Frida Kahlo: The Girl on the Bus (Part 1)

How did a bus crash change the course of art history? And what is the truth behind Frida Kahlo's family origins? Join Alastair and James as they embarked on a new three part series on the life and work of one of the world's most celebrated artists - Frida Kahlo. Artworks in this episode include: Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait (With Velvet Dress), 1926, Private Collection For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Frida: The Making of an Icon is on at Tate Modern, London until 3rd January 2027. Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01James Fox?

  Welcome to Stories of Art, I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Alastair Sooke?

  And I'm Alistair Sook.

• 0:09James Fox?

  A young woman with black hair, a faint moustache and a distinctive mono brow gazes out at us. She wears a spiky necklace whose thorns pierce her skin, sending droplets of blood running down her neck, and to which is tied like a ghoulish pendant, the lifeless body of a hummingbird. She is surrounded by a menagerie of other animals. A spider monkey sits behind one shoulder, a black cat creeps behind the other, and two gossamer butterflies rest on her head. Now that, Alistair, is a celebrated self-portrait by one of history's most celebrated self-portraitists,

• 0:50James Fox?

  the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. It's a haunting work, isn't it?

• 0:56Alastair Sooke?

  It is a haunting work, James. I think you forgot, I'm looking at a picture reproduced in a catalogue on the table in front of me. Did you forget the couple of dragonflies that are sort of buzzing around?

• 1:04James Fox?

  I forgot the dragonflies!

• 1:06Alastair Sooke?

  You can never quite tell whether these are almost hair adornments, ornaments, or real natural elements. I mean, this is an amazing picture, very, very famous, and it's one of a whole series of self-portraits that Frida Kahlo produced late on in her life. And I think the thing I'm fascinated by looking at it is, you've picked a particular image where because she has this necklace of thorns, and you can see the spikes cutting into her neck and their drips of blood falling down her neck, she's staring at the viewer and she has this quite Christ-like presence.

• 1:43James Fox?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44Alastair Sooke?

  You know, it's as if she is someone who is taking on the suffering of others. And you mentioned the mono brow, it's very, very distinctive. I think most people, when they see, if they were to look at this, they would be able to tell you that this is not just Frida Kahlo, but they'd probably call her Frida, just by the first name. And the thing I find fascinating about her is that this face is one of the most famous faces of the 20th century, because I think, I don't know if you agree with it... But I think she, and this is what's so fascinating about doing a mini series about her in this podcast. I think she transcends visual art altogether. And she is operating on a sort of bigger, wider scale, if you like. It's as if she's as recognisable as Che Guevara.

• 2:28Alastair Sooke?

  You know, she's become this kind of political symbol. She's a radical somehow. And I think people clearly find her enormously attractive in terms of what she represents.

• 2:39James Fox?

  She is a breakout artist, isn't she? She's one of those artists, even if you don't know much about art, you don't like art. You will recognise who she is. In fact, before we did this episode. I showed the picture to my seven-year-old son and I said, who's this? And he immediately, without a beat, without a hesitation, Alistair, he said Frida Kahlo.

• 2:56Alastair Sooke?

  Did he?

• 2:56James Fox?

  Because they're, because they're learning Frida Kahlo at school, just as, do you remember we did the Great Wave and he understood the Great Wave?

• 3:02Alastair Sooke?

  Art-literate household, the Fox household.

• 3:04James Fox?

  Of course it is. But it's interesting, isn't it, how some artworks end up, you know, translating across culture in that sense.

• 3:10Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, they cut through.

• 3:12James Fox?

  And self-portrait was such an enormous part of her practice. So she produced, what, 140-odd paintings? Almost a quarter of them, I think actually more than a quarter of them are self-portraits. What do you think about the picture itself? What do you think about these animals in particular?

• 3:27Alastair Sooke?

  Well, the picture, it's, this is, it's quite typical of self-portraits from this moment in her career. Because I think this dates from, is it 1940?

• 3:35James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Alastair Sooke?

  And she's presented quite sort of in close-up, you just see head and shoulders. But in front of this very dark foliage, these leaves behind, and as you say, all of these animals. So she did have various pets that she lived with, one of which was this spider monkey called Fulong Chang.

• 3:50James Fox?

  Which means any old monkey.

• 3:52Alastair Sooke?

  Does it? I didn't know.

• 3:54James Fox?

  Yes, it does. And it was a gift from our husband, who we'll be discussing in great detail.

• 3:58Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah, big character, an important figure. But Fulong Chang, any old monkey, appears on her right shoulder on the left of the picture as we look at it. And seems to be fiddling with the necklace, quite sweet. The cat looks very, very sinister. Totally black, emerging out of the foliage, paw on her left shoulder on the right of the picture as we look. And then that- Hummingbird you mention is interesting as well. It's like it's a pendant from this bizarre masochistic piece of jewellery, the necklace of thorns. But whereas traditionally you might think a hummingbird was what, a symbol of something quite joyful? It's hanging there, lifeless.

• 4:36James Fox?

  Yes.

• 4:36Alastair Sooke?

  It appears to be dead and stiff. It's like this odd talismanic emblem. But again, it has quite an ominous quality. And I think that she is, in her self-portraiture, transforming the tradition of self-portraiture because she is showcasing her own, both physical and emotional pain and suffering through symbolic motifs like that hummingbird and the cat.

• 4:59James Fox?

  Well, look, so much of Frida's fame that we've described is rooted in her life story, which is extraordinary. It's a tale of love and loss, of immense physical and emotional suffering, of marriages and affairs and dozens of surgical procedures, all taking place, Alastair, against the backdrop of the revolutionary politics of the 20th century. So it's an incredible story. So this then is the first part in our three-part series on the life and work of Frida Kahlo.

• 5:38James Fox?

  So, Alastair, Frida Kahlo is of course Mexican, probably arguably the most famous Mexican of all time.

• 5:45Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, or what about that figure that she eventually marries that we'll come on to?

• 5:50James Fox?

  Well, I think she's more famous than him.

• 5:51Alastair Sooke?

  She is now. It's interesting, isn't it? But yeah, sorry, I'm jumping ahead, James.

• 5:55James Fox?

  But although she's the definitive Mexican in some ways, I'd like to begin this story on the other side of the Atlantic because her father was actually German. His name was Wilhelm Kahlo. He was born in 1871 in the city of Pforzheim in southwestern Germany. And you know, Frida's life is full of strange mysteries. We're only 30 seconds into this episode. We already reached one of the first mysteries because she claimed repeatedly throughout her life that her father was Jewish, that he was from a Hungarian Jewish background. It became established fact. It's mentioned in this really great biography by Hayden Herrera.

• 6:35Alastair Sooke?

  I certainly feel I've read this.

• 6:36James Fox?

  Yeah, it's it was there was a a few years ago, there was an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, all about Frida Kahlo's Jewish identity. If you go onto Wikipedia today, you will find the first thing about Wilhelm Kahlo was that he was Jewish.

• 6:47Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 6:48James Fox?

  And yet, relatively recently, a pair of German historians traced her lineage all the way back to the 16th century.

• 6:55Alastair Sooke?

  Ha.

• 6:55James Fox?

  And they found not a shred, not a centella of Jewish heritage.

• 7:00Alastair Sooke?

  So what's going on there? That was a family story she's repeating or an embellishment that she's coming up with because?

• 7:06James Fox?

  Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, isn't it? I think there are two potential explanations. I mean, like many great artists, Frida was a a self fashioner. She was a myth maker. She was of the political left, so she identified herself often with minority groups. So perhaps throwing Jewishness into the mix was a good part of her shtick.

• 7:22Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 7:23James Fox?

  I think the other aspect was political, you know, in the 1930s and 40s, she's a member of the left. Everyone knew she was half German. You do not want to be German in the 30s or 40s if you're if you're of the left. And so one way to acknowledge that German identity, but to sort of neuter it was to say, well, I'm a German Jew.

• 7:40Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I also know that she changes the spelling of her name.

• 7:45James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Alastair Sooke?

  For the same reason, right? Because she's actually called F R I E D A, which is the German spelling of Frida. And she changes that spelling to almost renounce.

• 7:55James Fox?

  Yes.

• 7:55Alastair Sooke?

  Symbolically, that German heritage.

• 7:57James Fox?

  It means peace in German, the name. So anyway, let's get back to Wilhelm Kahlo. So Wilhelm Kahlo grows up in Germany. Relatively prosperous, middle class background. His father is a jeweler and a photographer. And in about 1890, he goes to university at Nuremberg. Now, one of the things that is a defining feature of the Kahlo family is they get very unlucky with their health.

• 8:19Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 8:20James Fox?

  And the first person to get unlucky with his health is Wilhelm. So when he's 18, 19 years old, he takes a fall. He hits his head.

• 8:28Alastair Sooke?

  Uh huh.

• 8:28James Fox?

  He suffers severe brain injury and suffers epileptic seizures ready for the rest of his life. Frida will witness some of these seizures as a young girl.

• 8:36Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 8:37James Fox?

  At the same time, Alastair, his mother dies. And his father remarries a woman he hates. And so Wilhelm decides, I want to leave Germany. So 1890, 1891, he crosses the Atlantic and he settles in Mexico.

• 8:49Alastair Sooke?

  So how old is he roughly?

• 8:51James Fox?

  He's about 18 or 19 years old at this point. He's got no money, he's got no possessions, he's got quite significant neurological disorder.

• 8:58Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 8:58James Fox?

  It's pretty brave of him to do this.

• 8:59Alastair Sooke?

  Do we know why he's picked Mexico?

• 9:02James Fox?

  Don't know why, no idea. But anyway, he very quickly embraces Mexican identity. He changes his name from Wilhelm Carlo to Guillermo Carlo.

• 9:10Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 9:10James Fox?

  He gets a relatively modest job in a jewellery shop. Remember, his father was a jeweller. He marries a Mexican woman.

• 9:17Alastair Sooke?

  Who is, so this is, this is not Frida's mother, right?

• 9:20James Fox?

  Not Frida's mother. They have a couple of daughters together.

• 9:23Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 9:23James Fox?

  Now, listeners may feel relatively sympathetic towards Wilhelm at this point, but what I'm about to say will change their mind because his wife dies giving birth to his third daughter. And that same night, Guillermo proposes to another woman and puts his children into a convent.

• 9:41Alastair Sooke?

  Wow.

• 9:42James Fox?

  Yes, this is what he does. It's not his finest hour. So he then has fallen in love with another woman who works in the jewellery shop. A woman called Matilda Calderon, who's this very handsome, formidable woman from Oaxaca with indigenous heritage. They marry and Matilda is very ambitious for her husband. She doesn't want to be married to a shopkeeper. She wants him to set up a business and she convinces him to set up a photographic studio, which is a booming industry at the time. And it proves to be very successful. He's very good at it.

• 10:14Alastair Sooke?

  So my memory is that he always says he much prefers photographing buildings and monuments rather than people, right?

• 10:20James Fox?

  Yes, and indeed he gets a really lucrative commission from the Mexican government to travel around the country taking photographs of Mexican architecture. And this generates sufficient money for him and his wife to buy a little plot of land.

• 10:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 10:35James Fox?

  In a village just outside of Mexico City called Coyoacan and to build a house called.

• 10:42Alastair Sooke?

  The Blue House.

• 10:43James Fox?

  The Casa Azul, the Blue House, which today is obviously the Frida Kahlo Museum. Have you ever been?

• 10:48Alastair Sooke?

  I, I wish I had been. I haven't. It's lovely. You have.

• 10:52James Fox?

  It's a lovely place to go. So this is where Frida Kahlo grows up. So they have a couple of daughters.

• 10:57Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 10:57James Fox?

  And on a rainy day, on the 6th of July, 1907, they have their third daughter, whose name is Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo I Calderon.

• 11:09James Fox?

  And she grows up in this relatively prosperous house.

• 11:13Alastair Sooke?

  I love this. I really love the sound of this this place because it's not today, my understanding, I mean, you've been there. My understanding is that it's sort of been subsumed into the big sprawl of Mexico City. But when she's born and when she's a young child, it sounds like it's a very quiet, quite pretty, villagey town on the outskirts of Mexico City.

• 11:32James Fox?

  The sound of cockerels and that kind of thing. Lovely.

• 11:35Alastair Sooke?

  Quite like a mini paradise.

• 11:36James Fox?

  Yes.

• 11:37Alastair Sooke?

  Beautiful place to grow up. Particularly, she's got, what, a couple of older siblings who are sisters. I think there's a son who's born who dies when he's quite young, and then she has a younger sister who's going to play a very big part in the story called Christina. And it feels like, to begin with, aside from your mentioning the dad's, what, how did he put it, neurological issues.

• 11:59James Fox?

  Yes, he has seizures and Frieda often witnesses late at night, she sees, you know, through a half-open doorway in the bedroom, him having these epileptic seizures, which must have been traumatic for a young girl. But generally, the life in the house was relatively stable.

• 12:14Alastair Sooke?

  Do you think it was quite strict? That's my question, because my sense is that I think there's this real bond and rapport between the father and Frieda specifically. I think Frieda's probably his favorite child and they they feel like they're quite alike. They're sort of simpatico. The mum takes more of an interest in other members of the family than in Frieda. And I think she comes from this background, which was quite a sort of strict upbringing, quite traditional, right?

• 12:41James Fox?

  Yes, very Catholic, very Catholic. The mother's quite fearsome, quite intimidating. The father is a much more taciturn, morose, cultural type. He'll spend a lot of time in his study on his own, listening to German classical music.

• 12:54Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 12:54James Fox?

  But they do form a bond, because as we shall see, Frieda will suffer terrible health throughout her life, and they bond over that.

• 13:00Alastair Sooke?

  There's a really, really famous black and white photograph, taken in, I think, 1926, which is a family group shot. And the reason it's so famous is that you have everyone dressed very elegantly and quite conventionally, including Frieda's siblings. And then there's Frieda on the left of the picture, who is dressed. In a man's suit, and the amazing thing is that no one's batting an eyelid. They're all like, yeah, that's standard fare for the way Frida Kahlo operated. And of course, much later, she paints herself cross-dressing. So I think that's almost part of her appeal for contemporary audiences.

• 13:35James Fox?

  Definitely.

• 13:36Alastair Sooke?

  This is, this is an important moment.

• 13:38James Fox?

  But the household is relatively stable. The, the real issues, the real instability is coming nationally. It's what's happening, happening in Mexico during this childhood.

• 13:48Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 13:48James Fox?

  Because Mexico, Alistair, is going through this political upheaval at the time.

• 13:53Alastair Sooke?

  It totally is. I mean, when she's born in 1907, she's born into a dictatorship, a relatively stable society in Mexico, but the ruler is someone called Porfirio Diaz. And although there's been this kind of peace and prosperity under his rule for almost 30 years, it is authoritarian. There is this elite land-owning class that have a lot of the wealth, quite sort of, europhile is my sense of, of the culture. And you have a situation by 1910, where he is looking to get elected for, I think, the seventh time. And surprise, surprise, he's quite confident he may be elected. And whoa, he is!

• 14:35Alastair Sooke?

  And it's the last straw. There's a sense of disgust at what's going on. There's a call to arms. And in 1910, it's the beginning of what's known as the Mexican Revolution, which is this big definitive moment in Mexican history. It lasts for about 10 years of chaotic civil strife and combat, all of these different factions, different leaders. But out of it, it's the end of the dictatorship and ultimately the beginnings of modern Mexico as a nation and as a state, and a sense of opportunity and progressive ideals. For example, to do with education or labour rights or land reform. And without skipping ahead too much, and we'll come back to this, but just to sort of tease it,

• 15:19Alastair Sooke?

  what you eventually find, there's a constitution, which happens in 1917, and then the elected government after that eventually really Tries to harness culture and art to help further its message and connect with the people. And Frida is part of that. I think later in life, doesn't she actually slightly embellish her story? She's always doing that. She changes the year of her birth, as she tells it, from nineteen oh seven to nineteen ten, which is the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, almost to identify with the revolutionaries, even though in that place, that small town outside Mexico City, it was pretty quiet.

• 15:57James Fox?

  Yeah, it's a bit like the novel Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, where the main character, whose name escapes me, is born at exactly the moment that India finds independence. She wants to identify herself with this new politically left-wing Mexico, doesn't she?

• 16:12Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 16:12James Fox?

  So this is what's going on in her early childhood. I have mentioned before that poor health stalks the Carlo family. Her father is having epileptic seizures, we've mentioned it. Her mother begins to have epileptic seizures as well. And at the age of six, Frida Carlo contracts polio.

• 16:32Alastair Sooke?

  And this is a big deal.

• 16:33James Fox?

  Big deal. She's bed bound for months and months. Her leg, her right leg in particular, becomes very withered and weak. It never really recovers, actually. She limps for the rest of her life. She's very self-conscious about it. She's bullied at school.

• 16:46Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, she gets a nickname, doesn't she? She's called Peg Leg.

• 16:49James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Alastair Sooke?

  And I mean, the self-consciousness extends throughout her life in terms of, often she's wearing long skirts. She's trying to hide that skinny withered leg. I mean, I just mentioned before her younger sister Christina, who was socially quite successful and very attractive. And I think Frida felt quite jealous throughout her life. She had this insecurity that she wasn't certainly as attractive as Christina. And may have all come from this one, this moment.

• 17:14James Fox?

  This leg, it gives her pain consistently throughout her life until, this is a bit of a spoiler, it gets amputated. We'll be discussing that in episode three. It's an awful situation. But she manages to recover. And in nineteen twenty-two, when she's fourteen, fifteen years old, she enters pretty much the best school in Mexico, which is the National Preparatory School. It's a very large. School in Mexico City.

• 17:40Alastair Sooke?

  Mainly for boys, surely.

• 17:41James Fox?

  Yeah, I think there are two thousand boys, thirty, thirty five girls.

• 17:45Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 17:45James Fox?

  She immediately, she's a very spirited girl, Frida, and she immediately becomes a member of the, the troublemaking gang.

• 17:52Alastair Sooke?

  I, I quite like this.

• 17:53James Fox?

  Do you know what they're called?

• 17:54Alastair Sooke?

  Uh, what is it? They, they, they capuchas or something.

• 17:56James Fox?

  They're called the cachuchas.

• 17:57Alastair Sooke?

  Cachuchas, they, they lost cachuchas. What does it mean?

• 17:59James Fox?

  I don't know what it means. I don't know. It's a bit of a cap.

• 18:02Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I think it's about the caps that they supposedly wore, but also has this, it's a slang term for people who are a bit crazy, los cachuchas.

• 18:09James Fox?

  Well, they are crazy. They ride a donkey through the corridors of the school. They strap fireworks to the back of a very unfortunate dog. They set off a, a bomb of firecrackers in the middle of a class to scare the teacher. So they're causing all kinds of mayhem. But also in that same year, in nineteen twenty two, the same year that Frida Kahlo arrives at that school. The school commissions.

• 18:33Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 18:33James Fox?

  A very famous artist to create a mural for the auditorium. And this figure will prove to be an incredibly important character throughout this series. And his name, Alastair, is Diego Rivera.

• 18:47Alastair Sooke?

  Diego Rivera.

• 18:49James Fox?

  What do we know about Diego at this point, nineteen twenty two ish?

• 18:53Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, we don't want to sort of jump too far ahead in the chronology.

• 18:57James Fox?

  Wouldn't be like you.

• 18:58Alastair Sooke?

  No, no, I know. So that really is my MO. Um, I, what we know about him is that he is this, he's just a massive character.

• 19:07James Fox?

  In more ways than one.

• 19:08Alastair Sooke?

  He's big. He's really, really big. He has a paunch.

• 19:11James Fox?

  He's, no, no, it's not a paunch. He weighs a hundred and thirty six kilos. He's, he's the weight of the two of us.

• 19:16Alastair Sooke?

  But bloody hell.

• 19:16James Fox?

  He's enormous.

• 19:17Alastair Sooke?

  He has these quite sort of like buggy eyes. I mean, he's physically basically quite unattractive. And yet he's enormously successful with women throughout his life. And actually that's, becomes a great cause of strife and, and discord between, um, Diego and Frida.

• 19:31James Fox?

  Do you know he ends up getting penis cancer?

• 19:34Alastair Sooke?

  Ah.

• 19:35James Fox?

  Karma.

• 19:35Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 19:36James Fox?

  But anyway, he's a great woman.

• 19:37Alastair Sooke?

  You just leave that with that.

• 19:39James Fox?

  Maybe that's another episode three discussion.

• 19:41Alastair Sooke?

  Um, he is, he's also, as well as being quite a big character, he's very, very talented and precocious. So I think he's, when is it? He's born in eighteen eighty six and at the age of ten or eleven, he's actually already studying at the Mexico City San Carlos Academy. And quite soon after that, he's probably, you know, he's copying old masters. He's proven to be very good at that. He wins a grant to go to Europe. So for fourteen years from nineteen oh seven, he's spending time in Europe, much of it in Paris. And you have to imagine, this is like peak moment of heroic, early wild modernism years, where Paris is the centre of the art world.

• 20:23James Fox?

  I mean, nineteen oh seven, you know, Picasso's painting, the Deauville d'Avignon, Cubism is just about to, to emerge and explode onto the scene.

• 20:29Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 20:30James Fox?

  Very exciting.

• 20:30Alastair Sooke?

  And so he, he's, he's soaking up all of these avant garde, experimental artistic ideas. He's also carousing. I think much later in his life, there's a, a sort of sense of his legendary exploits of those bohemian years. We're still kicking about in the late thirties when Frieda ends up going to Paris. She's hearing these bloody stories about Diego. And he has quite a complicated personal life at this point. He has a couple of relationships. He spends ten, well, I mean, probably more, but principal ones, ten years with a Russian artist called Angelina Beloff. And they have a young son together who's called little Diego, Diegoito. And that child dies and in a freezing cold studio garret.

• 21:11James Fox?

  Oh.

• 21:11Alastair Sooke?

  Which is very sad. And then Diego, um, it's kind of like an echo almost of what you said before about Frieda's dad. But he abandons her, gets together with a second Russian woman who's called Marevna. They have a daughter, but that doesn't work out very well. And eventually in nineteen twenty one, Diego returns to Mexico by himself. I don't think he has anything to do with those two women ever again. And he comes back, it's post-revolutionary Mexico. And this is the moment where, I mean, there is a particular minister who. Always is in all of the literature about Diego and Frida, who's called Jose Vasconcelos. He's the Minister of Education around this time, and he, it seems to me, is a real visionary.

• 21:54James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Alastair Sooke?

  He's the one who's wanting to employ and harness lots of prominent public artists to create effectively a new type of art. It's not for the elite, but it's going to be done in public on the walls of public buildings. And so for the next few years, Diego Rivera, and this is, I'll just briefly bring this to a close. He becomes exceptionally famous for the murals he's painting in all these public buildings. And the very first mural he does is by chance in this amazing school, which was a new school modeled on European educational ideas. You've already mentioned the prepper.

• 22:30James Fox?

  Yes.

• 22:30Alastair Sooke?

  Where Frida goes to study and he happens to be working there, where I think he is ribbed by a lot of these, um. Uh, what do we call them? The caturchas.

• 22:40James Fox?

  The caturchas, yes, in- indeed. They are very excited when they hear this great celebrity who's been, you know, abroad, has coming to their school. And Frida Carlo is very excited and she makes mischief, as the caturchas always does. So there's one story in which while he's up on the scaffold, she sneaks in to the auditorium and she steals his lunch. He's a man, he's a man who liked his lunch.

• 23:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, that would have pissed him off.

• 23:03James Fox?

  Probably didn't go down very well. There's another story when, while he's up on the scaffold or sort of away, she puts these very slippery soap suds on the floor in the hope that he will slip over.

• 23:12Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 23:12James Fox?

  But Rivera was so big and so slow moving that he didn't slip over and one of the teachers slipped over instead.

• 23:18Alastair Sooke?

  Okay. Isn't it the case that, I mean, certainly this one of the stories, I don't know whether, you know, can we verify it? Supposedly from day one, because bear in mind that she is, what, she's 15 in 1922 when she starts the school. At this stage, Diego is probably in his, I think, mid to late 30s. He's a lot older. Yet she says from the off, one day, I'm gonna marry that man.

• 23:42James Fox?

  Yes.

• 23:42Alastair Sooke?

  And it seems to me that that's an act of, I mean, it's not really true love striking. Maybe it is. Or is it just an act of kind of adolescent rebellion? It's sort of almost so perverse that as a 15 year old, you might be attracted to this character. It's kind of dangerous. He represents something which is the opposite of that safe Catholic traditional upbringing that her mother had prized.

• 24:04James Fox?

  Yes, they're in the playground, I think, and they're all talking about what they want to do when they grow up. And Frida says, well, I'm gonna have Diego Rivera's child. And everyone goes, well, he's disgusting. He looks like an enormous toad. And she says, don't worry, it's gonna happen. And indeed, Alistair, they do actually meet in 1922 while he's there. I will, because I love Diego Rivera's writing.

• 24:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 24:24James Fox?

  May I just read his little account of their first meeting?

• 24:27Alastair Sooke?

  And should we just preface it by saying that he was someone who liked to embellish life in terms of accounts, right?

• 24:34James Fox?

  Just like us.

• 24:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yes. So we just maybe just keep that in mind as we listen to this passage.

• 24:39James Fox?

  Well, this is what he says. He says, "One night, as I was painting high on the scaffold, there was a loud shouting and pushing against the auditorium door. All of a sudden, a door flew open and a girl who seemed to be no more than 10 or 12 was propelled inside. She was dressed like any other high school student, but her manner immediately set her apart. She had unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes. Her beauty was that of a child, yet her breasts were very well-developed." That's a rather Diego comment.

• 25:10Alastair Sooke?

  That's a Diego line for sure, yeah.

• 25:11James Fox?

  "She looked straight up at me. 'Would it cause you any annoyance if I watch you at work?' she asked. 'No, young lady, I'd be charmed,' I said. She sat down and watched me silently, her eyes riveted on every move of my paintbrush. The girl stayed about three hours. When she left, she said only, 'Good night.' A year later, I learned that her name was Frida Carlo, but I had no idea that she would one day be my wife."

• 25:37James Fox?

  So that is Diego's probably embellished account.

• 25:39Alastair Sooke?

  Quite self flattering, isn't it?

• 25:41James Fox?

  Yes.

• 25:41Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, you know, fair enough, but and retrospectively, this was a kind of bizarre coincidence because their lives do become so enmeshed and entwined, but not for some years, even though they had had this meeting earlier on.

• 25:56James Fox?

  Yeah, well, I think we should come to a break. Everything really now was going very well for Frida. She's in a good school, she's having fun, she's full of vim and sparkle and optimism for the future. But Alastair, she is about to suffer a terrible disaster that will change her life forever. And to hear all about it, join us after the break.

• 26:21Alastair Sooke?

  For more great art, go to henny.com or to the Henny Talks YouTube channel to see more than 200 videos on art and architecture. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.

• 26:46James Fox?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It's now 1925. It's three years or so after that first encounter with Diego Rivera. Frida Carlo is 18 years old and she, Alastair, is about to experience a life changing disaster. So it's a rainy afternoon, another rainy afternoon. On the 17th of September, 1925, she is in the centre of Mexico City with her boyfriend, Alejandro.

• 27:13Alastair Sooke?

  Now, we haven't mentioned him. Just briefly, it's worth kind of establishing who he is because he's a very important figure in her life. Alejandro Gomez Arias, he's very charismatic, apparently, kind of really good public speaker. And my sense is that he was the real leader of this this group, the Cachuchas. And she is drawn to him. I always sort of thought she has this crush on him. We don't quite know, was he her boyfriend, wasn't he? But they certainly, they have this real bond and closeness. And crucially, they are travelling together every day from to and from the school because they're living in the same vicinity.

• 27:52James Fox?

  Yes.

• 27:53Alastair Sooke?

  And so this is one of those days where it's the end of the day, right? And they are both going together to go home.

• 28:00James Fox?

  Yes, they're in Mexico City after, I think, a day at school. They're wandering through the stalls of the Zócalo, which is the the central square in Mexico City. He buys her a little toy, a little toy parasol from one of the stalls. And then it's a rainy day, as I say, so they get onto a bus. And the buses back then were not buses as they are now. They were rickety little wooden vehicles with two benches facing each other in the back, a little handrail on the ceiling.

• 28:24Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, I think they were meant to be state of the art at the time.

• 28:26James Fox?

  But nevertheless, yeah, yeah. They get onto the bus. And as soon as they get on the bus, Frida realizes she's lost her parasol. So they get off the bus, they retrace their footsteps, they never find the parasol. And they end up getting on the next bus. Again, tiny little wooden vehicle. It's a very busy service, but they find a little space right at the back. And shortly after they get on the bus, the bus driver is trying to overtake a tram.

• 28:51Alastair Sooke?

  And he's a novice driver.

• 28:53James Fox?

  Yes, and there's a very extensive tram network in Mexico City. Trams are much bigger, much more robust than the buses. And as he's trying to overtake the tram, the tram turns and the two vehicles collide.

• 29:08Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 29:08James Fox?

  And as those vehicles collide, the bus is crushed and shattered. It is a terrible accident. Several people are killed instantly. Alejandro passes out, wakes up with minor injuries under one of the vehicles a few moments later. And immediately tries to find Frida. And then he finds her lying flat, covered in blood. All of her clothes have been ripped off by the accident. And worst of all, one of those handrails that I mentioned earlier, it has impaled her, it's gone right through her body.

• 29:40Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, there's another detail that I just find, can it be true? Supposedly, one of the passengers is carrying this vial of gold dust. And the idea is that when Alejandro sees her, he sees his possible girlfriend, as you say, naked, covered in blood, penetrated by this enormous piece of vehicle, shocking, but also mixed with the red crimson blood. It's like an artistic image or a sort of odd perverse macabre performance. This gold dust coating her body as well. I mean, it's an indelible image. Once you have that in mind.

• 30:16James Fox?

  I think it was a sign writer who might have been standing next to her and it was his gold leaf that fell out over.

• 30:22Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 30:22James Fox?

  But anyway, together with another man, Alejandro pulls this iron bar out of her body. They hear the bones crack and crunch as they withdraw it. She's screaming at the top of her lungs and they managed to get her to the hospital in Mexico City. And the scale and the scope of her injuries are just horrifying. I should list them. So her spinal column was broken in three places. Her collarbone was broken. Two of her ribs were broken. Her right leg, which we've said was already very weak, was fractured in 11 places. Her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was dislocated. Her pelvis was

• 31:05James Fox?

  broken in three places. And the handrail had of course had gone through her abdomen. She says it came out of her vagina. Whether that's true or not, we don't know.

• 31:13Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the thing that I that sticks with me is that before even getting to the hospital, I mean, what you're describing is so catastrophic that supposedly medical personnel arrive on the scene and they're categorizing the various victims and passengers in the crash. And Frida is put in the untreatable category. And subsequently, there's even a newspaper report that speculates that she may be among the people who've been killed in this accident. Apparently, it's down to Alejandro, you know, he's trained to be a lawyer, very charismatic. I mentioned he was good at public speaking. Apparently, it's his on the spot advocacy that saves her life because he persuades those personnel to treat her and take her case seriously. And eventually, she does get to hospital and clearly she does survive.

• 31:57James Fox?

  It's a miracle that she survives. Given that list of injuries I've described, it is a miracle. And it's a miracle that she's only in hospital for a month because exactly a month later, on the 17th of October, 1925, she returns home. But her recovery is far from over. She's really convalescing, bed bound for over a year. She's in constant pain. She's having regular operations. She's wearing these extremely uncomfortable corsets.

• 32:25Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the one that I find so grim, because you sort of. It's quite easy when you read about her life, you know, the accident is, it's oddly gripping, you know, but, but that's the wrong word. It's, it's so awful to have befallen anyone, but um, you sort of almost then telescope the next bit where she, yeah, she recovers, she's back home, she recovers, but just imagine the tedium, because she's having to be in these full bodies, she's sort of entombed in these plaster casts and has to be immobile for long, long periods. I mean, I think there is sort of these, this idea that every now and then when she has to have a full body cast, you know, she's winched up on some mechanism and then they do the cast, it takes two and a half hours for this thing to dry and she's just hanging there and then

• 33:10Alastair Sooke?

  eventually, you know, toes barely touching the ground, eventually she's lowered back and may find some relief back on, on her bed. But this kind of monotony, you know, she's just had this moment where she's, she's blossoming as a, as a young person.

• 33:23James Fox?

  She's 18 years old, she should be out.

• 33:25Alastair Sooke?

  She's, she's loving being in the city, she wants sociability, she's potentially got this boyfriend, you know, the new horizons of the prepper. And then suddenly she's taken right back to where she started, which, you know, we didn't mention this, but when she was a young girl, there's this wonderful, beautiful story about how she often was breathing onto the frosted, kind of in the morning chill, the windowpanes of the house and then drawing these circles in the, the breath vapor on, on the windowpane. And she imagined that these things were like these kind of escape portals, these windows to other realities where she could get through and leave that kind of confined environment of her home. And of course, here she is pulled right back to it by this, by this

• 34:07Alastair Sooke?

  accident. But in a weird way, I mean, I, look, I don't want to go on about it, but, you know, it does kind of raise a very big and interesting, almost moral philosophical conundrum, because pre-accident Frida Kahlo is going to this school where she's training to become a doctor.

• 34:24James Fox?

  Yes.

• 34:25Alastair Sooke?

  And if it wasn't for the accident, I'm sure this is where you're going in a moment, she wouldn't have become probably an artist. And she certainly wouldn't have become the artist that she did become.

• 34:37James Fox?

  Yeah, I think it has a really, the accident has a really significant legacy. It really is a turning point in her life. I know it's, you know, it's easy to always talk about turning points, but I think it really does. I think the first change it has is it changes her worldview. She's, you know, beforehand, she's this happy-go-lucky girl, probably going to have some kind of medical But it turns her into someone far more complex, more morose, more interesting. It gives her this real sense of strength. I mean, she she comes to feel that she has survived this and she has to do something with that survival. You know, there's a reason for it.

• 35:13Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I mean, and and that sense of mission, you know.

• 35:15James Fox?

  Yes.

• 35:16Alastair Sooke?

  We began this episode, you were selecting a self-portrait in which she has this quite Christ-like kind of aspect. And I think she's referring in possibly in letters, she's still in touch with Alex Alejandro at this point, although they're drifting apart as she's recovering. She's writing to him a lot, quite stridently. And I think she refers to her, quote, martyrdom in terms of the the the recovery that she's being, well, in terms of the procedures the doctors are making her go through to recover. And there's this quite this sense of like, what is it? I mean, as well, you might self dramatization. This is so extreme, what she's experiencing. And you might think that anyone would go slightly, almost do lally. I mean, I think, you know, there are moments where she's really feeling depressed. There are

• 36:00Alastair Sooke?

  moments where she's feeling that death is coming into the bedroom every night. It's not a happy place to be.

• 36:05James Fox?

  No. But the the other legacy of this accident, and you have alluded to it already, is that it is the thing that really pushes her towards painting. And this is what she writes. I'll just read a very brief passage that she says. She said, I never thought of painting until 1926, when I was in bed on account of an automobile accident. I was bored as hell in bed with a plaster cast. So I decided to do something. I stole from my father some oil paints, and my mother ordered for me a special easel because I couldn't sit up. And I started to paint.

• 36:39Alastair Sooke?

  So this is this is the kind of self mythology, isn't it?

• 36:42James Fox?

  Yes.

• 36:42Alastair Sooke?

  Because I I think during this convalescent period, isn't it the case that she she she rigs up these systems? You know, she has very limited movement. She has these plaster casts. She can just about move an arm and fingers. And there are these systems of winches and pulleys so that she can paint. But also, crucially, tell me if this is wrong, doesn't she get a mirror?

• 37:03James Fox?

  Yes, she does.

• 37:03Alastair Sooke?

  Kind of like rigged up in in the cannon Of her bed. Is it the same bed, by the way? There's a canopied bed, is there not, in the blue house in the museum?

• 37:11James Fox?

  I think it's the same bed. That's certainly the bed that she spent a lot of time in later in life.

• 37:15Alastair Sooke?

  Later, yeah.

• 37:15James Fox?

  It could have been her lifelong bed.

• 37:17Alastair Sooke?

  Anyway, canopied bed, there it is. Mirror there. And because she is forced to stay in this room, in this bed, she is spending all her time scrutinising her own face. I mean, this must be so formative in terms of her development as an artist.

• 37:33James Fox?

  Absolutely. Well, we're going to come on to a self-portrait in a moment, but I think just in order to talk about that self-portrait, it's worth mentioning something you've already brought up, which is that one of the saddest things about her accident is that in the aftermath of her accident, her boyfriend or not boyfriend, it's not entirely clear, but her boyfriend Alejandro, he pulls away from her.

• 37:53Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 37:53James Fox?

  Now, no one quite knows why. Some people say it's because his parents didn't like her seeing Frida, because she was a very naughty girl, and they thought this is an opportunity to drive them apart.

• 38:01Alastair Sooke?

  Don't they send him off to Europe or something?

• 38:03James Fox?

  They do. He ends up going to Europe, actually.

• 38:05Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 38:05James Fox?

  But it's also possibly that he just thinks, you know, he's an eighteen-year-old boy. Does he really want to be, you know, tethered to someone who might never walk again for the rest of his life? And so he begins to withdraw. This causes her no end of grief. You've mentioned the letters. She writes these imploring letters to him again and again, saying, please come to visit, please come to visit. He hardly ever goes to visit. And in September nineteen twenty-six, so this is a year after the accident, in this desperate attempt to remind him of her to remain in his life, she makes a portrait for him. This is arguably, Alastair, her first of many self-portraits, which she probably made lying in bed with that easel suspended above her, looking up at the mirror.

• 38:48James Fox?

  And it's called Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress. What do you think of it?

• 38:54Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's a fascinating picture to look at in terms of her development and given that self-portraiture becomes so important. And it's probably just worth describing a little bit. We see her as a young woman. She's in this very dark, dramatic dress with a patterned collar and a patterned cuff, although whilst it's known as self-portrait in a velvet dress.

• 39:16Alastair Sooke?

  I did just see this painting because it appears in the Frida Kahlo exhibition that's currently on at Tate Modern here in London. And I was reading the label that in fact she's wearing a bathrobe. It is an address, but she's standing in front of, well, it seems that she might be on a beach. There's a swirling sea, quite stylized waves behind her, and it appears to be at night. The sea is very dark, the sky is very black. There's a sense of darkness and gloominess, and all of that offsets this very pale flesh and face of Frida herself. So there's a very plunging neckline to the garment she's wearing, which almost elongates

• 39:57Alastair Sooke?

  this already quite long neck, which is very bright, stands out against the background. And then you see her features, and of course, already she has that, the eyebrows that seem to join in the middle of her face. A sense of just like downy hair on her upper lip. You know, she, she isn't sparing or, there's no kind of Photoshop treatment going on in that portrait, but yet she does appear very elegant and very pretty and quite self-possessed. And I think she creates this, she, doesn't she either inscribe it or sign it as "your Botticelli"?

• 40:36James Fox?

  Yes.

• 40:37Alastair Sooke?

  And it, you know, what does that mean? It's obviously, it's a reference to the Italian Renaissance artist Sandra Botticelli, very famously created The Birth of Venus, in which you see Aphrodite emerging, well, or Venus, emerging from a shell out of the ocean. But this is like a sort of dark, not quite Gothic, but kind of like very adolescent version of that, if you like, where all of the brightness of Botticelli's painting has become very stormy and dramatic. But she is casting herself as his Venus, sending it to him. And the idea is that it's so that he doesn't forget her. Doesn't she say something about how, you know, you've got to display this at eye level?

• 41:14James Fox?

  Yes, she does. She does. I mean, you can see there's that right hand, her right hand makes a gesture, and it's almost like the gesture it's making is, "I'm here, Alejandro. You know, don't forget me. Come for me." And indeed, she sends this picture to him without a frame. She asks him to hang it in his home at a low height, so it's, she was, she was a short child, short girl. Um. So it's almost as though he's present. And you know, this is, this is part of the history of portraiture. That's so much of the history of portraiture is about trying to make the absent present.

• 41:47Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 41:48James Fox?

  You know, Pliny, I know this is a complete detour, but Pliny talks about the origins of portraiture being when this woman called Cora, her lover is going away to a war. So she does a silhouette of him against the wall to remind her of him while he's away. And this is partly sort of motivated by that. And indeed, it works because very temporarily at least, it does draw Alejandro back to her. He does start seeing her again, and he keeps this painting at home for the rest of his life for decades afterwards.

• 42:14Alastair Sooke?

  I, I think it's interesting, given the sort of darkness of him, what you're describing. It has a slight quality. I don't know if this is just projecting onto it somehow or imagining this rather. But it's, it has a slightly sort of black magic quality.

• 42:28James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Alastair Sooke?

  She, she's sort of presenting herself as like a, almost a sorceress. She's kind of siren-like and the darkness of it all, it creates an atmosphere that is designed almost as though she's casting a spell to bring him back.

• 42:40James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Alastair Sooke?

  It's fascinating that that spell does seem to have worked for a bit.

• 42:43James Fox?

  Only temporarily. It's a funny one though. It's not, I mean, it's, it's not a masterpiece, is it?

• 42:48Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 42:48James Fox?

  When you consider that she's only really been painting for, what, a month or two, couple of months? It's pretty darned impressive. I mean, the way she paints the shine on her hair, the intensity of the facial expression. There is a sign here, although it's slightly stilted and slightly studenty in a way, there is a sign of a talent lurking within this picture.

• 43:08Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, there, there, there's, there's promise. You know, this is a very promising young artist. I think the thing about it that means it isn't a masterpiece is that she is sort of slightly self-pritifying.

• 43:21James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:21Alastair Sooke?

  What we find in those great self-portraits much later, the one with which we started this episode is a great example. Is something where she's laying bare her own suffering, kind of inner workings, both sort of mentally and emotionally, and sometimes even physically. And there's a real sense of frankness, confessional exposure. Here, there's a slight sense of, um, you know, a young woman who wants to be seen as attractive and pretty by a man. And I think that's the element that maybe is slightly curtailing it.

• 43:52James Fox?

  Yes. Anyway, she carries on painting and she does carry on recovering. By nineteen twenty seven, so this is two years after the accident. She has sufficiently recovered to be able to lead a relatively normal life, although she's constantly in pain, but she is able to be out and about. And she's now got quite a few paintings under her belt.

• 44:11Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 44:12James Fox?

  And she thinks, right, who can I show these paintings to? And there is but one man.

• 44:16Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 44:17James Fox?

  And it is the man we've already mentioned. It is Diego Rivera. And they have rather different accounts of this first proper meeting. I'm once again, Alastair, going to read Diego's.

• 44:28Alastair Sooke?

  No, do it. I mean.

• 44:29James Fox?

  May I do this? Because it's it's a relatively long account, but I've I've filleted it a bit and it is wonderful. So this is nineteen twenty seven, she's twenty years old, and this is what Diego Rivera says of this first sort of adult meeting, if you like. I was at work on one of the uppermost frescoes of the Ministry of Education building one day when I heard a girl shouting up to me. Diego, please come down from there. I have something important to discuss with you. I turned my head and looked down from my scaffold. On the ground beneath me stood a girl of about eighteen. She had a fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face. Her hair was long, dark and thick eyebrows of met above her nose.

• 45:10James Fox?

  They seemed like the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes. When I climbed down, she said, I didn't come here for fun. I have to work to earn my livelihood. I have done some paintings which I want you to look over professionally. I want an absolutely straightforward opinion because I cannot afford to go on just to appease my vanity. I want you to tell me whether you think I can become a good enough artist to make it worth my while to go on. I brought three of my paintings here. Will you come and look at them? Yes, I said, and followed her to a cubicle under a stairway where she had left her paintings. She turned each of them, leaning against the wall to face me. They were all three portraits of women. As I looked at them, one by one, I was immediately impressed.

• 45:55James Fox?

  I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life, and she would continue to be, up to the moment she died twenty seven years later. So that is their first encounter.

• 46:07Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's really interesting to hear that. She is so persistent. You know, they cross paths pre-accident. She's already saying, one day I'm going to marry that guy, and then she seeks him out. She's obviously getting encouragement from him. So, you know, it's not just about romantic, emotional union, right? I mean, she is wanting, I think genuinely she's detected within herself the glimmerings of some potentially great artistic talent. She wants that encouragement. Diego is the person, the vehicle, if you like, that will allow her to escape again the confines of her home and open up this new, exciting, artistic, bohemian world.

• 46:49Alastair Sooke?

  And she has this wonderful, this wonderful line, doesn't she, where ultimately, you know, I think they effectively, this is the beginnings of their romance, and fairly swiftly, you know, they do get together. I think she refers to Diego as her second accident.

• 47:05James Fox?

  Yes.

• 47:06Alastair Sooke?

  And, you know, it's sort of, that's the import. There's this real sense of that relationship is so fundamental to her and her art, and also how we think about her and her art. And that's partly because she has made it that way. That's how she spoke about it.

• 47:22James Fox?

  Well, anyway, after that first meeting, they do spend more and more time together, and they become romantically entwined. They're very different though, Alistair. I mean, he's in his early forties at this point, she's in her early twenties. He's enormous and ugly, and she's very petite and pretty.

• 47:38Alastair Sooke?

  And he's spent a lot of time in Europe, and even though she's got that European ancestry, she's really spent most of her adult life lying in bed at home, convalescing. So, you know, limited horizons in comparison.

• 47:48James Fox?

  Yeah, whereas he's rich, he's famous, he's well-connected. Um, well, she is really, you know, a nobody at this point, but the romance is genuine. And at times it's delightful. There's a, I don't know if you've read this wonderful anecdote. There's a wonderful story when they're just outside the family house and it's nighttime and they're standing under a street lamp. And they kiss and as their lips touch, the street lamp goes off. And as their lips part, the street lamp goes back on again and they start laughing and they run to the next street lamp and the same thing happens. It's like a Hollywood romantic comedy.

• 48:17Alastair Sooke?

  You say that. I mean, Netflix has just announced it's doing a new Frida Kahlo and Diego series. I mean, you can guarantee that scene's gonna make it.

• 48:24James Fox?

  It's gotta be in, it's gotta be in. So they do really fall in love. And there's another lovely moment when he's at the house. I mean, what must Guillermo Carlo and his wife think of this? The most famous man basically in Mexico, just turning up at their house saying, where's your daughter in?

• 48:38Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, but also the most famous womanizer practically. So, you know, you might, alarm bells might be ringing a bit.

• 48:43James Fox?

  Well, they do. And there's a particular incident that Diego talks about where he's in the house and Guillermo Carlo tells him to come and have a chat and he, he brings him over and he says, Diego Rivera, I hear you're interested in my daughter. And he says, yes, I'm very interested in your daughter. And he says, she's a devil.

• 49:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 49:01James Fox?

  And Diego says, I know.

• 49:03Alastair Sooke?

  And a little devil.

• 49:04James Fox?

  He doesn't heed the warning.

• 49:05Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 49:06James Fox?

  And indeed, on the 21st of August, 1929, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo get married by civil ceremony in the village with just three witnesses.

• 49:17Alastair Sooke?

  I quite like the whole Guillermo line because, I mean, there's another very famous line, which is around the time of the wedding where he, you know, for him, Rivera is totally grotesque. So he says to Frida, I mean, you know, this is, this guy's a fat, fat, fat broigal. Referring to kind of, you know, Northern European Renaissance artists are famous for that sort of like very over the top, kind of anarchic, chaotic scenes in, in his paintings. And said, marrying him is a bit like the mating of an elephant with a dove. Which is really evocative. It's a great, great image. And I think the thing, one of the things I find so fascinating, because I know we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about the wedding and, and what happened, but you know, at this stage, it's so important to remember.

• 49:59Alastair Sooke?

  I don't know whether this is just me, but perspective from coming at it from a sort of British art audience, Frida Kahlo's the one who is mega famous today, more so certainly in the UK than Diego Rivera. But of course, at this moment, he was big physically, big in terms of reputation, and she was a nobody.

• 50:20James Fox?

  Yes.

• 50:20Alastair Sooke?

  And, you know, to have that sort of switch over the decades in terms of their reputation, it points to her strength of character, perhaps that strand of the little devil that her father kind of divined in her. I think it's a real testimony to her strength of character.

• 50:37James Fox?

  Yeah. Well, and with that, Alastair, I think we should probably bring this episode to a close. And in the next episode, we are going to focus on their turbulent marriage, a series of bizarre affairs, including, among others, Frida's own sister and the Russian communist Leon Trotsky, and above all, on Frida Kahlo's stunning progress as an artist in her own right. Goodbye.

• 51:00Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 51:07Alastair Sooke?

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