FRIDA KAHLO: gleefully dabbling

 

"Thus, while her husband paints with large brushes on a huge wall surface, his wife, herself a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress in"

George Gershwin meets the Lovely and Charming Mrs. Rivera (a. k. a. Frida Kahlo)

 

Jan. 23, 1936
One Thirty-Two East Seventy-Second Street
New York

Dear Elizabeth -
After much patient waiting I finally was rewarded with an epistle (a very well typed epistle I may add) from you. I find its a very good idea to write letters so seldomly as it works up a been desire, almost amounting to pain in the receiving person, and its a swell idea unless of course the person happens to die waiting.

It's nice that things whizz for you out where beauties play my music. On the 9th February I'm playing the same frogs with the Washington Sym. - your mother has asked If she could give me a party in Wash. on that evening and I answered a quick "yes". I wish you were there.

Ira's Follies opens in town next week & it reminds me of a year ago when you had that lovely dress on & we went to the opening of 8:40.

Hope now you are in the pink, physically, mentally & professionally & affectionately & that you'll write soon to

George

& talents go to earn an honest dollar. When life whizzes by, one is really living, so drink it in, honey.

The Mexican trip was fun & educational. No, I didn't fight with Eddie or even the Doc. We all got along 'splendid'. Much sightseeing, travelling for 10 days at an average height of about 7500 ft., seeing all the churches (but no synagogues) looking, but in vain, for the Mexican beauties one hears about, listening to the music but finding difficult to get anyone to play anything away from 6/8 time. Spent a great deal of time with charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera. Made color pencil portraits of them both.

Here I am back in old New York again, freezing cold. It's 10 above zero today. Night before last I played in Philly with the Philadelphia Symphony, the concerto & a suite from Porgy. It was a major thrill to hear that band

Though it's pretty easy to find samples of GG's handwriting, the most interesting thing about these samples is his reference to meeting "charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera", the latter now celebrated as an artistic genius in her own right by her real name, Frida Kahlo.

I have to confess that some of this was a little hard to transcribe. That reference to "playing the same frogs" must, surely, be "songs", unless one of the songs was "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal". I am not sure who Elizabeth is, or was, and the Mexican letter consists of only page 2 and 3. What interests me - and maybe this was as casual then as an email, who knows - is how open he is about handwriting/answering letters from interested people and "fans". It must have been a thrill to get a handwritten note, not just from a secretary but from the great man himself.

By the way, he refers to playing with the Washington Symphony on February 9. No coincidence, is it, that the date happens to be my birthday?

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo: gleefully dabbling

(text) Something about the hilarious incongruity of a stuffed lion, a plaster-of-Paris horse, and a colored chromo of George Washington draped in garlands of red, white and blue crepe paper, all jumbled in the same shop window, proved to be too much for the sense of humor of Senora Diego Rivera, and so she simply had to do something about it. What she did was to go home and paint it, which may surprise people who think that Diego Rivera, the great mural painter now at work at the Detroit Institute of Arts, is the only artist in the family.

That, however, is all a mistake, since his wife, Carmen Rivera, or "Freda" (sic) as her friends call her, is a painter in her own right, though very few people know it.

"No," she explains. "I didn't study with Diego. I didn't study with anyone. I just started to paint."

Then her eyes begin to twinkle. "Of course," she explains, "he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist." Then the twinkles in both black eyes fairly explode into a rippling laugh. And that is absolutely all that you can coax out of her about the matter. When you grow serious she mocks you and and laughs again. But Senora Rivera's painting is by no means a joke: because, however much she may laugh when you ask her about it, the fact remains that she has acquired a very skillful and beautiful style, painting in the small with miniature-like technique, which is as far removed from the heroic figures of Rivera as could well be imagined.

Thus, while her husband paints with large brushes on a huge wall surface, his wife, herself a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress in

And that's as far as it goes. As much of it as we can see, anyway, though the article probably goes on to provide us with "Freda's" favorite recipes, shoe styles and facial depilatories.  

The article is a strange one, in that it almost seems to be acknowledging that Mrs. Rivera has some talent, if only in miniature. Her claim that she "didn't study with anyone" is very Kahlo (and also very true), as is her bold statement, "it is I who am the big artist." The interviewer probably thought she was kidding, though the laughter might have been a little uneasy. 

I love the movie Frida and have seen it seven or eight times. The tango sequence is particularly excruciating. Alfred Molina nails it as Diego, though in truth he's too good-looking to play the dumpy, awkward-looking artist who wore his belt under his armpits. But like F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, he's the salt in the recipe without which it would lose its savour and fall flat.

Monkeyshines: more creepy than Halloween

It's All Saints Day, the bellybutton of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration which lasts from October 31 to November 2. In celebration of which, I'm going to post something totally irrelevant: something I came across years ago and which fascinated me. As usual, it's attached to the idea of obsolete technology which was cutting-edge and even astonishing in its day.

YouTube has graciously provided me with many clips of early gizmos which were meant to create the illusion of motion. I'm not sure if Eadweard Muybridge invented the idea or not, but his studies of horses and buffalo and giraffes in motion were groundbreaking. Somehow (I can't find out how because I have to get out of here in a minute), he had rigged it up to take a lot of photos of a moving object over a few seconds. Trip-wires, or something, except that then the horse might trip! (haha). However he did it, when the photos were shown in rapid succession, the horse or buffalo or Thompson's gazelle or whatever-it-was seemed to be running. (Until then, people were so ignorant that they claimed a horse always had one foot on the ground when it ran. Reminds me of what Ann Landers told teenage girls they should do when making out.)

It's really just the old flip-book idea in more sophisticated form, leading to the mutoscope - you know, the crank job with its 20-second-long, supposedly titillating scenarios.

Meantime, Edison was experimenting with the kinetoscope, which used a kind of film - a quantum leap beyond these rapidly-shuffling leaves of paper - but still pretty primitive. Only one person could look at it at a time, creating the strange and steamy intimacy that made the church thunder against its wicked graven images. An experimental Edison film called Monkeyshines (in two parts) is especially strange and seems to reach out to us from some eerie dimension in the deep past. In the first part there are just flickers of what might be a human form. Part Two is a little more recognizable, but still weirdly primitive and low-tech.

(Wikipedia entry)

Monkeyshines (1889 or 1890), an experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope, is believed to be the first film shot in the United States.

Monkeyshines, No. 1 was shot by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison labs. Scholars have differing opinions on whether the first was shot in June 1889 starring John Ott or sometime between November 21–27, 1890 starring G. Sacco Albanese. Both men were fellow lab workers at the company; contradictory evidence exists for each claim. Monkeyshines, No. 2 and Monkeyshines, No. 3 quickly followed to test further conditions.

These films were intended to be internal tests of the new camera system, and were not created for commercial use; their rise to prominence resulted much later due to work by film historians. All three films show a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and are only a few seconds long.

(NOT Wikipedia entry): I REALLY have to get out of here, I'm late for whatever it is I'm going to, which is none of your business anyway, but here are some bizarro Muybridge things I found along the way. And his name really was spelled Eadweard. Maybe his mother couldn't spell? (Oprah's real name is Orpah, did you know that? Now you do.)

POST-LEAPFROG OBSERVATIONS. This Muybridge guy was some character. His real name was Edward Muggeridge, by the way, but he didn't think that was colourful enough, so he kept changing it until he thought it was back to its original medieval form. It wasn't - just very hard to spell. And just how would you pronounce EADWEARD anyway?

I present this blog the way I dig out my facts: in jigsaw fashion, finding a chunk of valuable information, but later finding something else that seems to fit or, more often, just changes the whole picture. That is why I am so given to post-blog observations: it's to represent the process of discovery, the nosy eagerness and ferreting-out. Research is never a straight line, is it? (unless it's very dull research). Or maybe I'm just too lazy to write formal essays with all the loose ends neatly woven in. But such watertightness is, I've always thought, a great way NOT to learn, because everything is already neatly sealed. Much scientific discovery has been effectively choked off and died due to this approach.

So! Here is another nice nugget about Muybridge, whom I did NOT set out to talk about! At all! I was going to talk about Monkeyshines, and got sidetracked, but Muybridge is much more interesting than Edison because he murdered somebody:

His most famous work began in 1872, when he was hired by Leland Stanford (later the founder of Stanford University) to photograph horses. Stanford reputedly had made a bet that for a moment, all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously, and he hired Muybridge to take the pictures to prove him right. This was difficult to do with the cameras of the time, and the initial experiments produced only indistinct images. The photographer then became distracted when he discovered that his young wife had taken a lover and may even have had their child by him. Muybridge tracked down the lover and shot and killed him. When Muybridge stood trial, he did not deny the killing, but he was nonetheless acquitted. Muybridge left San Francisco and spent two years in Guatemala. On his return, Muybridge resumed his photography of horses in motion, this time far more successfully. He set up a row of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a split second as the horse ran by. The results settled the debate once and for all: all four hooves do leave the ground at once, as the top middle image in this sequence demonstrates.

". . . For which I will gladly pay you Tuesday."

*DISCOVERY!* I have made a discovery! More Muybridge dirty pictures, hitherto unknown to anyone, even Muybridge! (Taken from the Muybridge Institute for Pornography, Stagreel, Minnesota).

George Meets Frida: a Mexican adventure

Jan. 23, 1936
One Thirty-Two East Seventy-Second Street
New York

Dear Elizabeth -
     After much patient waiting I finally was rewarded with an epistle (a very well typed epistle I may add) from you. I find its a very good idea to write letters so seldomly as it works up a been desire, almost amounting to pain in the receiving person, and its a swell idea unless of course the person happens to die waiting.
     It's nice that things whizz for you out where beauties play my music. On the 9th February I'm playing the same frogs with the Washington Sym. - your mother has asked If she could give me a party in Wash. on that evening and I answered a quick "yes". I wish you were there.
     Ira's Follies opens in town next week & it reminds me of a year ago when you had that lovely dress on & we went to the opening of 8:40.
     Hope now you are in the pink, physically, mentally & professionally & affectionately & that you'll write soon to
     George

& talents go to earn an honest dollar. When life whizzes by, one is really living, so drink it in, honey.
     The Mexican trip was fun & educational. No, I didn't fight with Eddie or even the Doc. We all got along 'splendid'. Much sightseeing, travelling for 10 days at an average height of about 7500 ft., seeing all the churches (but no synagogues) looking, but in vain, for the Mexican beauties one hears about, listening to the music but finding difficult to get anyone to play anything away from 6/8 time. Spent a great deal of time with charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera.  Made color pencil portraits of them both.
     Here I am back in old New York again, freezing cold. It's 10 above zero today. Night before last I played in Philly with the Philadelphia Symphony, the concerto & a suite from Porgy. It was a major thrill to hear that band

OK, Gershwinites: and are there any of you actually out there? Never mind, nobody reads my blog anyway, or hardly anyone, so I may as well pursue my current obsession (as usual!). One of these days I'm going to change the title of it to Gershwin's Ghost. You see, George himself is beginning to wonder if I am in fact working up to another book, which would be OK if it appears after my death and somebody else does all the slamming-headlong-into-the-cement-wall/humilating failure for me.

It's pretty easy to find samples of GG's handwriting, and the  most interesting thing about these samples is his reference to meeting "charming fat Diego Rivera & charming lovely Mrs. Diego Rivera", the latter now celebrated as an artist in her own right by her real name, Frida Kahlo.

I have to confess that some of this was a little hard to transcribe. That reference to "playing the same frogs" must, surely, be "songs", unless one of the songs was "Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal". I am not sure who Elizabeth is, or was, and the Mexican letter consists of only page 2 and 3. What interests me - and maybe this was as casual then as an email, who knows - is how open he is about handwriting/answering letters from interested people and "fans". It must have been a thrill to get a handwritten note, not just from a secretary but from the great man himself.

By the way, he refers to playing with the Washington  Symphony on February 9. No coincidence, is it, that the date happens to be my birthday?

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