“Well, guys, let’s get to work. I am going to be what is called ‘teacher’, but I am nothing of that (…) I have never been a painting teacher nor do I think I ever will be, because I am learning all the time.”
This is how Frida Kahlo introduced herself in 1943 to those who would be her first students. Although the Mexican artist was in one of the best moments of her career, she did not feel prepared for the work.
“It is true that painting is the most wonderful thing that exists, but it is difficult to execute it well. You need to practice and learn the technique in depth, have very rigid self-discipline and, above all, feel a lot of love for it.”
“Once and for all I am going to tell you to let me know if the little experience I have as a painter is useful to you in any way.”
But I wanted to and I had to do it.
Her teaching adventure was linked to another large-scale project: the Mexican Culture Seminar, a public institution that brought together artists and intellectuals, of which she was a founding member.
The classes were taught at the School of Painting and Sculpture of the Ministry of Public Education, better known as “The Emerald”.
Unlike the closed circle of high culture, in La Esmeralda they did not look for the promising artists of painting, engraving or sculpture, but rather young people from all types of backgrounds, particularly the most popular ones.
It didn’t take long for Kahlo, who was 35 years old at the time, to overcome her insecurities and became a guide and friend to the young students, whom she affectionately called “my children.” The most advanced were known as “Los Fridos”.
“Frida was very self-taught. She studied high school, which at that time was unusual for women, but she did not have artistic training as such. “He didn’t go to an art school,” explains Dr. Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, an academic at the Aesthetic Research Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), to BBC Mundo.
A language of its own
La Esmeralda, Hayde Herrera -author of “Frida: a biography of Frida Kahlo” (1983)- and the students themselves have said, It was an improvised school, with a single classroom and with a patio that flooded during the rains.
The precariousness of the infrastructure contrasted greatly with the list of professors, which included figures such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo’s husband, Jesús Guerrero Galván, Carlos Orozco Romero, Agustín Lazo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Francisco Zúñiga and María Izquierdo.
The race lasted five years. Guillermo Monroy He was part of his first generation.
“At first there were only about 10 students. Then a gang from my neighborhood arrived, of more or less 22 boys. When I started school, I didn’t know anything about art, because it was worker from a family of carpenters”, Herrera states in his biography, for which he interviewed several of the students.
“I only had a six-year education; I didn’t even know art schools existed. Varnished and upholstered furniture. Later I wanted to learn how to carve wood, because I worked in a colonial furniture store. For that reason, and because I am a worker, I went to La Esmeralda,” says Monroy.
Fanny Rabelone of the few women there with Rina Lazo and Lidia Huerta, tells how she was skeptical about having a female teacher in that Mexico dominated in almost all aspects by men.
But she confesses that she was “fascinated” when Kahlo appeared before them.
“He had the gift of captivating people. She was unique, with enormous reserves of joy, humor and passion for life. He had invented his own languagehis individual way of speaking Spanish, with a lot of vitality and accompanied by gestures, mime, laughter, jokes and a great sense of irony,” he told Herrera.
“The first thing he did when he met me was say: ‘Oh, you’re one of the little girls here! You’re going to be my student! Hey, how do you do this teaching thing? I don’t know. What is it about? I don’t have the slightest idea how to teach. But I think everything will be fine.’”
“That disarmed me,” he recalls.
Chávez Mac Gregor believes that Kahlo’s youth was key to the “very creative, very free” pedagogy that she developed.
“It was a way of teaching that was not that of the time and that allowed these young people a very different approach to art than what existed,” says the expert.
The beginnings of the journey
The Mexican, especially popular struggles, were at the center of what Frida, Diego Rivera and other artists of their generation sought to highlight in their works.
“Since the end of the Mexican Revolution there was a need to invent a nation that did not exist as such, which had to be reworked. And muralism was a solution,” Chávez Mac Gregor explains to BBC Mundo.
“People like Renato González Mello tells how Muralism invented the idea of a Mexican town and created this very strong ideology of miscegenation. This connection was created with a glorious pre-Hispanic past, united with the peasantry and the workers who would achieve a revolution.”
Kahlo’s classes emphasized that idea.
He asked his students to look at things in their immediate reality to paint them. It could be furniture, kitchen utensils, toys… anything that had some manifestation of popular art.
She herself, wearing an elegant Tehuana dress – traditional of the indigenous peoples of the south – posed for her students.
In general, rather than lecturing, Kahlo encouraged her students to self-criticize.
When she had to make an observation, she could be “sharp,” but never severe. Perhaps because it recreated the same way she learned to paint.
“When he was finishing high school he had his accident. [en un autobús]…His father was a photographer, mainly of architecture. She had an important artistic sensibility and Frida, while recovering at home, began to be self-taught with the things she knew and the materials she had,” summarizes Chávez Mac Gregor.
Arturo García Bustosanother of his most faithful students, says that he did not tell them “not a word about how we should paint nor did he talk about style.”
“I used to comment: ‘How well you painted this! O This part came out very ugly.’ Fundamentally, what he taught us was love for the people and a taste for popular art. He exclaimed, for example, ‘Look at that Judas! How wonderful! Watch the proportions! How Picasso would like to be able to paint something with such expressiveness, with such strength!’ he told Herrera.
Each student showed their own style and interests, which generated more wealth among the group.
“It made us feel and understand a kind of beauty that exists in Mexico and that we would not have noticed on our own. He did not communicate this sensitivity to us with words. We were young, simple and manageable; one was only 14 years old, another was a farmer. We had no intellectual pretensions. She didn’t impose anything on us. He used to say: Paint what you want, what you see,” Rabel pointed out.
The blue house
Soon the one-room schoolhouse became too small for the group of enthusiastic young people and their teacher. Kahlo then took them to paint street life.
They made excursions to popular neighborhoods, markets, colonial buildings, and neighboring towns. Not only did they share a taste for painting, but they also went to sing and drink pulque.
By 1944, however, Kahlo began to suffer more intensely from the consequences of the polio she suffered as a child and the severe road accident, which reduced her mobility.
His injuries made it difficult for him to go to teach at La Esmeralda or go out more with his pupils.
decided open his house in the Coyoacán neighborhood to them.
Herrera says that at first there were many, but then there were fewer. Four were the most faithful: Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, Arturo Estrada and Fanny Rabel.
“We got so used to Frida and loved her in such a way that it seemed like she had always been there… Everyone loved her in a strange way. It seemed that her life was always so closely linked to the people around her that they could not live without her,” says Rabel.
It was then when the group, in which Mariana Morillo Safa and Roberto Behar also participated, began to be known as “Los Fridos”, something similar to the disciples of Diego Rivera, who were called “Los Dieguitos”.
The young people continued painting the things around them, which in Kahlo and Rivera’s house were many and very varied, ranging from monkeys, frogs, dogs and cats to beautiful pieces of art.
His teacher checked his work, but more irregularly due to his illness. It could be three times a week, or once every two weeks.
There was also space for readings beyond art, such as that of the thinkers Walt Whitman and Vladimir Mayakovsky. I taught them books, they learned about biology and even sexual education.
“The Little Rose”
“Los Fridos” had its first major presentation in 1944, but not in a gallery or a museum, but in a cantina in the Coyoacán neighborhood, the “La Rosita” pulquería, near Kahlo’s house.
The group painted murals on the walls. However, the authorities erased them with whitewash in a campaign against alcoholism, because their color “attracted men,” they argued.
This angered Kahlo and other artists, who arranged for the walls of “La Rosita” to once again be the canvas for their students.
They worked hard on images alluding to the popular classes of the countryside and the city. Kahlo and Diego Rivera were very proud of what they had achieved.
The unveiling of the works was a huge party, promoted as a great event with the participation of personalities from the artistic world, mariachis, dances, barbecue and, of course, pulque to toast.
There were even songs composed especially for the occasion.
Doña Frida de Rivera,
our dear teacher,
He told us: Come, boys,
I will show you life.
We will paint pulquerías
and the facades of schools;
art begins to die
when he stays at the academy.
own wings
Later, “Los Fridos” began to be called for other works.
One of them was the new Posada del Sol hotel, but the work – which had romance as its theme and which the young people had interpreted very freely – did not please the owner and he ordered it destroyed.
They also painted a public laundry and had an exhibition at the Palace of Fine Artsone of the most important artistic spaces in Mexico.
As the years went by, they grew, both personally and artistically, and great contemporary artists, such as José Clemente Orozco or David Alfaro Siqueiros, added them to their teams as assistants.
For Chávez Mac Gregor, among “Los Fridos” it was Rabel who stood out the most in his his later career.
“Because his work continued a political struggle, especially in the Taller de Gráfica Popular,” he points out.
“Frida and Fanny were very ahead of their time. “There is a preview, especially with Frida, of what is going to be important for contemporary art, since she is an artist who is thinking about the personal, the intimate, about sexuality, about not only affirming identities, but challenging them,” explains the expert.
“Frida opens a path that will later be very important for contemporary art”…
“With me they will paint everything they want and feel. I will try to understand them as best as possible. From time to time I will allow myself to make a few comments about your work, but I ask you, at the same time, to do the same when I show you mine, since we are friends. [amigos]”
“I will never take the pencil away from them to correct something. I want you to know, dear children, that there is not a teacher in the whole world capable of teaching the art. Doing that really is impossible.”
“We will surely talk a lot about one or another theoretical issue, the different techniques used in the plastic arts, artistic form and content, and all other things closely related to our work.
“I hope I don’t bore you, and if I do, I beg you not to stay silent, okay?”
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