Life Is Elsewhere

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo took the messy, wonderful and sometimes horrible stuff that is a woman’s life and transformed it into likenesses that are as bracing as ice on a burn. Her self-portraits, painted in the 1930s and 1940s, reveal a hirsute red-lipped woman whose dark and staring eyes accuse the observer of crimes--indifference, complacency and worse. The portraits (and a large portion of her oeuvre was an obsessive excavation of her own image) are hallucinatory and disorienting. Sometimes Kahlo portrays herself as a man, a moody siren, a heartbroken Mary Magdalene; in other works she depicts herself as a victim of physical illness undergoing excruciating treatments in a hospital.

Naturally, Kahlo’s reliance on self-portraiture leads us to wonder about the autobiographical foundations for these various incarnations; Kahlo, too, admitted that style and substance merged in her work, when she so famously said: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” And most of us have heard the stories: Didn’t she have some sort of horrible disfiguring accident? Didn’t her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, treat her like a doormat? Didn’t she commit suicide? Didn’t she have an exotic love life?

It is easier, actually, to grapple with these facts and rumors than with the art itself. With the art, we’re floating at sea; we’re confused and exhilarated; we’re indicted with felonies we didn’t even know we had committed. But when we work with the facts and the rumors, we can reduce Kahlo the great artist into Frida the troubled and bisexual brown girl: Yes, she had a mutilating accident and had polio; she loved women; she loved and hated Diego; she was a drug addict. And once she is so condensed, she isn’t that intimidating at all. We could do anything that we wanted with her, now that we see her sick, strange, dejected, dead. And dead exotic female artists usually can’t escape being shrunk to fit into shapes that suit the next generations’ needs for Tragic Victims of Patriarchy (Sylvia Plath) or Madwomen in the Attic (Virginia Woolf) or Genius Hermit Virgins (Emily Dickinson, though that reputation is being revised).

It was inevitable that current consumers would refashion Kahlo’s story. There is the upcoming biopic starring the Mexican actress Salma Hayek, of which I know nothing. My worst fear was that by now I’d be watching some soapy network miniseries starring Meryl Streep in brown face and Antonio Banderas in a fat suit.

Oh, God, now I only wish it were that, after having read Kate Braverman’s shockingly bad fictionalized biography of Kahlo, “The Incantation of Frida K.”

The novel contains a chaotic rendition of Kahlo’s inner monologue as she lies on her deathbed. Braverman, a Los Angeles native who has won acclaim for works such as “Lithium for Medea” and “Palm Latitudes,” wastes her gifts of poetry and passion on an incoherent account of Kahlo’s marriage, travels, miscarriage and, most prominently, her illness.

That pain and sickness ate up a significant portion of Kahlo’s life is well-known. Moreover, though Kahlo gained fame as a portraitist of Latina identity, she also illustrated the desperation and agony that accompany serious injury and disease, and so articulated a part of life that less brave artists might have shut their eyes on. The world of literature could use a similar contribution, but Braverman takes Kahlo’s sometimes explicit depictions of disability as a license to devolve into lurid and disjointed accounts of Kahlo’s physical disintegration.

There are lengthy and pornographic descriptions of corroding body parts, fungus on skin, infections, pubic infestations--why go on? Moreover, sensational descriptions of disease are used for the archaic purpose of adding an exotic and even mystical element to the narrative: “My toes were decaying in my shoes .... They were having their own autumn. They would curl and fall.” “In the corridors, golden moths with metal mouths. They feed in hospitals and depots. They spread infection. They carry cancer. They slip through the mesh.”

It is important to note that Kahlo’s work, too, was called pornographic, on account of its depictions of disease and violence against women. In the 1944 “The Broken Column,” Kahlo paints herself nude, bleeding, pierced with nails and physically ripped open to reveal the shattered obelisk that represents her spine. In 1945’s “Without Hope” she vomits a fountain of repulsion while lying in a hospital bed.

These canvases are not pretty things to look at, having none of the simple grace of some of the still lifes and the more pulchritudinous self-portraits. But Kahlo’s work avoids being simply shocking and so, in the end, banal because of her excellent craftswomanship: Her renderings are precise, edited, accurate and elegant. Also, she withholds in her paintings. Even at their most graphic, Kahlo maintains her famous reserved expression and so creates a tension in the work between dignity and almost unbearable candor.

But Braverman would undo all that careful work with “The Incantation of Frida K.,” which is neither precise nor taut, though not without merit. Braverman clearly has a great affection for the artist and what she represents--audacious and idiosyncratic womanhood, female creativity, the romance of the underdog. She writes well of Kahlo’s miscarriage and the emotional trauma of her loss. But these achievements cannot compensate for the obsessive return to repulsive imagery or the portrayal of Rivera, shown here as a stick-figure misogynist who repeatedly curses Kahlo, near-rapes her and is a so-so painter besides.

They also cannot remit the sometimes haphazard storytelling. To her credit, Braverman has taken on an awesome project in fictionalizing Kahlo’s hardships and imagining the monologue of a painter who eschewed coherence in favor of dream-like fantasy. Writers attempting to translate less-than-linear art like Cubism (Gertrude Stein) and jazz (Jack Kerouac) have struggled to write works that sustain those art forms’ fixating qualities for page upon page. Braverman runs up against the same challenge. She makes a good choice by infusing her prose with poetry-like elements but in the end she is not able to maintain the crispness necessary for a novel.

“I understand what floats on rivers which conclude in harbors pale as the veins of infants,” she writes. “What you see from your veranda is not debris but entire texts rendered intelligible. This is what moves in the current, on the backs of stray fronds, the sodden bleached lily and old newspapers. Cures for insomnia and betrayal by man and accident. And methods to heal abscesses and find lost daughters.”

There is a greater hazard to this sometimes delirious style of writing than mere unintelligibility. Later on, when describing a man sitting on a curb, the character Kahlo begins by describing his dirty feet and cigar and then moves into a baffling and unnecessary conjecture of how he has brutally sexually molested his 9-year-old daughter. Images of the seamy and the sick are employed gratuitously to maintain the energy of the novel, which cruises inevitably downward, as the facts of Frida Kahlo’s life hang like weights from the narrative. One wishes Braverman had crafted a story that drew upon the artist’s reserve and lapidary style.

It is astonishing that Kahlo made so much beauty out of her difficult life. When you stand in front of the paintings of the hirsute red-lipped woman with the strange stare, you’re looking at someone who did more than document her suffering. Instead of sinking under the weight of that world, Kahlo was able to transform her illness and heartbreak into art that is rich and brilliant and, if not light, then illuminating, with her potent but controlled touch.

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The photo that originally published with this article has not been archived electronically by the Times. The license did not allow it.

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