Comments by Ana Pardo

It’s some time since I met her, let me be clear, since I knew both her work and the biographies and autobiographies that had been published, and I still don’t fully realize how strongly I am attracted to the figure of Frida Kahlo. If, God forbid, I was shut up in a cloistered convent having taken the vow of silence, and if someone inclined to enigmas wanted to look into me, during their research they would soon find my friends. Everybody who knows me, or at least those who know my more sociable side, would quickly venture to underline some analogies that appear when we are compared: both of us professional painters who don’t rush to hold exhibitions, our origins somehow connected with Germany, both liking a sedentary lifestyle and there is some other affinity which I won’t mention here. I can truthfully say, while I can still speak, that I couldn’t disagree more: however it is and for whatever reason, the cause of my fascination has nothing to do with some kind of parallel life. So I have left just one path: a portrait of Frida, perhaps the only way to interpret my fascination for her and at the same time to discover some of the norms that govern the sign of my behaviour. Also, to be completely honest, I find the type of analogy based on the comparisons just mentioned quite uncertain. To show why, I will begin by dismantling the myths surrounding my own origins, firstly the coincidence that leads some to insist on calling me the Spanish German.

I can’t deny that I was born in Germany, just as I could have been born flying over Chinese airspace. True, I lived there for the first seven years of my life, but at such a young age you don’t keep any lasting regional affinities, even les so in my case since the first people to look after me were a Hungarian couple who will always remain in my heart and who in the end became the only grandparents I ever embraced. I am not German and I don’t claim to be German because I have no connection to that nation, although I feel for the country the innate attraction for the things that sent us to sleep in childhood. I am Spanish, unfortunately, I am from an invertebrate Spain, a Spain that lacks confidence and forgets its roots. This makes me even sadder because I love Spain so much.

Although my relationship with my country may seem just an autobiographical detail, it is vital in order to understand my relationship to Frida and, even more importantly, in order to understand fully the expressive highlights which give form to her portrait. I realize the idea I am transmitting here is confused and chaotic but I’ve finally come to understand that in order to get to the deepest part of her soul I need to reach to the deepest part of mine. The fact that this type of introspection is not typical of references made in art doesn’t really bother me. Those who only want to find fault with the portrait will do so after looking at it for ten or fifteen seconds (for which, besides, I should be grateful). But there are other people who for different reasons pay attention to and examine the endless nuances in the development of the human mind and so I am prepared to continue to express in an intelligent way the pain I suffer when I look through the window.

It’s a long time since the parties of my youth when we sang such “Desde Santurce a Bilbao” or “Asturias patria querida” (songs from the North of Spain )and danced with the same enthusiasm jotas and sevillanas from other parts of Spain, using regional expressions like “nen” and “rapaz” as we spoke. I mention this as solemnly as possible to show that we felt all this belonged to us, we never thought we were taking over something alien, it was ours, just more typical kilometres away. Now, in different circumstances, I watch how these activities are being repressed, sometimes out of pure hatred, sometimes out of fear of stirring up regional sensitivities at the thought of profaning or robbing a copyright controlled element of culture. Outside the sports arena (and perhaps this is why sports have become so important) it takes courage to whisper “Viva España”, fear of the shadow of Fascism falling on our heads often limits our freedom of expression.

I am aware of the old divisive illness diagnosed long ago by people much more respectable than me, but that won’t stop me from cursing the bad luck this country has always had with its leaders. Their speech has become more poisonous than ever, they could sell their soul for a vote, they make people feel humiliated, offended, robbed of their own particular cultural worth and abandoned by the nation. The people as a group have ended up believing these worthless words and feel a hatred that wasn’t there before, not towards politicians but towards their own compatriots. This is a strange French revolution that I am living through just now, the people rising up against the people.

Spain is wounded, mortally wounded, and I can’t manage to find an antidote or shock therapy. What credibility can I grant nowadays to 10 politicians from the same party with no morphological difference in their reflections? Or to 200? At least when they vote in Congress their homogeneity is clear to see. If, as I mentioned before, richness and variety are gifts of the human mind, they are still more necessary in intellectuals. Can’t a progressive politician have a conservative idea at least once in their life? Or vice versa? But let’s be more clear-sighted. If we must accept the political reality in this country, in other words if we must recognize not that conservatives and progressives are blurred together in the same ideological framework but that there is an immense vacuum of conservative politicians, progressive politicians and basically of politicians with ideas, can’t 15 out of 150 in the same party come up and vote on something I DON’T AGREE WITH THE PARTY? Do they hate their parents and children so much? No! I don’t believe it. For the same reason that two twins, however similar they are biologically, have different thoughts, it is an effort to believe that our politicians, true clones in the public sphere, do not make politics but use politics, even sacrificing my Spain to do so.

I have no wish to go along with social utopias; by definition politics is not honorable, but even if the people don’t find politicians credible, everything is forgiven when politics is used to try to save a common goal, a destiny. The people of this world, with all its actions and contradictions, need a native country first and foremost. Spain has lost its past and its present and is refusing a destiny. My dear Spain, as Cecilia used to sing, has wasted her future. The seed of ill feeling that this political serpent has sown has born fruit. I have also come to feel hatred. Spain’s current politicians irritate me and the masses exasperate me even more when they hoist political flags without weighing up the consequences. I am living through the dictatorship of an insubstantial, ignorant majority who are capable of attacking each other over who should change the hall light bulb while they cheer those who rob them, mock them, stain their memory and ruin the dignity of their children. When Spain dies, we will just have servants for the rest of Europe, to work in winter and wash feet in the summer.

I recognize that making this analysis of how my identity uproots me from the new reality of Spain is on the borderline between rational and exotic, yet this judgment has its own validity and is in a sense ironic: since my Hispanic roots lead me to refuse to identify with the current state of Spain, I must give an even bolder, broader definition of the actual situation in order to explain the principles which guide my behaviour.

I have to admit to having a strong character, not in the conventional way described in the literature of ethnography which, like a horoscope, assigns a fixed role to groups of individuals. No country is full of heroic people or lazy people, nor is there even a small village whose inhabitants are all generous, talkative or defeatist in the face of domestic adversity. My strength doesn’t come from this political principle. I am strong because I defend my economic and intellectual inheritance; because I have resources which support me and which I seek when there is a vacuum. I am strong because I broadcast my customs, my beliefs and my own energy. Because of the way these characteristics fit together, I am prepared to believe that this vitality comes from my Latin roots. I am Roman, of Rome, which conquered, colonized and protected herself, Rome that adopts the best of other cultures without renouncing her past or giving up her idiosyncrasies, civil, logical, realist Rome. And yes, Rome which was class conscious, proud, conspiring and imperious too. Rome, Latin civilization, eternal civilization. How uncomfortable those Western nations who don’t consider themselves Latin would feel if they looked carefully at the principles that direct their lifestyles.

For this reason, paradoxical as it may seem, it is often the horizon not the homeland that best defines the nature of the individual. I am Latin, proud of my Roman inheritance, and this evaluation explains, for example, my admiration, respect and resolute defence of classical art and, in the case that brings me to write these thoughts, my fascination for Frida Kahlo.

Her Latin side was always dominant. Life was not kind to Frida; you could say that an impertinent, insistent destiny made her the target of a stream of misfortunes so that, in a macabre way, the most recent would alleviate the sorrows of the previous one. But she had Latin blood flowing in her veins, and when she fully realized her heritage, a combative halo began to carve out her character. Frida’s temperament was strong as she defended her painting, her family and her people. Our Latin side is the first thing that relates us closely. The one Mexican, the other Spanish, but both of us influenced from our cradles by the same ancestral character. The horizon gives us the same source of energy; the homeland makes our expressions different. In her case, she was attracted by the people she loved in a Mexico which was young and unsure of itself; in my case, I cling to the memory of an old, dying Spain which I love together with her ambiguous people.

Rightly or wrongly, now, through a work that may appear ill-judged and even offensive, I have become aware of my fascination for Frida, the person. I know that it is difficult to accept evaluations of her personality that don’t include anecdotes, but the reason why I haven’t told her life story or the legends about her is because I honestly believe that I will never be able to come close to the splendid films that have been made and that I highly recommend. However, I respected her before the films. First, naturally, I knew Frida the painter. At this point, if we questioned again those friends who tried to make such groundless comparisons between me and Frida, they would solemnly state that I completely reject her painting. Since I know how fluently and eloquently they speak, I have no doubt that the primitive nature of her concept of colour, form, composition, artistic technique and other things would be the set of reasons they would use to back this viewpoint. Once again I must repay their gratitude with the strongest possible contradiction, for when I look at one of her paintings, I contemplate a work of art.

Leaving aside technical evaluations, I see in her pictures her own story, I come close to her, Frida, whom I consider a real work of art. Frida made art because she painted herself. Let me explain myself. When we see a photograph of Michelangelo’s David, however far we place the new aesthetic boundaries, we accept that the art reflected on the paper does not come from the photograph. Frida was art; a chance destiny made her a painter and the chance of her marriage made her famous. I am grateful for this since it let me know her.

In my vision of Frida I wanted to transmit those features that bring out her character: the proud Latin gesture letting a complex internal simplicity shine through her pained face together with the Baroque nature of her role in society. Sometimes her physiognomy determines her expression, other times the surrounding elements do. I don’t want to finish this note without apologizing to all those true friends who esteem me and overvalue me. I ask their forgiveness, not for the way this note has contradicted them, since I am sure they have already forgiven me, but mainly for the final attack on their presumption. Even if the portrait looks like a reproduction of the Vogue cover, I based the portrait on her father Guillermo’s photographs.

Ana Brown