z From “Hablando de un cuadro mío,” Así, August 18, 1945, 70–71. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
Frida Kahlo was recruited for the surrealist movement by André Breton, but she never fully joined it, preferring to maintain that she was more Mexican than surrealist. We know the often pained self-expression that animates many of her works, but this essay exposes other sides of her: intellectually curious, assertive, and down-to-earth. Here she discusses a rather small but interesting work: Moisés [Moses], from 1945. As this text was transcribed from a speech, it has many slang expressions in it, some of which are in quotation marks here as they also appeared in the original magazine. The work discussed is in a pri- vate collection, but is viewable online at several websites.
This is the first time in my life that I have tried to “explain” one of my paint- ings to a group larger than three persons, so I hope you will excuse me if I take on “balls” and show some rough edges. About two years ago, José Domingo told me that he would like for me to read Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud and to paint my interpretation of that book, however I wanted. This painting is the result of that short conversation between José Domingo Lavín and I. I read the book through just once before I started to paint, working from the first impressions that it gave me. Yesterday I just reread it, and I should confess to you that I now find my painting quite incomplete and rather dif- ferent from what appears to be Freud’s marvelous analysis of Moses. But now, because I can neither add to the work nor take from it, I will describe it just as it is, and as you can see it for yourselves. Naturally, the general Copyright 2017. University of New Mexico Press.
theme is “Moses, or the Birth of a Hero.” But I interpreted the facts and images that most impressed me from the book in my own admittedly mixed- up manner. Because I am finally responsible for all this, you can tell me if I have stuck my foot in my mouth or not.
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What I wanted to express most intently and clearly was this: The reason that people need to invent or create heroes or gods is out of pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death. I started with the figure of Moses as a baby. The word moses in Hebrew means he was taken out of the water, and in Egyptian it means baby. I painted him as he is described in many legends, abandoned in a basket and floating on the waters of a river. I tried to have the basket, with its animal-skin covering, resemble a womb because Freud says that the bas- ket is the exposed womb and the water is the maternal source that gives birth to a newborn. To highlight this fact I painted the fetus [in the womb just above] in its final stages of development in the placenta. The ovaries, which resemble hands, reach out toward the world. Just to the sides of the newly created child, I placed the elements of his creation [above on either side], the fertilized egg and the first cell division. In a way that is very clear, but too complicated for my mind, Freud ana- lyzes the important fact that Moses was not Jewish but rather Egyptian. In the painting, I portrayed him as neither Jewish nor Egyptian, but just as a boy who could represent Moses, or anyone who could have had this legend- ary beginning, transforming himself later into an important person or leader of his people, which is to say, a hero. (The “all-seeing eye” shows that he is wiser than others.) Similar cases include Sargon, Cyrus, Romulus, Paris, and others. Freud’s other interesting conclusion was that Moses, not being Jewish, gave to the people who chose him as their leader and guide, a religion that was not Jewish, but rather Egyptian: the religion of Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, who revived the cult of Aten, or the Sun, which is rooted in the ancient religion of Heliopolis. Thus I painted the sun as the center of all reli- gions, as the first god and as creator and propagator of life. There have been and will be in the future a large number of “crazy vision- aries” like Moses, who transform religions and human societies. We could say that they represent a certain kind of messenger between the people that they lead and the gods that the leaders have themselves invented to aid in their leadership. These gods are quite numerous, as you know. Naturally, not all would fit in the painting and so I inserted them on either side of the sun, at least those that have a direct relationship with the sun. On the right are the Western gods, and on the left the Eastern ones. [On the right] the Assyrian winged bull, Amen, Zeus, Osiris, Horus, Yahweh, Apollo, the Moon, the Virgin Mary, Divine Providence, the Holy Trinity, Venus, and the Devil. On the left, the Thunderer, the bolt of lightning
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and its trace, which is to say [the pre-Columbian gods] Huracán, Cuculcán, Gukamatz, Tlaloc, the magnificent Coatlicue, mother of all the gods, Quetzalcóatl, Tezcatlipoca, Centéotl, the Chinese Dragon and the Hindu Brahma. I needed to add an African god, but I could not find one anywhere, so you can mentally allow him a space. I cannot tell you much about these gods, because of the shocking lack of information available about their ori- gins, importance, etc. Having painted in all the gods that would fit, in their respective heavens, I wanted to divide the heavenly world of imagination and poetry from the earthly world of the fear of death. So I painted the two skeletons, human and animal, that you see here [on either side above the heads]. Mother earth encloses them in her hands. Between death and the group of “heroes” below there is no division, because the heroes die and the earth swallows them all up, dependably and without prejudice. On the earth itself [below the skele- tons], I painted the portraits of other heroes, with their heads a little larger than the masses below. They are few in number but carefully chosen: Transformers of religions, inventors or creators of religions, conquerors, rebels; that is, the “movers and shakers.” On the right you see Amenhotep IV, who was later called Akhenaten, young ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt [1370–1350 BCE]; I had to paint him with much more importance than any other. He imposed on his subjects a new religion that broke from the tradition of polytheism, estab- lishing a strict monotheism that was based on traces of the ancient religion of Heliopolis, the religion of Aten, that is, the sun. They revered the sun not only as a cult object, but also as the creator and preserver of all living things, in or out of Egypt; his energy showed itself in rays, anticipating the modern scientific discoveries about solar power. [James Henry] Breasted [in The Dawn of Conscience] called Amenhotep IV “the first individual in human history.” Next is Moses, who in Freud’s analysis gave his adopted people the same religion of Akhenaten, adapted somewhat according to local interests and circumstances. Freud came to this conclusion after a very close study of the intimate relationship between the religion of Aten and the religion of Moses, both of which were monotheistic. It proved impossible to translate this very important part of the book into my painting. There follow Christ, Zoroaster, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Tamerlane, Napoleon, and that other “lost child,” Hitler. On the left, the mar- velous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten. I imagine that besides being beautiful
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she must have been the “lost key” and a highly intelligent collaborator with her husband. Then come the Buddha, Karl Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicurus, Genghis Khan, Gandhi, Lenin, and Stalin. The order is messed up, but I painted it according to my historical awareness, which is also messed up. Between them and the mass of humanity, I painted a sea of blood, which sym- bolizes warfare, the inevitable and inexhaustible. And finally, the powerful and “never well-regarded” mass of humanity, which is made up of all sorts of critters: warriors, pacifiers, scientists, igno- ramuses, monument-builders, rebels, flag-wavers, medal-wearers, orators, the crazy and the sane ones, the happy and sad, the sick and the healthy, the poets and the fools, and all the rest that you can think of, who live on this massive orb. Only the nearest ones are seen a little more clearly; as for the rest, well, you can’t hear them over the noise. In the left foreground is man, the builder, in four colors which signify the four races. On the right is woman, the mother figure, the creator, with a baby in her arms. Behind is an ape. The two tree trunks form a type of rainbow/ triumphal arch, representing new life which always springs from the old. At the bottom center is the most important item for Freud, and for many others: love. It is represented by the snail and the shell, the two genders which unite to create new and thriving races. This is what I can tell you about this painting. I invite any kind of question or comment; I won’t get upset. Thank you.
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