Invitation to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York Page 4 of 4

defying the impulses that restrain themselves at the beginning of the race, his youth is evident in all acts of life, and his immortal thoughts are, for those who come near him or his books, a promise and a certainty for revenge. He is Leon Trotsky.
I have for long admired the self-portrait by Frida Kahlo de Rivera that hangs on a wall of Trotsky’s study. She has painted herself dressed in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies, and it is exactly in this guise that she draws aside the mental curtain. We are privileged to be present, as in the most glorious days of German romanticism, at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the society of men of genius. One can expect such a mind to be fashioned according to geometrical principles, ideally adapted to provide the vital solution for a series of conflicts of the kind that affected Bettina Brentano and Caroline Schlegel in their time. Frida Kahlo de Rivera is delicately situated at the point of intersection between the political (philosophical) line and the artistic line, beyond which we hope that they may unite in a single revolutionary consciousness while still preserving intact the identities of the separate motivating forces that run through them. Since this solution is being sought here on the plane of plastic expression, Frida Kahlo’s contribution to the art of our epoch is destined to assume a quite special value as providing the casting vote between the various pictorial tendencies.
My surprise and joy was unbounded when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, that her work has blossomed forth, in her latest paintings, into pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas motivating the activities of my friends and myself. Yet, at this present point in the development of Mexican painting, which since the beginning of the nineteenth century has remained largely free from foreign influence and profoundly attached to its own resources, I was witnessing here, at the other end of the earth, a spontaneous outpouring of our own questioning spirit: what irrational laws do we obey, wha subjective signals allow us to establish the right direction at any moment, which symbols and myths predominate in a particular conjunction of objects or web of happenings, what meaning can be ascribed to the eye’s capacity to pass from visual power to visionary power? The painting which Frida Kahlo de Rivera was just completing at that moment--What the Water Yields Me--illustrated, unbeknown to her, the phrase I had once heard from the lips of Nadja: ‘I am the thought of bathing in the mirrorless room’.
This art even contains that drop of cruelty and humour uniquely capable of blending the rare affective powers that compound together to form the philtre which is Mexico’s secret. The power of inspiration here is nourished by the strange ecstasies of puberty and the mysteries of generation, and far from considering these to be mind’s private preserves, as in some colder climates, she displays them proudly with a mixture of candour and insolence.
We are, once again, at the height of the significant movement that produced the notable anonymous painting in the Mexico Museum of Art "Esta es la vida" (This is the Life), depicting disparate groups of men and women who drink, caress, and kill one another as a guitarist plays along; the work of Rousseau (who was known as Le Douanier or customs officer) fully embodied in the great pictorial traditions of Mexico; and Posada's incomparable engravings, inspired by scenes of accidents, suicides, executions, and skeletal horses.The "retablos", as they are referred to in Mexico, or ex-votos, in which a devoted believer, with regard to some supernatural figuration, sets about depicting, with both paintbrush and the pen, without the slightest trace of reserve, the history of some illness or other that they suffered, or a surgical operation they underwent; or these life-size portraits, destined to impose upon those who are left behind the overwhelming presence of someone who has passed on, such as this young woman, so fascinating and so fresh, a rose between fingers, bearing this poignant inscription: "You see me alive, but I am dead. Those who loved me have become shrouded in immense grief. This rose is my emblem."
The art of Frida Kahlo de Rivera is a ribbon around a bomb.

ANDRÉ BRETON