had a depth they had never had in Europe. I was in the very center of the plastic world...In everything I saw a potential masterpiece - the crowd, the markets, the festivals, the marching battalion, the workingmen in the shops and fields - in every glowing face, in every luminous child.... Gone was the doubt and inner conflict that had tormented me in Europe. I painted as naturally as I breathed, spoke, or perspired" [15].
<9> Mexico presented a new style and subject matter, as well as new artistic confidence; it also provided the means to work as an artist: after six months, Rivera was given a commission to paint a wall at the National Preparatory School of the University of Mexico (during which time he met one of the few female students - Frida Kahlo). This one thousand square foot mural is centered by the Tree of Life flanked by two nudes, male and female. Lupe Rivera, his new wife, modeled for the female, who was serenaded by Music and Song, also modeled on Lupe and dressed in purple skirt and red shawl. Heroic female imagery was central to this new world nationalism; Octavio Paz calls Mexico "la chingada" with some pride. [16] This monumental scene from 1921 was repeated in somewhat diminished form the same year in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which staged the first Miss America beauty contest celebrating the United States' national bounty of blondes.
<10> Rivera's return in Mexico parallels the return to Canada by the Group of Seven. Responding to the hysterical public rejection of Arthur Lismer's September Gale when the National Gallery of Canada purchased it in 1926 (it was referred to as "the greatest abortion of a work of art ever seen in our fair city") Canadian modern art patron Katherine Drier remarked in the more liberal Toronto the following year: "The creative artist is the custodian of the future fame of his own country. According to its Art is [sic] the life of a nation, and the nations that have vanished from the globe are the nations without Art." [17] These heroic gestures to chart national iconography, were spurred by a disillusionment with European politics in the wake of the Great War and with an exhaustion within art modern movements, that by the 1920s, were hardening into orthodoxy. For instance, the aptly named Hector Charlesworth, famous curmudgeon art critic for Canada's Saturday Night, decried how
the group, which is trying to force its wares on international attention, do no good to Canada … [T]he efforts of this school to reduce all Canadian landscape painting to one graceless and depressing formula…are obviously not those which Canadians accept as generalizations. The blood and thunder school not only reject the circumstance that Canada in many sections is one of the richest pastoral lands in the world, lovely in its contours as a beautiful woman glowing with exquisite and subtle gradations of tone. Not only do they reject beauty themselves, but they urge that all painters who feel its existence be cast aside and their pictures excluded so far as possible from public galleries as 'insincere' and 'unrepresentative' from the standpoint of nationality. And the worst of it is they seem to be succeeding to some extent in spreading the belief that Canada is a land of ugliness and its art a reflection of a crude and tasteless native intelligence. [18]
North American artists looked to the popular - what Charlesworth called "the cult of ugliness" - as modernist forms to resuscitate national culture. In Italy, Rivera had studied the frescoes of Giotto and Piero della Franceso, but he had also sketched street fights between fascists and socialists. This combination of history, politics, art served to determine how Rivera's frescoes would "reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth...show the masses the outline of the future" (p. 79). Mexican street culture, its radical politics and its official support of mural work, meant that Rivera's Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors were commissioned to produce frescoes all over the nation. These included the Palace of Fine Arts, which, Carlos Fuentes notes, served as a perfect metaphor of "the schism of the body of Mexico," the Art Deco interior boldly wrapped in murals by Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros cocooned within the "Italian mausoleum...in wedding cake style" of the building's exterior begun in 1905 under Porfiro Diaz. [19]
<11> Kahlo, like many women of her generation - especially those connected with younger men, as was her first lover, Alejandro Gomez Arias - shaved a few years off her age. Like others from that era, her choice of dates was significant. Meridel Le Sueur claimed to have been born in 1900 so she could assert that she was a thoroughly modern American, having grown up entirely within its century. Kahlo changed her birth year from 1907 to 1910 to coincide with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Her life spans the Revolution, dying just days after the CIA-aided coup overthrew the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Clothed in "the finery of peasant women," she became a synonym for the nation: "what a mysterious sisterhood between the body of Frida Kahlo and the deep divisions of Mexico during her early years," declares Fuentes. [20] Her name changes, too; she respells her German Frieda, into Frida, appearing more like the mestiza she was on her birth certificate. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, who took up photography at his second wife's (herself the daughter of a photographer) suggestion, was commissioned by the Porifiro Diaz government to photograph Mexican architecture [21]. In celebration of the centennial of Mexican independence, he produced nine hundred glass plates documenting indigenous and Colonial architecture, for which he earned the title "first official photographer of Mexico's cultural patrimony." [22] As an immigrant and a Jew, who spoke with a German accent, Guillermo Kahlo, born Wilhelm Kaul, was himself not truly part of Mexico's patrimony; his marriage to a mestiza only partly secured his national identity. Kahlo's insistent fabrication of Mexicanness in dress, decor and portraiture may have come from her sense of needing to secure the family's status at a time of fervent nationalism.
<12> Throughout her life, Kahlo knew how to compose her image for the camera to best convey effect. Kahlo's signature Tehuana dress, rebozo (shawl), peinetas (hair combs), Olmec pendants, Aztec earrings and Puebla braids with fresh flowers in her hair became her public persona when she joined the Mexican Communist Party after her marriage to Rivera. "The classic Mexican dress has been created by people for people. The Mexican women who do not wear it, do not belong to the people, but are mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wish to belong, to the great American and French bureaucracy." [23] Her Mona Lisa-like closed mouth smile, dark full brows and glorious cheekbones (which people see as mestiza, but to my mind could also be from her Hungarian Jewish side) indicate an odd combination of mystery (as erotic woman) and transparency (as naive native). These posed images declare the intimate connection she established in her work among woman, nation, artist. Kahlo's embrace of Mexicanista identity also included a political connection with peasants and workers, at once anti-imperialist and nationalist. [24] As Claudia Schaefer notes: like film images themselves, Kahlo's self-portraits utilize and play on consumer society's reification of the face as the icon of feminine beauty - suggested by cinematic close-ups juxtaposed with nationalist epic long-shots - explicitly to draw the observer into the game of seduction by surface appearances. The mask, whether literal or figurative, covers the 'shadowy' space behind it, which is composed of an uncharted and unconquered terrain that she suggestively exploits and explodes. [25]
<13> Her body presented a stage for dramatizing the people's history. Fuentes uses the image of the schism, the wound, the trauma, the broken body to speak of Mexican history, a history culminating in the "cultural success" of the Mexican Revolution when "the peasant armies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata rose from the land to say no, we are these dark, wounded faces that have never seen themselves in a mirror." Kahlo's "tortured body, her shriveled leg, her broken foot, her orthopedic corsets" serve as synecdoche for the oppressed masses, "offering themselves the invisible gifts of language, color, music, popular art" sewn into the "laces, the ribbons, the skirts, the rustling petticoats" in which Kahlo paraded and masqueraded. "As the people are cleft in twain by poverty, revolution, memory, and hope, so she, the individual, the irreplaceable, the unrepeatable woman called Frida Kahlo is broken, torn inside her own body much as Mexico is torn outside." [26] The multitudes are endless, anonymous, subject to economic and political devastations; Kahlo is unique, singular, interior, suffering within her own body, but for the people. She is a female Christ for the nation.
<14> This 1930s social consciousness seemed at odds with her earlier New Woman rebelliousness. Kahlo dressed in overalls and men's suits, cropped her hair, swore and smoked (these she never gave up). Yet as the lives and works of so many 1930s women writers indicate, feminist modernism prepared the way for anti-imperialism and internationalism, which often came at the expense of more fluid gender identities. [27] Long before her iconic 1940 Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, in which she wears a suit and ribbboned heels with scissors poised at her crotch to finish cutting her hair, Kahlo had posed in men's clothing for her father's camera. [28] Her polio and accident left her partially lame and she took advantage of modern fashion openings to wear men's trousers. These would be the logical attire of a serious artist once her pursuit of painting after her 1925 accident became her primary creative and intellectual focus. But after her marriage to Rivera, at least in public, she always appeared in flowing skirts.
<15> It is a curious double logic. From feminist modernity, in which freedom from restrictive femininity allows these creative women to proclaim themselves as artists, to national femininity, in which their position as exceptional woman artist forces them to embrace a mythic connection between themselves and the land that is quite traditional. This easy slippage, corresponding to the rise of fascism, develops a revolutionary nationalism through the icon of the modern woman artist. Yet this move, because it ends up suppressing something - woman, modernity or national liberation - while at the same time stressing something else - femininity, tradition, racism - veers inevitably into reaction. How different is this image from Leni Riefenstal scaling German mountains? What is it about modern feminine identity that eventually gets transformed into nationalist icono(geo)graphy?
<16> In the self-portraits Kahlo paints during the 1930s and 1940s, mythical landscapes place her recognizable face within an imaginary Mexican space - a space of indigenous flora and peoples that envelop the (often) wounded self. Yet this imagined landscape - like D. H. Lawrence's - connects death and desire through the volcanic, the interior eruption explosively links self to national destiny. [29] Her face and body, cut by her deep brow or by sutures and "nips," present the literal vision of woman-within-landscape that O'Keeffe's From the White Place or Carr's Red Cedar, each with its gash, invitations to the darkness within (the mesas, the forest), metaphorizes. The "imagined community" of the nation, as anthropologist Benedict Anderson conceives it, depends upon "print capitalism" to spread itself across homogenous, empty time. Rivera and Kahlo, the Group of Seven, Stieglitz's Seven, deeply inserted into high modern culture of monopoly capitalism, construct spaces for an alternative imagined national landscape through visual icons that are at once natural, folkloric, aesthetic and visionary, but also owe much to the image capitalism of advertising photography, cinema and magazine.
<17> By the early twentieth-century North American artists worked in a post-visual culture, one thoroughly saturated with imagery sustaining and sustained by codes of common reference. Arguments within post-revolutionary Mexico centered on the questions of nationhood: is it a racial formation or an abstract state? Does Mexico define itself through attachments of rural Indian peasantry to the land, to home-grown "new Mestizo" identity, or to Criolla separatism from both indigenous peoples and Spanish colonialism? Is the nation encoded in its cosmopolitanism, in its multiculturalism, in its soil and the people tied to it? How might a more just distribution of resources be achieved?
<18> T.K. Oommen considers the "linkage between citizenship and national identity" by carefully dissecting the differences between New World settler colonies and Old World nations. He contends that the conditions in the Americas - different though they may be within - are still more divergent from either European or other "Third World" nations. A nation, he argues, "is the combination, the fusion of territory and language...a nation is a community in communication in its homeland." [30] He goes on to differentiate nation from state, and national identity (a collectivity) from citizenship (an individual identity), on the one hand, and ethnicity, on the other, which can share culture with nationality but lacks territory. These are often competing and sometimes conflicting relationships and identities, interdependent though they may be. Sometimes acquiring citizenship (i.e., an individual identity) requires group identity formation through a nationality or ethnicity. Sometimes the state incorporates some, but not all national identities, racial identities may or may not be ethnicities; it depends on who declares them and for what purposes. Thus "the idea of a nation-state as conceived and practiced in West Europe is not conducive to the conditions prevalent in Latin America" (p. 49). In the case of Latin America, according to Azril Bacal, five collective identities are at play simultaneously in Latin American studies, if not within Latin America itself: three - Hispanic, indigenous and Mestizo - are racial; two - Indian and multicultural - are ethnic. These are all "national" identities; yet the perspective of each yields a different interpretation of nation and national identity. Similarly, Margaret Lindauer notes that during the volatile years when Kahlo was painting her most political works (the 1930s) a "coexistence of various nationalisms" was at play in and around Kahlo's works. [31]
<19> The post-revolutionary opening that brought Rivera home in 1921 to begin his muralist career was sponsored by Jose Vasconcelos who, as Minister of Education, stressed promoting glorified images of Mexican history and culture, by representing the land and its people. However, by the 1930s and the rise of National Socialism in Europe, left-wing fractures questioned aspects of mexicanidad, which seemed tinged with fascism (for instance, Vasconcelos later became a Nazi sympathizer), so that an anti-nationalist internationalism was as much a part of Mexican intellectuals' ideas of nationalism as indigenista images were. Widespread debates considered which of the differing identities best represented a post-revolutionary Mexico. Vasconcelos had been a member of the Ateneo group before 1910, which had promoted Arielism, after Uruguayan poet Jose Enrique Rodo's essay "Ariel" had declared indigenous Latin American culture to be morally superior to the materialism of capitalist United States. This identification with Prospero's spirit over the wizard, however, still left Caliban needing guidance; and it was from intellectuals and artists that this might be expected to emerge. Fuentes calls Frida Kahlo "the feminine Ariel of the National Preparatory School" (10). However, by the mid-1920s, Vasconcelos had moved from support of Arielist celebrations of Mexico's cultural heritage coursing through Indian blood to embrace the Mestizo as "La Raza Cosmica" that would eradicate all racial, ethnic and economic differences among Latin Americans. By the mid-1930s, according to Benjamin Keen, he had become a Hispanista. In this, he obviously diverged from the muralistas he had first employed. However, within the left-wing muralist movement diverse ideas about Mexican identity competed for ascendancy. Rivera championed the poor and indigenous peoples, claiming that pre-Columbian culture and politics surpassed the modern Western state; Orozco resisted conflating national identity with folk art; while Siqueiros actively dismissed "lamentable archeological reconstruction ... We must love our machines," he declared, embracing industrialism as a means to develop Mexico. [32]
<20> Furthermore, extrapolating from what Kumari Jayawardena has argued about Muslim and Asian women, Latina women were organizing both as women under the auspices of democratizing, modernizing, capitalist forces introducing education, social and civil rights and as (nationalist and/or anti-imperialist) revolutionaries. Feminist ideals emerge from both bourgeois social norms about self as well as capitalist demands for new labor and they also come from the struggles to resist the violent alterations capitalism and nationalism fostered on women. "If capitalism brought women into the social sphere and into economic production, nationalism pushed them into participating in the political life of their communities. Nationalism in these countries was both the product of, and a reaction to, imperialism." While Oommen warns against homogenizing the "Third World" by recognizing Latin America's New World conditions as far different from either Africa's or Asia's, nevertheless, feminist politics emerge often as nationalist identities become available to a rising middle class no matter what the conditions or circumstances. [33]
<21> The elaboration of feminism as a politics of the private and of the subject is both an effect of bourgeois nationalism and one of its primary supports. Thus Kahlo's depictions of national culture often invoke the various positions she and other left-wing artist/intellectuals occupied; they offer a perspective that included revisions of traditional and occasionally bourgeois ideals of womanhood even as they resisted them. In addition to the overtly political landscapes in Henry Ford Hospital, My Dress Hangs There, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and US, which clearly suggest that Frida represents the ghostly presence of the colonized woman, a number of paintings depict Frida in the embrace of a larger Indian mother, as fair-skinned recipient of her succor. My Nurse and I, Love Embrace of the Universe, Mexico, Myself, Diego and Señor Xochtil, Two Nudes place a miniature Diego within Frida's grasp - a third eye in her forehead, on her chain, as her baby. In these, the woman appears as matriarchal presence regenerating the nation and its art and artists. In many paintings, Frida's body (and especially hair and veins) become roots enmeshing her in the soil of Mexico - a landscape sometimes verdant and fecund, green and overgrown, at other times, barren and crevassed. Finally, the Tehuana, as mythic matriarchal indigenous figure, crystallizes various aspects of the "competing nationalism" circulating within Mexico during the 1930s. All these references were collapsed in her 1938 painting-as-shrine, What the Water Gave Me. What the water gave Kahlo and the mesas and trees gave O'Keeffe and Carr, respectively, for that matter, was the means to interconnect self, body, nation, landscape for the promotion of a modern woman artist's career under the peculiar conditions of the interwar years. Sensing its grammar, Andre Breton used this painting to accompany his essay on Kahlo for the Surrealism and Painting show he curated and on the cover of catalogue of the 1938 Mexican show he mounted in Paris.
<22> As a complicated Communist - supportive of Trotsky, to the point of having an affair with him (so the mythology goes: his secretary in Mexico Jean van Heijenoort claims it was actually he who was her lover) - yet ultimately a loyal Party member, Kahlo's political identity was at once nationalist and internationalist, and she figured both almost exclusively through herself. As a colonial nation, Mexico was the victim of both European imperialism - conquered by the Spanish in the 1500s, then even after independence controlled by the Criolla elite - and U.S. imperialism - losing half its territory in the Mexican War of 1848.<23> Its revolution began as a bourgeois reform movement, which was swiftly subsumed by the social and economic revolutionary aspirations of the Zapatistas, only to find the newly nationalized industries at the mercy of U. S. corporate dominance and neoimperialism. Thus nationalist iconography about Mexico needed to address "Gringolandia," as Kahlo called the US where she and Rivera lived on and off for a few years, which during the 1930s was engaged in the Bracero program bringing thousands of farmworkers to the US to work land sometimes formerly owned by their families. Margaret Lindauer complains that the art history and popular celebrity of Frida Kahlo conflates her paintings and her biography, collapsing woman and nation. However, Frida actively arranged many of these connections.
<24> But is this woman/nation nexus that has such a long history actually connected to nationalism, which is clearly a modern formation, not necessarily related to the nation itself? According to Arjun Appadurai, nationalism is a social abstraction working to mobilize "intense affect." A "passionate excess" of "attachments...more libidinal than procedural," it is subject to desires of modernity that can produce "violence by request" of the modern state. In other words, the modern state depends on the production of modern subjects whose identities have been forged through "moments of spatial activity" that resemble psychic mechanisms of subject formation. [34] Space and territory and the attendant sensations of deprivation - a people has been denied its rightful place - produce this predatory victim identity, which he calls nationalism. Appadurai is investigating the causes and effects of communalist violence in India; however, his psychoanalytic model also is suggestive for what it says about how the nation becomes identified with woman. It confounds the simplistic land=body analogy. Here the investment in space is tied to a curious combination of excess and deprivation - much as the child experiences the mother - so space/territory become zones of rage. Kahlo's reliance on icons of maternity that equate the dead mother with hers (and herself) – while finding the nourishing mother in the mythic Indian – displays some of this ambivalence about national allegiances and the ways in which the mother's body figures them.
<25>
When O'Keeffe decided to make her Great American
Painting - placing
the cow skull she'd had shipped back in a barrel to Lake
George
from New Mexico on a background of black, white, blue and
red - she
claimed it was her joking revenge on all the male modernists
desperately seeking the Great American Thing. Her encounter with the
landscapes of the Southwest allowed her to cultivate this
vernacular - red hills, blue sky, white clouds really do spread
across the spaces. She "knew the middle of the
country - knew
quite a bit of the South - I knew the cattle
country - and I knew our
country was lush and rich. I had driven across the country many
times. I was quite excited over our country." In this she
claimed
an authenticity as an American who had immersed herself in its vast
terrains that "the city men [she] had met in the
East" could
never approach. [35] She: woman as
nation; the
nation as woman: L'America, O Brave New
World, the new found land.
Notes
This essay was completed during a residency at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, Summer 2000.
[1] Carlos Fuentes, "Introduction" The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), p. 10. Further references in text. [^]
[2] Richard Klein, Eat Fat (New York: Pantheon, 1996), p. 24. [^]
[3] See Ann Douglas, "Skyscrapers, Airplanes and Airmindedness," in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday, 1995), pp. 434-61. [^]
[4] See Lois Cucullu, Expert Modernists, Matricide and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). [^]
[5] In Collected Poems, p. 539. [^]
[6] Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painter, Vaudeville, and Poets (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), p. 116. [^][7] "The Female of the Species Achieves a New Deadliness," Vanity Fair 18 (July 22, 1922): 50, rpt in Lynes, p.175. [^]
[8] "We Nominate for the Hall of Fame," Vanity Fair 22 (July 1924): 49, rpt. in Lynes, 221. [^]
[9] "We Nominate for the Hall of Fame," Vanity Fair 30 (August 1928): 63, rpt. in Lynes pp. 293-294. [^]
[10] Alfred Stieglitz, "O'Keefe [sic] and the Lilies," The Art News 26 (21 April 1928): 10. rpt. in Lynes p. 285. [^]
[11] Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands p. 288. [^][12] Michael Kimmelman, "Van Gogh, or Beauty and the Blockbuster," New York Times (2 October 1998), p. B34. [^]
[13] A. J. Casson, "Group Portrait," in Douglas Fetherling, ed. Documents in Canadian Art (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1987), pp. 59-60. [^]
[14] Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (With Gladys March) 1960 rpt. (New York: Dover, 1991), p. 71. [^]
[15] Rivera, My Life, pp. 66, 72. [^]
[16] Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985), p. 75. [^][17] Quoted in Shirley L. Thomson, "Foreword," The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Toronto: McCelland and Stewart, 1995), p. 8. [^]
[18] Hector Charlesworth, "Canada and Her Paintslingers," in Fetherling, pp. 54-54, emphasis added. [^]
[19] Carlos Fuentes, "Introduction," The Diary of Frida Kahlo, pp. 9,7. [^]
[20] Fuentes, p. 8. [^]
[21] Guillermo Kahlo was the photographer for the beautiful six volume Iglesias de Mexico tracking 400 hundred years, from 1525-1925, of church architecture throughout the nation. This massive project aimed to document the changing styles and landscapes of the nation's churches with authoritative texts by leading art historians, archaeologists, engineers and architects: Dr. Atl, Manueal Toussaint, J. R. Benitez was published between 1924 and 1927 by Publicaciones de la Secretaria de Hacienda. Mexico, D. F. Its volumes covered "Cupulas," "La Catedral," "El Ultra-Barroco en el Valle de Mexico," "Tipos Poblanos," and "Las Altares de las Iglesias de Mexico, " in addition to the final survey. [^]
[22] Carla Stellwig, "The Camera's Seductress," Frida Kahlo: The Camera Seduced (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), p. 106. [^]
[23] Quoted in Stellwig, p. 111. [^]
[24] There is a growing body of work on the gendered interconnections, similarities and differences, among anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and nationalist politics within the so-called Third World. See Recasting Women, Chandra Mohanty, Spivak, etc. [^]
[25] Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), pp. 12-13. [^]
[26] Fuentes, pp. 8,9. [^]
[27] See especially, Bessie Brueur, The Daughter (1938), which follows the political development of an awkward girl whose mother is a modern feminist. The eponymous daughter attributes her ability to get involved in a strike, staying out late at a worker's bar, to her mother's feminist freedom. In the end they leave for Spain to join the Republicans. See also Virginia Woolf's move from her 1929 A Room of One's Own to her 1938 Three Guineas where modern women's feminist desires for self-expression give way to critiques of fascism. [^]
[28] See image following page 101 in The Camera Seduced. [^]
[29] In Devouring Frida, Margaret Lindauer seeks to reclaim Kahlo from the clutches of reductionist feminist art historians who have yoked psychobiography to ouevre so completely as to misrecognize the subversive political content of Kahlo's paintings. Unfortunately her reclamation project hinges on simplistic appropriations of post-structuralist feminism and a reductive historicism. Still, her chapter on Mexican nationalism and Kahlo's political iconography stresses the ways in which various debates within the Mexican intellectual left over the ways in which mestizaje culture, criolla legacies and indigenism could provide adequate representations of the post-revolutionary nation force an analysis of the ways in which iconography and representation both contribute to and differ from nationalist political discourse and public policy. None can be assumed to be co-terminus. [^]
[30] T.K. Oommen, "Introduction: Conceptualizing the Linkage between Citizenship and National Identity," in T.K. Oommen, ed. Citizenship and National Identity: From Colonialism to Globalism (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 33. [13-51]. [^]
[31] Margaret A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 116. [^]
[32] Quoted in Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1971), p. 516. [^]
[33] Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 257. [^]
[34] Arjun Appadarai lecture, University of Minnesota, 2 October, 1998. [^]
[35] Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe (New York: Viking, 1976), figure 58. [^]
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