The Painting Frida Almost Burned
A birthday gift, a love affair gone quiet, and a bouquet of flowers hiding a broken heart — Frida Kahlo's most intimate self-portrait was nearly destroyed by her own hand.
On November 7, 1937, Frida Kahlo finished a small oil painting on masonite, just 30 by 24 inches, and dedicated it to a man she had loved and lost within the space of a single year: Leon Trotsky. The date was no accident. It was Trotsky's birthday, and it marked twenty years since the October Revolution that had once made him one of the most powerful men in Russia before Stalin exiled him from it.
Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, had arrived in Mexico in January 1937 after years of exile, granted refuge thanks to the efforts of Diego Rivera and Kahlo, who persuaded President Lázaro Cárdenas to let them in. The couple moved into Kahlo and Rivera's Blue House, La Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, where they would live for two years. It was there that Kahlo and Trotsky, thrown into each other's company, began exchanging more than pleasantries.
Their attraction surfaced quickly. Trotsky left her letters tucked inside books she borrowed; the two met secretly at a friend's nearby house. Kahlo called him 'El Viejo' — the Old Man — drawn to his defiance in the face of persecution and the force of his revolutionary convictions. But the affair burned out fast. By July 1937 it was over, and Trotsky and Rivera, whose friendship had strained under the weight of it, patched things up. Weeks later Trotsky wrote to his wife Sedova: 'She is nothing to me.'
Months after the affair ended, Kahlo painted her gift. She depicted herself standing between two white stage curtains, in a pose borrowed from retablos — the devotional paintings of Mexican religious tradition — poised and self-possessed, dressed in a Tehuana huipil from the Isthmus. In her hands she held a letter and a bouquet of flowers. The letter, painted directly onto the canvas, read: 'To Leon Trotsky with great affection, I dedicate this painting November 7, 1937. Frida Kahlo. In San Angel. Mexico.'
Trotsky hung the painting in his study, where it remained until August 1940, when he was assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin's orders. Kahlo, devastated, wanted to destroy the painting that had once been a private declaration and had become, suddenly, a relic of grief.
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