Frida Kahlo Steps Out

Frida Kahlo Steps Out

Scene: The Diego Rivera Theatre at City College. A docent has just finished giving her tour of Diego Rivera’s Mural of Pan American Unity. She and the remaining tourist are in front of the center panel of the mural. They are discussing the way that Frida Kahlo is depicted in the mural..

Julia: Look at the way he painted Frida Kahlo.

Anna: Yes! She looks beautiful. More beautiful than she sometimes painted herself. She showed herself holding scissors more often than a palette of paints. In fact, she only showed herself as a painter once! Think of that--only once in seventy paintings!

Julia: But do you notice something about the easel?

Anna: Well, nothing’s on it.

Julia: That’s right. Why is the canvas blank? Is he giving her the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block? Did he want to be sure she wasn’t too productive while he was busy with another woman behind her back?

Anna: Oh, but he was supportive of her as an artist. He praised her art. He said, "Frida is the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings."

Julia: And I supposed that’s supposed to make up for his infidelity.

Anna: Well, you know the Dorothy Parker poem.

Julia: Dorothy Parker? Who’s Dorothy Parker?

Anna: You’re a woman, and you’ve never read Dorothy Parker’s verse? How have you survived? There’s a poem in which she tells her lover that she’ll take almost any other criticism or insult, "But say my verses do not scan, and I get me another man."

Julia: Well, I know she was hurt by his infidelities, and that woman he says is Paulette Goddard looks an awfully lot like Frida Kahlo’s sister Cristina--one of the women he had affairs with! I read that when Frida found out, she was unable to paint for several months. So maybe the blank easel is an acknowledgement of that.

Anna: You mean Diego Rivera is apologizing, saying that he knows his behavior was responsible for her not being able to paint?

Julia: Maybe. Or maybe he’s just showing her at the beginning. After all, we have the expression, "a blank slate," and that’s supposed to mean a fresh beginning. No baggage. They’d just remarried, so maybe both the easel and the marriage represented a fresh start, endless possibilities.

Anna: Yeah. I read that she was beginning the second marriage with the knowledge that he’d never be faithful. Whatever the case, he’s given her a prominent position. She’s in front of him.

Julia: That’s where Andre Breton put her. He said she was a surrealist and he was more impressed by her art than by Diego Rivera’s.

Anna: Maybe that’s because Breton considered her a surrealist, like himself, and Diego Rivera wasn’t a surrealist. That brings up another possibility. Maybe Rivera left her easel blank because only she could paint like Frida Kahlo.

Julia: Whatever the case, she needed to paint. In the portrait she painted in 1951, the one of her doctor and also the one showing her as a painter in a wheelchair, she said there were three things she wanted to do when she left the hospital.

Anna: What were they?

Julia: Paint, paint, and paint.

Anna: Hmm. Very interesting. In fact, the whole tour has been fascinating. You really make art come alive.

Julia: Thank you. You seem to know a lot about art yourself.

Anna: Well, I teach art.

The women walk to the door together and Julia shows Anna out. She then reaches toward the light switch when she’s startled by a voice.

Frida: Oh, I’m so bored!

Julia jumps, startled.

Julia: Oh, I thought I was alone in here! (looks around, trying to see who’s there)

Frida: I can’t stand it a moment longer!

Julia turns toward the mural and realizes that the beautifully accented English is coming from the center of the mural. Frida Kahlo, a palette in one hand, is extending her other hand beyond the usual confines of the mural.

Julia: My God!

Frida: Take my hand and help me out, and I’ll paint your portrait.

Julia: (in voice showing a panic and shocked disbelief) Go back! You can’t just step out of the mural like that!

Frida: Why not?

Julia: Because I’m in charge here, and I’d get in trouble if you disappeared. I’m in charge of keeping people out and components of the mural in.

Frida: You keep people out?

Julia: Not if they have a scheduled tour. But I keep out thieves and art desecrators.

Frida: Please help me out. Just for a little while. I just hate this passive pose, being gawked at all the time when what I really want to do is-as I heard you say yourself, paint, paint, and paint.

Julia: (starting to calm down as she enters the willing suspension of disbelief phase) I’m afraid I’d get in trouble. You’re the very center of the mural.

Frida Kahlo once again extends her hand.

Frida: If you help me out, I won’t have to force my way out, and the mural won’t be destroyed in the process.

Julia: Oh, my God!

She takes Frida Kahlo’s hand and helps her step out.

Frida: What time is it?

Julia: Four ten.

Frida: What year?

Julia: 2000.

Frida: Dios mio! I’ve been trapped in there for sixty years. No one should have to stand still that long.

Julia: I don’t understand. All this time you stay put, and suddenly after sixty years you just step out? Why now?

Frida: I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. Besides, I heard what you said about my blank easel. (turning around and looking at the mural) Sometimes you have to step back to get the full picture. (Her eyes settle on the vacant spot where she is no longer standing and then on Diego Rivera, who is behind her missing form, holding hands with another woman.

Frida: Oh, how typically Diego! As I stand with my idle palette, next to my blank easel, he’s carrying on behind my back with another woman.

Julia: (going into her docent routine). That’s Paulette Goddard, an actress famous in the thirties and forties. And the lit up tree you see is called--

Frida: He’ll never grow up. That infant, that great monster…

Julia: Oh, that’s what you say in the video we show. I Paint What I See ...

Frida: What’s a video?

Julia: Oh, you have been stuck in there a long time. You’re even on the Internet now--a whole web site. www.riveramural.org. And I’ve seen your likeness on a mousepad, too. You’re very big these days!

Frida: (looking at herself) Big?

Julia: I mean, there’s a whole Frida Kahlo cult. And you’re very…prevalent. All over the place, like Starbucks!

Frida: What’s the Internet? What’s a mousepad? Who’s Starbucks?

Julia: I guess it must be confusing being sixty years behind the times.

Frida : Could you bring me up to date?

Julia: Well, we've just entered the new millennium! And things have changed a lot for women over the past sixty years.

Assignments

1.Continue the script! Talk to Frida Kahlo or take her on a tour of the campus or out into San Francisco.

2. Improvise. Act it out from the beginning or pick up where it ends here.

(For more suggestions, see Women’s Studies and Research Project)