Invitation to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York Page 3 of 4

There is a country where the world’s heart opens out, relieved of the oppressive feeling that nature everywhere is drab and unenterprising, that, despite racial particularities, the human being is made in a mould and condemned to achieve only what modern society’s all-embracing economic laws permit him; where creation has been prodigal with undulations of the ground and species of plant-life, and has surpassed itself with its range of seasons and cloud architectures; where for a whole century now, the word INDEPENDENCE has continued to crackle beneath a blacksmith’s giant bellows, sending up incomparable sparks into the sky. I had long been impatient to go there, to put to the test the idea I had formulated of the kind of art which our own era demanded, an art that would deliberately sacrifice the external model to the internal model, that would resolutely give perception precedence over representation.
Would this idea be powerful enough to stand up to Mexico’s mental climate? The eyes of all the children of Europe, among them the eyes of the child I once was, had preceded me there with their countless enchanting flashes of fire. I saw, with the same eyes that I use to cast over places in my imagination, the prodigious sierra unfurling at the speed of a galloping horse and breaking at the edge of the golden palm groves; I saw the feudal haciendas baking in the scents of Chinese jasmine and other florals; and I saw the unique silhouette of the adventurer, brother of the poet, loom higher and more imperiously than anywhere else, laden with heavy ornaments of felt, metal, and leather. And yet, although these fragmentary images plucked from the treasure-chest of childhood continued to exercise a magical power, they nevertheless left me conscious of certain gaps. I had never heard the immemorial songs of the Zapotec musicians; my eyes remained closed to the perfect nobility and terrible poverty of the Indian people as exemplified by their image in the sun-drenched market-places; I never imagined that the world of fruits could encompass such a marvel as the pitahaya, whose coiled pulp is the colour of rose petals, whose skin is grey, and which tastes like a kiss blended of love and desire; I had never held in my hand a lump of that red earth from which had emerged the statuettes of Colima, which are half-woman, half-swan, their make-up already beautifully applied by nature; and lastly, I had not yet set eyes on Frida Kahlo de Rivera, resembling these statuettes in her bearing and adorned, too, like a fairy-tale princess, with magic spells at her fingertips, an apparition in the flash of light of the quetzal bird which scatters opals among the rocks as it flies away.
She was there on that twentieth day of April 1938, framed by one of the two cubes (the pink one or the blue one? I shall never remember) of her transparent house. The garden bristles with idols and the tousled white mops of cactuses, and is enclosed simply by a border of giant green cactuses: through the narrow gaps between the peep, from morning to night, the yes of the curious who have flocked here from all over America, and the lenses of their cameras, hoping immediately on their arrival to catch revolutionary thought, like an eagle, in its nest. The optimism arises from the belief that Diego Rivera can be seen everyday, either passing from room to room, or strolling through the garden, pausing occasionally to stroke his spider-monkeys, or on the veranda where a staircase without a hand-rail thrusts up into space, and they hope to catch a glimpse of his superb presence, to witness the slow, measured stride, the physical and moral stature of a great fighter. He incarnates, of course, in the eyes of an entire continent, the battle that is being waged so brilliantly against all the forces of reaction and coercion, and so he symbolizes for me, too, everything that is most valid in this world. Yet at the same time, there is nothing more human than the way in which he was attuned himself gently to his wife’s ideas and way of life, and nothing more impressive than the strength that he evidently derives from Frida’s enchanting personality.
If public indiscretion hounds this house in such a way, it is because it occasionally becomes the home of a man who has been forced to flee surreptitiously to the only corner of the earth where he cannot be reached by the immorality of our time. His intelligence is far superior to that of his persecutors, the hope that he instills in men is the force that demands a total leap towards liberation—the great leap, as he said, from necessity to freedom—