After several years in Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova boarded an oil tanker and docked in Tampico, Mexico on January 9, 1937. It was Rivera who convinced Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to offer Trotsky political asylum in Mexico. As a result, the Communist party fractured into two main camps: Stalinists and Trotskyites. But when Joseph Stalin assumed leadership in 1924, he consolidated power and demoted Trotsky, exiling him for good in 1929. They’d followed the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism closely, and knew Trotsky as a hero of the 1917 October Uprising, which cemented Vladimir Lenin and the Socialist regime’s rise to dominance. Many of her paintings took cues from age-old Mexican votive panels, and she and Rivera re-planted their yard to include only native plants (succulents abounded).īy the mid-1930s, Kahlo and Rivera both considered themselves Trotskyites. On most days, she donned traditional Tehuana clothes, elaborately patterned skirt-and-blouse ensembles native to Oaxaca. It was in this spirit that Kahlo dressed herself, painted, and even gardened. The couple also championed Mexicanidad, a post-Revolutionary movement that called for stripping the country of colonial influence and replacing it with the trappings of indigenous culture. Wearing a shirt emblazoned with a red star (red being the traditional color of Communism), Kahlo disseminates weapons to workers while a flag bearing the Communist party’s hammer-and-sickle insignia flies over the scene. In Rivera’s 1928 mural The Arsenal, he showed Kahlo as an activist. Influenced by the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the century, they advocated for a populist government and believed political power should rest in the hands of the working class. Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, were vocal supporters of Marxism and had been on-and-off members of the Mexican Communist Party for a decade, since 1927. Kahlo and Trotsky first met in 1937, when the painter was 29 and the politician was 57. Although their romance only lasted several months, it offers a window into Kahlo’s politics and how deeply they influenced her work. Kahlo had many romantic partners over the course of her short life (she died in 1954 at 47), but few resulted in dedicated paintings-and fewer pointed explicitly to her political beliefs. His murder-and her implication in the crime-was a dramatic turn of events, especially considering that Kahlo and Trotsky had been giddy lovers just three years earlier she’d even dedicated a striking self-portrait to him. Several days prior to her arrest, he’d been gruesomely offed with an ice pick. Mexico City police suspected her as an accomplice in the murder of the embattled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In the summer of 1940, Frida Kahlo found herself in jail.
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