Compound sheds light into complex relationship of Rivera, Kahlo
By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI
New York Times
Now that the cactus fence around his house near Mexico City has been replanted, its vivid colors restored and offending additions removed, Diego Rivera can easily be imagined on the third-floor bridge leading from his red studio to Frida Kahlo's blue studio, pounding at her glass door and asking his wife's forgiveness. The life of Rivera, a Rabelaisian omnivore, was a legend wrapped in scandal surrounded by myth that played against the backdrop of brightly colored buildings, as if he were a figure walking through one of his own heroic canvases.
No man is an island, but houses are often worlds unto themselves, especially the three buildings owned by the Mexican painters Rivera and Kahlo, together and separately, and designed by the Mexican architect Juan O'Gorman. These buildings, in the southern suburbs of Mexico City, housed the couple: the paired red and blue studios they occupied in San Angel from 1932 until their divorce in 1939; La Casa Azul, or the Blue House, in nearby Coyoacan, where they lived after their remarriage in 1940 until Kahlo's death in 1954; and the Aztec-Tolmec house-studio in Anahuacalli, finished after Rivera's death in 1957.
The restoration in 1997 of their San Angel studios means that the setting for their lives is now fully represented in a historically accurate cycle of buildings. A biographical neighborhood of rare character and radical political sensibility, this Mexican Bloomsbury offers a view into the painters' relationship and the country's cultural history. Beyond being the backdrop for a couple with the ideals of cultural revolutionaries and the mating habits of scorpions, the place reveals a second history.
The San Angel compound, which marked the operatic birth of modern architecture in Mexico, was designed in 1930 by O'Gorman, then 25. The architect came to Rivera's attention after he built his own simple, glass-fronted modern house in the town.
Inspired by a studio designed by Le Corbusier in Paris, his plan for the Riveras' studios was more robust and extroverted. The bold volumes, clay-brick ceilings, and cantilevered floors and stairs are punctuated by proudly displayed water tanks and downspouts. A southern sun ignites the intense blue and red that are taken straight from vernacular buildings. Working together, O'Gorman, Rivera and Kahlo made Mexican modernism, unlike its European counterpart, warm to the touch.
The modernist imagination has long been a major issue among artists in Mexico resistant to cultural colonization. The tension between being Mexican and modern plays itself out in these three houses belonging to artists whose left-wing politics led them and their architect to nationalize the International style.
In 1922, Rivera left Paris, where he had befriended Pablo Picasso and taken up Cubism, for a postrevolutionary, socially conscious Mexico. He turned to a populist realism that mythologized the nation's Indian past. Even his palette became earthier and brighter, with blood red, copper brown and the azure of the country's sky. Rivera and Kahlo's buildings, and O'Gorman's other designs, moved from the abstract to the mythic, and the arc of their change starts in San Angel with the galvanizing blue and red.
Given Rivera's emotional past, crowded with liaisons (including Paulette Goddard, Louise Nevelson and Frida Kahlo's younger sister, Cristina), separate studios for the two painters amounted to spatial wisdom. O'Gorman designed a large glass-walled red studio at the front of the property for Rivera and a smaller blue building at the back for Kahlo, next to a studio for her father, an architectural photographer.
"The architect thought like a psychologist and decided that Frida needed to live alone," said Blanca Garduno, director of the Rivera Studio Museum, in the San Angel house.
Kahlo's studio is the more private of the two. Rivera's double-height studio was on the third floor, beneath the same saw-tooth factory skylights that Le Corbusier used in Paris. Their two-story living room and dining area on the second floor of the front building became a salon for the international avant-garde, where Rivera and Kahlo entertained their bohemian friends.
"Besides the influence of Le Corbusier, you can feel the influence of Soviet ideas," said Victor Jimenez, who as the former director of architecture in the National Institute of Fine Arts was responsible for the restoration of the San Angel house.
Photographs taken by Kahlo's father, Guillermo Kahlo, a German émigré, served as archival documents that helped re-establish the home as it looked in 1932.
In 1940, Kahlo, who had been injured in a streetcar accident when she was young, left the San Angel home and retreated to her paternal house, the Blue House, now the Frida Kahlo Museum, in Coyoacan. "She was very angry in the San Angel house, because she felt she suffered there in two ways," Garduno said.
"Physically, because of her fragile condition, it became very difficult to walk upstairs, and emotionally, her heart suffered because of all the women who visited Diego. She realized that Diego had to make love, because these relationships were one way, with all his financial pressures, for him to promote his work."
Married in 1929, the couple separated frequently. But the most traumatic separation led to divorce in 1939, and remarriage the next year, when Rivera followed Kahlo to the Blue House. He returned to San Angel to paint. "So Frida had her own romances in Coyoacan, and Diego his own romances in San Angel," Garduno said. (Trotsky numbered among Kahlo's lovers in Coyoacan.)
The turn-of-the-century, one-story Blue House encloses a patio open to a tropical garden surrounded by high walls. The blue is so unrelenting in places, the house seems under water. The first rooms are now galleries, but beyond, the house remains as it was when Kahlo and Rivera lived there -- intimate, surreal and devoted to Mexican folklore.
Kahlo never returned to the San Angel studios. In 1946, Rivera added an L-shaped studio with walls of glass to the Blue House, and after her leg was amputated, he constructed ramps for her.
Kahlo's studio remains as she left it, her wheelchair parked in front of an unfinished portrait of a faintly Mexicanized Stalin.
The least known of their house-studios is an elemental pre-Columbian structure, now the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum. With rock excavated from the lava bed on which it was constructed, Rivera built a reinforced concrete structure surfaced in stone, creating the kind of architecture Aztecs might have built in the 20th century.
O'Gorman finished Rivera's dream after Rivera died of cancer.
The three Rivera-Kahlo houses are meticulously preserved and very much alive because of lingering issues of Mexican identity. Architects today are still divided between the abstractions of modernism and the stone walls of the country's past. The three houses represent the built history of a personal and political search to find and define the soul of a complex nation.