Happy Dia de los Muertos!

Today is the Mexican Day of the Dead. Technically, this observance goes from midnight October 31st to the night of November 2nd. The fist day honors children who have passed on and is called Dia de los Inocentes. The second day, Dia de los Muertos honors the adults who have passed.

Dia de los Muertos is a mixture of the ancient Aztec celebration for the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead, and Catholic holy days, All Souls Day and All Saints Day.

Read more about it here.

Here‘s a really beautiful gallery of Dia de los Muertos photographs. (It’s the really fast-loading, easy to flip through kind, not the reload a new page for every image kind. Because I love you.)

Maybe you’d like to incorporate this holiday into your life?

You can light a candle and pour a shot of liquor for your relative/ancestor/hero to enjoy. Leave both on the windowsill overnight for any wandering souls to enjoy. I like to pour a shot of tequila for Frida Kahlo. If the person you choose to honor didn’t drink alcohol, you could leave an offering of coffee, tobacco, perfume or candy. Traditionally, spirits tend to like those things.

You could also build an altar or decorate a mantle for the dead. Like this one for Frida:

Or, go to the cemetery where your ancestor is buried, light candles and place flowers on their grave:

Baking is another component of Dia de los Muertos celebrations. Pain de los Muertos is baked and sugar skulls are sculpted out of marzipan or fondant:

Happy Birthday Frida

Frida Kahlo would have been 105 years old today. She is alive and well in the hearts of her devotees. I love her more than words can say. Light a candle and leave a shot of tequila on the window sill tonight.

Mexican Day of the Dead, Dia de los Angelitos

Today is Día de los Angelitos, Day of the Little Angels. On this day, dead children are remembered and celebrated with sugar skulls, candles and orange marigolds.

This is not a somber observance but a celebration of a child’s life.

Dia de los Angelitos acknowledges that the spirits of children walk the earth tonight, visiting and communicating with the living.

Death of an Artist

Frida with her iconic flowers and rings.

“July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever…To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.” -Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo passed away a few days after her 47th birthday, in the early morning of Tuesday July 13th, 1954. The death certificate states “pulmonary embolism” but suicide was rumoured. She gave Diego an anniversary present 17 days early, saying that she’d be leaving him soon.

Hundreds of mourners visited Frida’s coffin but after lying in state, the body that had been so uncooperative was burned. The urn containing her ashes can be visited at The Blue House in Coyocoán.

Diego escorts Frida's coffin.

Despite the many tragedies she suffered, Frida loved deeply and laughed vivaciously.

At age 6, Frida survived the polio that left her right leg withered. She would hide it under long skirts and layers of stockings for the rest of her life.

At age 18, she survived the bus accident that destroyed her body, breaking her spinal column and pelvis and impaling her with a metal handrail that entered through her hip and exited her vagina. She often joked that the handrail stole her virginity.

She survived 32 operations to put her body back together and alleviate her chronic pain. Nothing worked.

She survived the amputation of her right leg, several miscarriages and the multiple infidelities of her husband.

All this inspired her art, which is “acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, lovable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life” as Diego Rivera told Picasso.

The last entry in her journal reads, “I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return.“

Her last painting is inscribed with the words “Viva la Vida”

Long Live Life.

Rest in peace, Amiga.

The Paintings

My Birth, 1932

Frida’s paintings are scattered across the globe. Some are in New York City. “Fulang-Chang and I” and “Self Portrait with Cropped Hair” are on display at the Museum of Modern Art, where Fiancé proposed. “My Grandparents, My Parents, and I” can be found at The Jewish Museum, Frida’s father was Jewish. Many paintings are still in Mexico, at the Blue House or in the Dolores Olmedo Collection.

The majority of Frida’s paintings are hanging above people’s fireplaces. It’s only been 57 years since her death and many of her friends and family are alive and well enough to cherish the paintings she left behind.

Currently, collectors are snatching up paintings as they become available, paying over 1 million dollars each. This is how Madonna came to have several in her private collection, including “My Birth.”

Fun fact: I once dreamed that Madonna invited me over for dinner and while she was stirring spaghetti sauce, I rummaged through her drawers and closets in search Frida paintings.

Anyways, I’d really like a painting… preferably one of the self-portraits… just putting out there…

I’d settle for one of her rings…

Frida Firsts

Frida was the first person in mexico to be psychoanalyzed by a psychologist.

She was the first woman to sell a painting to the Louvre in Paris.

She was one of the first girls admitted to the National Preparatory School, where she studied to be a doctor.

The first and only solo exhibition of her lifetime took place in Mexico in 1953.

Her first painting was done at the age of 18, while recovering from the bus accident that almost killed her.

Alejandro Gómez Arias was Frida’s first boyfriend. He was in the bus accident as well. He sustained minor injuries and rescued Frida’s body from the wreckage.

Salma Hayek was nominated for her first, and only, Academy Award in 2003 for her portrayal of Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo’s niece was so impressed with the film that she gave Salma one of Kahlo’s necklaces.

Happy Birthday Frida

This portrait was done by Nicholas Murray, her lover.

La Gran Ocultadora would have been 104 years-old today! Of course, her  birthday was actually yesterday but she loved to tell people she was born with the Mexican Revolution, at 1am on July 7th, 1910. However, the truth is that she chose July 7th, 1910 because it conveniently made her 3 years younger. I choose to celebrate her birthday today, on the date she preferred. Her life was not long but it was vast: 32 operations, 2 marriages (both to Diego Rivera), 143 paintings and too many tubes of  red lipstick to count. So drink a shot of tequila and put a candle in the window tonight.

Here are a few of my favorite photographs:

My very favorite picture. So beautiful.

Smoking never looked so good.

Even in a plaster cast, she put on some lipstick and created art.

With the love of her life, Diego the Frog.

VIVA LA FRIDA!!!

The Biography Channel has a really good page devoted to Frida if you want some more information. Also, a chronology of her life can be found here.

July 6th: Frida’s Birthday

Frida Kahlo’s birth certificate says she was born at 8:30am on July 6th, 1907 at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico. The Blue House is now a museum that houses all of Frida’s earthly belongings, including clothing, household items and artwork. Her prosthetic leg and one of her many plaster casts can be found there as well, along with bottles of medicine and bottles of tequila for her chronic pain.

The house is Mecca for any Frida devotee and I constantly dream of taking a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that would no doubt result in a snotty waterfall of tears at the sight of her easel, where a half finished painting still awaits her brush. And then more tears at the sight of her jewelry or her embroidery or her fork… it would get ugly.

The Blue House, now the Museo de Frida Kahlo, where her parents lived, where she lived with Diego, where she was born, and where she died.

Frida often lied about her birthday… more on that tomorrow.

The Princess and the Frog

Diego Rivera signed his letters to Frida, ”el sapo-rana”

The Toad-Frog.

She ended her letters with a red lipstick kiss and then circled it… for emphasis.

Their marriage was not an easy one. They wed for the first time in 1929 only to divorce 10 years later when Diego slept with Frida’s sister, Cristina. They remarried shortly after, in 1940, and stayed together until Frida’s death in 1954.

Friends said Diego and Frida’s marriage was the union of a dove and an elephant. She was 22 years old on their wedding day, barely 5 foot 3 and weighed less than 100 pounds. He was 42, over 6 feet tall and weighed 300 pounds.

He was also a chronic cheater, despite his froggy appearance, seducing women with his fame and charm. A doctor explained to Frida, “Diego is medically incapable of fidelity.”

She mostly laughed off his affairs, swallowing her jealousy and having numerous romances of her own. Indulging her bisexual nature, she slept with numerous men and women, including jazz singer Josephine Baker and fellow painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Frida wrote to a friend about the affair:

“O’Keeffe was in the hospital for three months, she went to Bermuda for a rest. She didn’t make love to me that time, I think on account of her weakness. Too bad.”

Despite their tumultuous relationship, Frida and Diego were completely supportive of each other’s art. Diego praised Frida’s paintings to everyone he met. He told reporters, “through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman’s body and of female sexuality.”

A Celebration of Frida Kahlo

My Frida

The next week will be dedicated to Frida Kahlo, my inspiration, my hero, my personal saint. She was the living embodiment of beauty and creativity and she is very special to me. Although I remember her every Samhain and also on the Mexican Day of the Dead, many of the important events of her life took place in July. So for the next little while, I’ll be celebrating La Gran Ocultadora herself:

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon sometimes Rivera

“one of history’s grand divas, a tequila-slamming, dirty joke-telling smoker, bi-sexual that hobbled about her bohemian barrio in lavish indigenous dress and threw festive dinner parties for the likes of Leon Trotsky, poet Pablo Neruda, Nelson Rockefeller, and her on-again, off-again husband, muralist Diego Rivera.“