[Music] Freda Carlo is one of the most popular and recognizable artists of the 20th century she is known for her painting her politics her tempestuous relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera and others and her Fierce Independence but behind the vibrancy and energy of her work was a life racked with pain both physical and emotional from a near fatal accident at the age of 18 like no other artist she laid out her pain for all to see Unapologetic uncompromising deeply personal yet tapping into something Universal welcome to insane history I'm Professor Graham molon and today I'm exploring the colorful but painful life of Mexican artist Freda Carlo Magdalena Carmen Freda Carlo eal Lon was born in 1907 in kakan then a village just outside Mexico City her father gelmo was of German Hungarian origin and her mother Mexican of Spanish and Native American descent her ancestry was very important to Freda and she often explored her identity in her work by depicting both her European and Indigenous Mexican Roots she may have been born with spinabifida an inherited defect of the spine in which some of the vertebrae don't form properly and at the age of six she contracted polio still a life-threatening illness in 1913 that killed and crippled thousands of children every year she had to spend several months in bed and was left with a permanently withered and shortened right leg in her 9 months of isolation she Drew close to her father who suffered from epilepsy an illness that was still misunderstood and feared with few effective treatments available her doctor recommended physical exercise to strengthen her leg and her father encouraged her to swim play football box and wrestle all very unusual for a girl at the time her forced isolation and bullying because of her Peg Leg made her introverted and in family photographs she would often stand slightly apart from her sisters or dress in an unconventional way and in her later paintings she often portrayed herself as alone she recalled that the mood in her childhood home was often very very sad both parents had poor health her mother never got over the loss of a son who died soon after birth a year before Freda was born and their marriage was cold and Loveless she described her mother as kind active and intelligent but also calculating cruel and fanatically religious and it was her father who she always turned to for understanding and love GMO was a talented and successful photographer before the Mexican Revolution of 1910 but his business suffered during the 10 years of Civil War and money was so tight the family had to sell off furniture and taking Lodgers he taught Freda photography and she helped him develop and retouch prints in his Studio he also taught her about literature science and philosophy and educated her to think for herself Freda started school slightly late because of her polio but unlike her three sisters who went to a convent school Freda attended a German school she didn't last long however as her rebellious side began to emerge and she was expelled for Disobedience her mother arranged for her to go to a vocational school for teachers but at the age of 13 a female gym teacher showed an unhealthy interest in her and when compromising letters were found Freda was moved [Music] at 15 she went a place at the prestigious National Preparatory School in Mexico City and had plans to go on to study medicine one of only a few girls she mixed with a group of confident and politically aware students and they passionately discussed philosophy communism and how they felt the world should be the school commissioned a mural for its Auditorium and this is where she met the 36-year-old Diego Rivera for the first time watching him paint and listening to his stories about his Bohemian artistic lifestyle in Paris she became obsessed with the famous Michelangelo of Mexico and declared to her school friends that one day she would marry him and have his child but in 1925 at the age of 18 her life changed she was almost killed when a tram or trolley car ran into her bus her spine was fractured in three places her right leg was shattered into a 11 pieces her right foot was crushed her collarbone and two ribs were broken and her shoulder dislocated but perhaps most devastating of all her pelvis was fractured and her abdomen and uterus punctured by a metal handrail which exited through her vagina at first it was unclear whether she would live at all others were not so lucky and she spent a month recovering in hospital her mother pointedly visiting her only twice as she seemed to prefer being the center of attention herself Freda then needed a further two months to recuperate at home but this was difficult with her mother's hisonic Tendencies Matilda was even in competition with her husband by having pseudo seizures and Freda complained no one in my house believes that I'm really sick since I cannot even say so because my mother gets sick and they say it's because of [Music] me but despite the very real serious ious Ness of her injuries her spinal cord was undamaged and there was no additional nerve damage however after initially seeming to make a full recovery she began to suffer excruciating pain in her back and down her right leg which left her constantly exhausted an x-ray a year after the accident revealed a number of displaced vertebrae and she was readmitted to hospital for several months and had to wear a plaster corset from her chest to her pelvis to try to correct the issue being confined to bed and so restricted in her movements made it difficult to find distractions from her pain and boredom so she asked her father who occasionally painted Landscapes to bring in his oil paints and brushes and a special easel was set up allowing her to paint lying down with a mirror placed above so she could see herself during her slow convalescence she taught herself to paint studying the style and techniques of other artists from books in this one of her earliest Works she she paints a constricted Bland Urban landscape reflecting the narrowed existence of her confinement next came her first self-portrait completed when she was still only 18 and given to her boyfriend Alejandro as he was traveling off to Europe no doubt to keep him Keen over the next 2 years she painted family friends and just about anyone who came to visit [Music] until her bed rest was finally over and at long last she was able to socialize again with her old school friends who by now were at University busying themselves with student politics she joined the Mexican Communist party and mixed and made love to a very free-spirited Bohemian crowd of left-wing intellectuals and artists knowing that she was not physically capable of pursuing a career in medicine she considered becoming a medical illustrator and got a job as a stenographer but in 1928 she met Rivera again through her friends and plucked up enough courage to show him her work and asked whether he thought she had enough talent to live by her art he was encouraging and they soon launched into a passionate relationship even though he was still married to his second wife and was double her age after his divorce they were married in a civil ceremony in 1929 her mother wasn't Keen Rivera had a bad reputation and Jewish roots which offended her religious sensibilities they also looked an ill-matched pair her mother calling it a marriage between an elephant and a dove as Rivera was tall and seriously overweight and Freda petite and fragile but her father was happy as Rivera had money and he knew Freda would struggle to hold down a job and would likely need further expensive medical treatment throughout her life I'm not sure what marriage vows they took or whether they agreed to forsake all others but neither one of them stuck to any idea of marital Fidelity both having numerous Liaisons soon after the wedding they moved to qu naaka where Rivera had been commissioned to paint murals for the palaso de Cortez for a while they were devoted to each other and Freda wrote how she loved his huge stomach drawn tight and smooth as a sphere and his pendulous porine breasts Freda continued painting but her artistic style evolved and Drew increasingly on Mexican folk art like several other Mexican women artists and intellectuals at the time she began wearing traditional peasant clothing long colorful skirts elaborate headdresses and lots of jewelry she was particularly fond of the Deana outfit based on the traditions of women from the supposedly matriarchal society of tantek in Waka which expressed her feminist and anti-colonialist ideals the following year they moved to San Francisco where Rivera painted murals for the luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts they were a popular couple I met all the leading West Coast artists Architects and photographers and throughout their stay they lived and worked at the studio of Ralph stackpole collectors were starting to show an interest and for the first time freda's work was included in an exhibition alongside her husband's the six months in San Francisco was a productive period for Freda whose style was developing all the time she painted portraits of new acquaintances and found time to pose for Hungarian American photographer Nicholas Murray and probably began her long affair with him around this time but it wasn't all fun and games she suffered from trophic ulceration of her leg writing in letters that my foot is still ill a sketch from this time shows her foot bandaged and she returned to this image later in a painting which was lost in a fire trophic ulcers are pressure sords in parts of the body with poor blood flow or a damaged nerve Supply they are common in frail older people and can be very unsightly prone to infection and very slow to heal a horrible thing for a young woman to have she was in so much pain she consulted surgeon Dr Leo elessa who did his best to treat her even showing up on her doorstep when she missed appointments they became friends and she attended his weekly musical SW sarees where he played the viola together with a husband they went on day trips and on one of these they visited the garden of the famous botanist Luther Burbank known as The Wizard of horiculture for his development of hundreds of new varieties of fruits vegetables and plants learning how Burbank fused together two organisms to create something new fascinated Carlo and she applied this hybridization technique to her painting producing her extraordinary portrait of him part human part tree with roots drawing nourishment from his buried body many regard this as her creative breakthrough the finding of her true voice and afterwards the imagery of roots plants and Hybrid Bodies symbolizing life and death continues as a recurring theme in her work after a summer back in Mexico they returned to the US for the opening of Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City then it was Detroit where Rivera had been given a major commission to paint 27 murals at the Detroit Institute of [Music] Arts but Freda wasn't happy there she didn't enjoy socializing with motown's captains of industry writing that she felt a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here since I have seen thousand thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep and she wasn't impressed with the condescending tone of the newspapers about her [Music] work and her health was not good she became pregnant but because of fears that she might not survive a delivery a doctor agreed to a termination the medication did not work however and the pregnancy continued and until she had a miscarriage which caused a massive Hemorrhage that required a 2 we stay in hospital a few months later her mother died from the complications of surgery in Mexico and these events produced some of her most harrowing Works including in Henry Ford Hospital and my birth a picture that remains controversial to this day and I'm not sure it will pass the YouTube Community guidelines she shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with her San Francisco physician and friend Dr to elessa saying how sad she was after the miscarriage as she had so looked forward to having a little Dayo she corresponded with him for the rest of her life always starting her letters with KERO Doo my beloved doctor and their rediscovery in 2004 provided new insights into her life Carlo and Rivera returned to New York in March 1933 for him to start work on his commission to paint a mural at the Rockefeller Center the outrage over his inclusion of a portrait of Lenin in the very epicenter of American capitalism led to him being dismissed and his work destroyed although Rivera wanted to continue working in the US Freda was homesick she didn't like gingo landia as she called it and worked on only one painting during their stay in New York they returned to Mexico in December 1933 I moved into a radical new house designed by a student of loer comprising separate Living Spaces joined by a bridge the house became a Gathering Place for artists and political activists and the two halves made it easier for them both to pursue their Affairs without too much Fallout freda's Health continued to be up and down however she had an appendicectomy two more terminations and some of the toes on her right foot had to be amputated because of gang green she tried to remain positive declaring feat what do I need you for when I have wings to fly Diego was less positive however he was not happy about being back in Mexico and blamed Freda for their return as usual he looked Elsewhere for his pleasures and Freda discovered he was having an affair with her younger sister Christina in 1935 although she had accepted his previous Affairs and had plenty of her own this one hurt she moved out and considered divorcing him there have been two great accidents in my life she wrote in her diary one was the trolley and the other Diego Diego was by far the worst she consoled herself with having an affair of her own with American sculptor isamu naguchi it got quite serious and they pln to set up house together but when Rivera found one of his socks beside freda's bed he threatened him with a gun and naguchi made his departure this was fairly typical Diego didn't mind freda's Liaisons with women he enjoyed hearing about them and happily recounted her exploits to others but he hated her affairs with other men somehow Freda was able to accept her sister and Diego being together and they were all reconciled she even moved back in with him and Christina and her two children freda's pain paintings especially her self-portraits Laden with symbolism seemed to help her process her complex feelings about Rivera and their relationship and became a way for her to explore questions of her own identity and sexuality she explained I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best as well as painting she got back into politics and raised funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War with Rivera she petitioned The Mexican government to Grant ay to Leon trosky and offered him her childhood home of lacasa assou to live in Freda and trosky became good friends and had a brief [Music] affair she also had a fling with his secretary but pain and poor health were never far away and in her work Freda didn't shy away from depicting her medical problems in a painting from this period She shows the painful cracked skin and deformed toes of her right foot even though they had been amputated four years previously in October 1938 she traveled by herself to New York for a solo exhibition of her work although the opening was attended by famous figures in the art World such as Georgia O'Keefe with whom it is rumor she also had a fling and she received positive attention in the Press many critics adopted a rather condescending tone in their reviews of her work in January 1939 she sailed to Paris to follow up on French surrealist Andre breton's invitation to Stage an exhibition of her work there but the planning was poor and the gallery refused to exhibit two of her paintings as they were too shocking plus she was unwell and had to be hospitalized for a kidney infection although she met the Larger than Life Cabaret star Josephine Baker as well as Picasso and other artists she wasn't too impressed with France writing they are so damned intellectual and rotten that I can't stand them anymore I would rather sit on the floor in the market of Toca and sell tortillas than have anything to do with those artistic [ __ ] of Paris unlike New York it was not a financial success and she had to cancel a planned exhibition in London on the way home for New York Nicholas Murray ended their long onoff affair as she would not agree to leave Diego and marry him so when after she arrived back in Mexico Diego asked her unexpectedly for a divorce she was deeply upset she reluctantly agreed to the divorce however in November 1939 and afterwards they remained on friendly terms Freda even continued to manage his finances and correspondence for him as before she moved back to laa aul the blue house and determined to make a living from her art she threw herself into her work encouraged by the recognition she was gaining she started painting larger canvases and some of her most famous pieces date from this period such as the two fredas and self-portrait with cropped hair her work was exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the 20 centuries of Mexican art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in Mexico [Music] City but never good her health suffered after the divorce and was made worse by her drinking a bottle of brandy a day chain smoking and eating sweets that rotted away her teeth in true Freda style however rather than modify her habits she made the best of a bad situation and had her stumps removed and two sets of teeth made one in gold and one studded with diamonds in August 1940 trosky was murdered the police arrested Carlo and her sister and held them for 2 days as they were suspected of being involved fortunately Rivera was able to use his political influence to get them out she then traveled to San Francisco for further treatment for her back pain and a fungal infection of her hand ever resourceful she managed to squeeze in a brief relationship with art dealer hin berguin whilst at the same time getting back together with Rivera who was also in California at the time working on a commission they remarried in a simple ceremony in December 1940 just over a year after their divorce I feel that since our very Origins we've been together that we're of the same matter on the same wavelength that we carry within us the same sensibilities back in Mexico they lived together in La Kaza asso for the next 14 years it wasn't exactly domestic Bliss as they both still had affairs but the second marriage was slightly less tempestuous than the first sadly though freda's Health continued to decline she was in constant back and leg pain and she tried everything to combat it including dozens of different corsets some plaster some leather some made of steel but they brought only momentary relief or none at all so she relied increasingly on alcohol and morph [Music] she could not get rid of the fungal infection in her hand and at one point had to be treated for syphilis after her father died in April 1941 she went into a long period of depression and her health made it more and more difficult to do anything away from the calm and quiet of her home but she kept herself busy with the garden seeing visitors and fussing over her various pets working through the pain however she continued to be productive during the early 1940s painting several self-portraits with a characteristic indomitable gaze in 1943 she was appointed professor of painting at La Esmeralda the education ministri School of Fine Arts but by the mid 1940s she could no longer sit or stand for any length of time in June 1945 she traveled to New York for a spinal fusion operation which used a bone graft from her pelvis and a steel support to strengthen her spine she had High Hopes writing to her childhood sweetheart Alejandro about her doctor he is so marvelous this doctor and my body is so full of Vitality but her Euphoria probably had more to do with the huge doses of morphine she was taking and as the medication was reduced so did her [Music] optimism the operation was not a success partly because she did not stick to the strict regime of bed rest and in a fit of anger and frustration reopened her wounds her paintings from this period reflect her declining Health back in Mexico her pain continued as did her efforts to ease it with alcohol and opiates and she rarely left laka asso at times she would remain cheerful and defiant joking I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned to swim and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling in Darker moments she would fly into rages with her husband and taunt him about her affair with trosky and other men at other times she would write about their inextinguishable love nobody will ever know how much I love Diego don't want anything to hurt him nothing to bother him or Rob him of the energy he needs for living at face valy this seems to reflect her undying and self-sacrificing devotion but an alternative interpretation has been suggested that she might have been doing a little Shakespearean protesting too much revealing that she really did want to hurt him in 1950 she could barely walk so had another spinal fusion operation in Mexico this time using a donor bone graft but she developed a wound infection and required six further surgeries over the next year she spent 9 months in hospital but with her characteristic spirit and determination she made the best of it Diego took a room next to hers and they received lots of visitors whom she would entertain by showing off her saws and enthusiastically pointing out the beautiful shades of green on her dressings at the end of it all she could walk again and was so grateful to her surgeon she painted him a self-portrait but the Improvement didn't last long and over the next 2 years she often had to paint from her bed or from her wheelchair and she focused on still lives necessarily on a smaller scale she was largely confined to laca aul using crutches to get around and a wheelchair on rare foray into the outside world she remained active and committed to political causes but when she overdid it her doctors would put her back on strict bed rest in April 1953 she had her first Mexican oneperson show at the Galleria Arte contemporan she was meant to be at home on bed rest but determined not to miss her moment of glory and much to everyone's surprise she appeared at the opening ceremony carried in on a fourposter bed like a triumphant Egyptian queen but just a few months later she was under the surgeon's knife again this time to amputate her gangrenous right leg at the knee depression and anxiety followed and her dependence on pulas [Music] escalated when Rivera began yet another affair she took another overdose writing in her diary I keep on wanting to end it all Diego is what keeps me from it through my vain idea that he would miss me in his autobiography Rivera wrote following the loss of her leg Freda became deeply depressed she no longer even wanted to hear me tell her of my love affairs she had lost her will to live now I'm a big fan of Rivera's work but as a human being goodness me he left a lot to be desired even painting a few cacti turned into something erotic somehow Freda retained a sense of humor and after a quarrel with onetime lover Dolores St Rio she announced I will send her my leg on a silver tray as an act of Vengeance she made further attempts on her life but continued to paint one of her last Works was the prophetically named self-portrait in a landscape with the sun going down but when the work was almost finished she destroyed it saying the painting showed a Vitality she no longer possessed her Vitality was ebbing away but her vanity wasn't and right to the end she continued her daily elaborate makeup ritual gradually needing more and more to plaster over the cracks her last public appearance was in July 1954 at a March for the Guatemalan people protesting against the us-backed military coup that overthrew president yakobo arens 10 days later bedbound and weak from pneumonia she could shake off she gave Diego a ring for their 25th wedding anniversary it was a month early in her diary she thanks a long list of doctors and Friends ending with I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return [Music] Freda she died the next day officially from pneumonia but many people suspect that she ended her own life unable to tolerate the pain any longer her coffin draped with a communist flag was placed in the Palace of Fine Arts where the most prominent Mexican artists and intellectuals of the day came to pay their final respects more loyal in death Rivera had laca aul converted into a museum dedicated to her life and it is one of Mexico City's most popular attractions although Carlo achieved success as an artist in her lifetime her postumus reputation and fame has grown steadily especially since the 1980s reaching what some critics called Freedom Mania by the end of the century exhibitions books and documentaries have gradually revealed her complicated life story and as the details of her tireless championing of disenfranchised causes have emerged she has been adopted as an icon of feminism disability rights indigenous peoples and the LBGTQ community to name but a few her life and struggles have inspired movies a ballet an opera and [Music] imitators but what led to her life being so eventful and turbulent was it just her artistic temperament was it the accident was it the wandering eye of a husband or could it have been due at least in part to a mental disorder she undoubtedly had periods of depression at a time when there was no effective medication that might have helped her we know that she had a psychological evaluation including RW Shack blot tests which had been analyzed in great depth I particularly like her comment that one of them looked like male genitals with fire and Thorns but my feelings are that these so-called tests are about as much use as a fairgr fortune teller reading your tea leaves there is also no doubt that she became reliant on alcohol and painkillers but having had the odd episode of sciatica myself I can understand why she would have been desperate to find anything that relieved the excruciating nerve pain she had to endure for so long some people have suggested that her demands for multiple surgeries were the result of munch Housen syndrome as there was often an element of theatricality in how she approached her hospital stays but I see this as evidence of her strength and refusal to give in the cruel fate of having such a broken body and nothing whatsoever to do with fabricating her symptoms to get attention another suggestion is that her chronic pain was psychological not fabricated as in Munch Housen syndrome but unconsciously produced as a learned pattern of behavior from childhood as a way of getting sympathy and love this is a possibility but assessing patients with chronic pain is one of the hardest jobs in neuropsychiatry even when you have thousands of pages of medical notes to go through in freda's case however we know that she had soes on her feet and had to have some of her toes and eventually half her leg amputated so it seems highly unlikely to me that her pain was all psychological one could make a case for her having an emotionally unstable personality disorder or eupd but this would be a difficult judgment call she certainly lived a life full of drama heartache and relationship chaos she self-harmed and made numerous attempts on her life but there were also periods when she buckled down and busied herself with her work and political causes I think she had many of the personality traits that people with eupd have but whether they reach the threshold for making a modern diagnosis is unclear one could also make a case for her having post-traumatic stress disorder bullied at school abused by a teacher and then nearly killed by a tra she certainly went through a lot but not everyone who goes through trauma is traumatized in the sense of developing PTSD and we simply don't know whether or not she had any symptoms of this as you would expect for an artist who made use of such Rich symbolism in her work there are a thousand one psychoanalytic interpretations of her life but I don't think you need to have read the collected works of sigon Freud 10 times over to conclude that she may have had a bit of a farther complex in her relationship with Rea in the end we must form our own conclusions about her earlier Generations were troubled by her politics her promiscuity and her sexuality but today we can view her as someone who remained true to herself or perhaps to her many selves and admire how she worked through her pain both emotional and physical to leave us an enduring Legacy of work that continues to inspire people to this day to live their lives as they want thank you for watching please let me know if there are any other artists you'd like me to cover and remember to subscribe and click for notifications to be kept up to date with the latest videos there are some interesting ones coming up so I hope to see you again soon bye for now