January 2, Lay Saints (1)

New year celebration used to be such an important event in my childhood. In part because of the communist disagreement with religious holidays, Christmas was, quite modestly, for children. How many pajamas did I not uncover from under the fire hazard which was our Christmas tree? Next to the unlikely doll my mother worked so hard at uncovering from under the black market.

New year's eve, though, or Saint Sylvester's, was most joyfully celebrated by all. Staying up past midnight, a must even for the feeble. The whole week after, ornate by delicious leftovers from that night's feast, which kept the illusion of carnivalesque joy alive. By sending her wishes for the new year, Cristina reminded me, yesterday, of happy children waking up early and descending, with gaudy wreaths, upon the sleepy, ill-humored adults. The first morning of the year was about making wishes in return of small change: the cheerful "sorcova" or wreath wished any and all to live and to grow old like apple and pear trees, like the rose on a stem in the middle of summer; be strong like stone and iron, be fast like arrow and steel. For the new year at hand and so many years to come.

Of course that was only possible in tight villages and apartment buildings like the ones we lived in. Uncles had to be close at hand, for it was they, the hanged over, who were most generous in rewards. I only reluctantly went to say my rimes. Something in them kept putting me ill at ease. I did not understand this wish for old age. Neither the wisdom of the comparison between people and fruit trees. Today, of course, I could not think of a better wish and therefore I wish it to you all: May the new year allow you to bear fruit just like the fruit trees, may you live strong and quick, and renew yourselves with every passing winter.

This past, last Sunday of the year, we went to see the Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition at the AGO in Toronto. Vividly colorful in both appearance and content, for these were out of the ordinary people. And yet, one could not not be saddened by Frieda's untimely death, probably due to illness, she who was twenty years younger than her spouse. In spite of which, the twenty some years spent together were most fruitful, regardless of the state of her health. Painterly life, if one could call it that, where every object was to potentially become the vessel of painted life, including the woman and the man at its centre. After the exhibition, an unusual, rich array of jewelry made after Frieda's own, is offered by the museum shop in order to allow any woman visitor to look just like the artist.

Except that, in order to do so, one should be in the possession of a sumptuous mane of black hair, carrying, in braids knotted above the rounded forehead, enormous tropical flowers. Red, orange, white. One should also know how to exhibit, with pride, her two eyebrows as one, while a thin mustache adorn her proud red lips.  One should move or rest gracefully in long, pleated skirts, colorful under lace, on top of which aprons are concerned as much with painting as with the various small and not so small animals hanging around those skirts like children. This woman, who so much desired the child she could never bring to term and life, has become, strangely, the image maker, or is it the lay saint, of so many otherwise fruitful women, north and south of the border.

Diego Rivera's paintings remind one of socialist realism, that style in art with which we were at home under the communist regime. In those days of course I detested it like everybody else in the know. Today I'm not so sure any longer. But the interesting part is the fact that Rivera had lived in France, where he worked with the painters of the day, like Picasso for instance. He was in possession of the new avant-garde styles which he had practiced, one by one, in his youth. Nevertheless, after the Mexican revolution, he had been entrusted with the monumental project of expressing this new Mexican identity, in frescoes which would appeal to the people. Therefore, avant-garde went out the window, and realism stepped in, with its possibility of capturing the imagination of many. Rivera was a man of larger than life stature, and his painting kept those same ambitions.

In the meantime, Frieda Kahlo learned to paint as she was recovering from the accident which disabled her for years. Her paintings, of very small proportions, force the spectator to come close and inspect every minuscule detail. Auto-portraits so intense because of the intensity of the sitter, of course. Yet imagine the kind of strength one must muster, in order to live and work side by side with the country's most venerated mural painter. How small, how detailed, how intimate and close to unreadable those paintings should be, to withstand the force of that which appeals, defines, instructs and directs all?

I think of the difference between those who live - and work - as an example and luminary for many, and those who live and work at their own survival, as evasive and un-exemplary as it may be. Rivera, who had known many women, is quoted to have said, upon his wife's death, that without her he would not have known "woman". A quotation out of context, which does not say much as such. Was she "woman" really? The essence of woman? A woman from what planet, one may almost ask, seeing that those qualities which she possessed hardly make for the perfect woman of our times? Survivor of an accident, of miscarriages, dead of unknown causes.

christmas tree and wreaths for good tidings

 

We wanted to see the exhibition before the year end and I was not sure what exactly I needed to see in there. At some point, in one of Rivera's murals, my childhood's repeatedly perused portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were shown, and I had some difficulty recognizing them, as if it were possible to forget that which has been red ironed in one's memory. Let us hope, for now, that the small, fanciful self portraits of the recovering, for-ever painter to be, are as much of a consolation as their more grandiloquent counterparts. As for where exactly Frieda will lead us, stay (at)tuned; we'll wait together for those apple trees to first blossom.