I fell behind a bit, but I’m back (to write one more rushed entry before I disappear again). Day three in Mexico City I visited Frida Kahlo’s house and the house where Leon Trotsky was assassinated. Day four, I visited the Palacio de Bellas Artes and caught an overnight bus back to Chiapas. Roughly 36 hours later, my parents and brother arrived on a visit, and I will entertain them for the next few days. I probably won’t write again until they leave. Merry Christmas!
Frida and Diego lived in this house 1929-1954An unfinished painting depicting one of Kahlo’s miscarriages. Frida’s father was one of the first photographers in Mexico, and she spent her childhood helping him in the darkroom. Frida’s later work draws inspiration from the folk art of the retablo, in which regular people would paint and narrate their miraculous religious experiencesPossibly the last painting that Frida finished. Frida struggled with chronic paint for the entirety of her life following a bus accident when she was eighteen. Many of her easels were specially modified so that she could paint from a wheelchair or while in bed. Above Frida’s bed were portraits of Stalin, Engels, Lenin, Marx, and MaoThis hospital gown is covered in both blood and paintApparently no one knew where Frida’s dresses were for 50 years after her death, until one day they were discovered in the bathroom closet.After getting kicked out of the Soviet Union, for opposing Stalin, and kicked out of England, for attempting to start a communist revolution there, Leon Trotsky was welcomed to Mexico by Diego Rivera and lived with Rivera and Kahlo for five years, until he got kicked out for having an affair with Frida (which may have started as a way for Frida to get back at Diego for sleeping with her sister. They had a complicated relationship) so he moved to a new house six blocks away. After failed assassination attempt, the windows of the house were partially bricked up, the doorways were made smaller, and the guard towers on the top of the house were added. Sadly, this did not stop a second, successful assassination attempt from taking place. After visiting Frida and Trosky’s houses I visited a large plant market in the same neighborhood. The Palace of Fine Arts houses a bunch of murals that are too big to go anywhere else. Many of them were so big that I couldn’t photograph them properly. If you look closely, you can see Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, a mural which I had to write an essay about in my freshman Spanish class. The first plot to assassinate Trotsky was led by David Siqueiros, the guy painted this mural. He and Rivera didn’t really get along after that. Another Rivera, across the street from the palace. This one depicts more than seventy historical figures, more or less life-sized, gathered in the central park of Mexico City. Read from left to right, the painting tells the story of independence and revolution in Mexico. Mexico City Chinatown
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