But Frida was a person who enjoyed the company of friends and family, and who had a lively sense of humor. Despite the fact that she lived in physical and emotional pain, despite the fact that she grieved the death of her child, she made jokes and laughed at the jokes of others.
One of Frida’s friends was Lucienne Bloch. Frida and Lucienne had a number of things in common. Both of them had fathers born in the German-speaking areas of Europe, and both fathers had emigrated from Europe and immigrated to the Americas. Both fathers were photographers. Both Frida and Lucienne learned the methods of imagery from their fathers: lighting, framing, composition, subjects, etc. Both Frida and Lucienne used German when speaking with their fathers.
As a trusted friend, Lucienne was present for some of the pivotal moments in Frida’s life, as historian Elizabeth Carpenter writes:
Perhaps more than any other photographer who came before or after her, Lucienne Bloch had unprecedented access to Kahlo throughout the 1930s, during which time they were very close friends and traveling companions. The daughter of Swiss photographer and composer Ernest Bloch, Lucienne first came to be acquainted with Rivera soon after he and Kahlo arrived in New York City in 1931. A multitalented artist herself, Bloch was invited by Rivera to join the crew of assistants poised to begin work on his Rockefeller Center mural commission. In addition to her artistic labor on the murals, she also faithfully documented Rivera at work and Kahlo’s frequent visits to the site. After Nelson Rockefeller’s controversial declaration that work on the mural must be stopped due to the prominent position held by the portrait of Lenin in the composition, it was Bloch who clandestinely took the only photographs documenting the development of the work, which was ultimately destroyed. It was also Bloch who traveled from New York to Detroit in June of 1932 to keep Kahlo company during the early stages of her pregnancy and to see her through a subsequent miscarriage. Bloch was there for her friend again three months later, when Kahlo received a telephone call that her mother was dying of breast cancer. They boarded a train for Mexico the next day, and their trip was sensitively recorded by Bloch with her Kodak Brownie snapshot camera.
Not only were the 1930s a traumatic time for Frida’s personal life, but world events were also turbulent. Well into adulthood — Frida was around thirty years old at the time — she changed her from “Frieda” to “Frida” to protest the harsh and genocidal dictatorship which Hitler’s National Socialism inflicted on the German people. Appropriately, “Frieda” is a German forename which means peace.
Frida was willing to change more than her first name. She played fast-and-loose with her personal story, changing details for symbolic reasons. Although she was born in 1907, she often gave her birthdate as 1910, a significant year in Mexican history. She also occasionally alluded to ancestors who were Hungarian or Jewish — or both — although she was acquainted with her family’s history which had deep roots in western Germany.
Frida embraced Mexico, the land into which her father had immigrated. Yet she could also see Mexican culture from a distance, given her German roots. She celebrated Mexican culture, and yet could view Mexico analytically, as Elizabeth Carpenter explains:
Kahlo’s interrogation and testing of Catholic, patriarchal, and bourgeois mores was a primary motivation throughout her life, ultimately helping her to define her identity as an artist and informing the art that she produced.
Frida’s heritage included both the Mexican version of Roman Catholicism that she inherited from her mother and a long tradition of German Lutheranism on her father’s side. Her world included Mexican patriarchy, but also a European sensibility which saw women as capable of creating worthy and significant works of art. She lived among the rooted Mexican middle class, but also among her father’s German emigre community in Mexico. Her life’s structure prevented her from being totally shaped by one single culture.
Not only her father, but also both of her grandfathers were involved in photography on a professional level. Images were the family stock-in-trade. It would have been surprising if Frida had not worked in the visual arts.
Not only Frida, but at least one of her siblings, spoke German fluently enough to attend a school in which German was the language of instruction. Later in life, Frida maintained her ability to speak German, but was not comfortable writing it. The letter which she wrote to her distant relatives in Germany after the end of WW2 is in English. She writes enthusiastically about details of the family history, having retained in her memory the stories of previous generations of Kahlo women and men, and is able to furnish details in her letter.
To be multilingual is to be able to think from different perspectives. About Frida, historian Victor Zamudio-Taylor writes:
She spoke German and English but also adored the colloquial forms of her native Spanish spoken in central Mexico.
From the cards and letters she wrote and received, and from casual photographs taken with friends and family, the viewer sees both the serious and even austere Mexican traditionalism, but also a fun-loving personality who grins and laughs.
A solid, middle-class Mexican version of social standards and Roman Catholicism were Frida’s inheritance from her mother. A German Lutheranism, a love of classical music on the piano, and a curiosity about Schopenhauer’s speculative philosophy were her inheritance from her father. Frida could not have been who she was without her father’s German artistic sensibilities. It is for good reason that more than one biographer records that he addressed his daughter habitually as Liebe Frieda.
