Frida Kahlo: Pain, Politics, and the Self-Portraits That Made an Icon

[EPISODE 140] Frida Kahlo: Pain, Politics, and the Self-Portraits That Made an Icon

Kyle Risi: [00:00:00] Frida Carlo is totally unappreciated in her time.

Adam Cox: I would love to not be appreciated in my time.

Kyle Risi: It pierced through her abdomen, through her uterus and has come out the other side.

Adam Cox: Bloody hell.

Kyle Risi: This poor woman,

She's just this broken bleeding mess covered in gold paint. It's a description Of performance arts.

Adam, she was not a well woman. To deal with this grief, she starts painting.

pain manifested itself into this immense or consuming emotional pain that pretty much ended up plaguing her entire life.

She is not afraid to show herself in these really raw, often gruesome ways.

But Adam, She has no idea what surrealism even is. She's not trying to be something, she is that something?

Adam Cox: That's interesting actually. I didn't realize how she was, perhaps, different

Kyle Risi: [00:01:00] Welcome to the Compendium and Assembly of Fascinating Things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam Cox: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your ringmaster for this week's episode.

Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, the Senior Sawdust Distribution Analyst at the Compendium Circus.

Kyle Risi: Okay. Interesting. Why?

Adam Cox: My job is basically to make sure the sawdust looks naturally scattered while still meeting our ISO 9,001 Whimsy standards.

Kyle Risi: Whimsy standards. Mm. Wow. So they've got a new [00:02:00] classification. why is this role needed?

Adam Cox: Well, Kyle, if you recall, the great clumping instant of April

Kyle Risi: Yes.

Adam Cox: Where a clown took a slash in the ring, which caused the sawdust to clump. It was still wet underneath. Mm-hmm. And then an elephant was walking on it and it broke its hip.

Kyle Risi: Oh no. It slipped.

Adam Cox: Yeah. We had to get finance to put it down. Well shoot it. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Good old

Adam Cox: suit. Exactly.

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Kyle Risi: and also the Chippendales. I don't think we've ever mentioned that one.

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Adam Cox: And lastly, guys, please follow us on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Your support helps others find us and keeps these amazing stories coming.

Kyle Risi: So, Adam, today on the compendium, we are [00:04:00] diving in to an assembly of self-portraits, political posters, and a myth behind a unibrow.

Adam Cox: What does that even mean, Kyle?

Kyle Risi: Adam, who Sported one of the most famous unib brows of the 20th century.

Adam Cox: Your mother.

Kyle Risi: She does not have a

Adam Cox: unibrow. No, she does not. Bert from Sesame Street.

Kyle Risi: Ooh, Cara Dene. Yeah. Perhaps good guesses. But actually Adam, I'm talking about a woman who history will not let us forget. I am of course talking about Frida Carlo.

Adam Cox: Ah, Frida.

Kyle Risi: Frida. Frida.

Adam Cox: That's Vegas.

Kyle Risi: So I'll go for freedom.

Yeah.

So actually this episode was suggested by a bunch of our freaks on the Patreon through our very brand new Freak You Register. We have going on for our free and paid Patreons who can go off and suggest an episode they think we should cover.[00:05:00]

And an overwhelming number of people suggested that we do Frida Carlo of All Things, the reason why might be because the Tape Modern is doing a retrospective of her work in 2026.

So it seems that there's a lot of buzz surrounding that once again. Whenever we do an episode suggested by a Patreon member, just like this one, we're actually going to credit that episode to that Patreon.

Adam Cox: And so who is the lucky Patreon this week?

Kyle Risi: today's suggestion comes from Samantha Bingley. She wasn't the only one, but she was the first one. And so Samantha, this episode is for you. You'll have your credit displayed in the episode show notes so you can show the entire world

Adam Cox: and all you others there who suggested it. Nevermind. You gotta be quicker.

Kyle Risi: Maybe we'll kind of have a list. But I didn't write them down. Sorry guys. Maybe when

Adam Cox: you come to publish, let's give everyone a credit.

Kyle Risi: Okay, fine. So this week I basically went down a bit of a rabbit hole. Usually, we're driven by topics that we are directly interested in. And so [00:06:00] usually I have an anchor for where I wanna begin my research. But this time it was completely open and her life is just incredible. I had no idea. But the biggest takeaway for me is that apparently during feeder's lifetime, there wasn't a common word for what we now call a unibrow

Adam Cox: unibrow brow or monobrow

Kyle Risi: Monobrow uni brow.

They didn't have a term for it. So when she's painting herself with that deliberate, sweeping brow, that was so synonymous with her portraits she wasn't leaning into this quirk. She was just simply saying, Hmm, that's my face. Yeah.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I've, I've got, I've got one brow.

Kyle Risi: 'cause she's Wan brow. That's racist. Oh, how? Because you put on a Spanish accent. I dunno if it was, I say you went, Juan

Adam Cox: was that Spanish Juan,

Kyle Risi: cancel him.

And the thing about her work is that Frieda is completely unapologetic about how she depicts herself.

She is not afraid to show herself in these really raw, often gruesome ways. A lot of her work comprises of self portraits, which she of course is so famous for. out of like the 143 paintings that [00:07:00] she's made across her lifetime, 55 of those were self-portraits. it's a subject that she really knows incredibly well.

Adam Cox: Well, herself. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But also for a prominent artist, 143 paintings across her entire life. Is not that many. It's not that

Adam Cox: many, but a third of them. Of her. So she thinks a lot of herself.

Kyle Risi: Well, we're gonna get into why she painted herself so much. But when you put 143 paintings in comparison to the likes of Picasso, he painted almost 2000 works in total. So it's quite a big contrast.

Adam Cox: It's not about quantity, it's about quality. Kyle.

Kyle Risi: Correct. Very true. So tell me, Adam, what do you know of Frida Kahlo,

Adam Cox: uh, other

Kyle Risi: than the Una Brown,

Adam Cox: other than nothing.

We had a photo of her in a frame. I'm pretty sure she's in the bottom of one of our cupboards somewhere.

Kyle Risi: Maybe we should get that one out. Yeah. As like a little memorial to the fact that we've done this episode. For Samantha?

Adam Cox: For Samantha.

Kyle Risi: For Samantha. This one's for you.

Adam Cox: But back to your original question. No, I don't.

Kyle Risi: Well, I mean, the thing is though she is probably most famous for her unibrow, it's probably the [00:08:00] most iconic element of her.

Some would even say it's a magnificent uni brow. Women rarely get described as having a magnificent feature. Do they? It's mostly men. So it's a shame that women never get described as magnificent.

Adam Cox: I mean, big brows are in, but that, you know, brows is in plural. So yeah, I think, let's celebrate big browse

Kyle Risi: big, magnificent, big breasts are sometimes described as magnificent and heaving. Heaving is the other one. falling down the stairs, falling like slinkies. There's so magnificent. We know nothing about women.

We don't.

But Frida Kahlo was magnificent of course, she's also famous for her flower crowns, her bold tier one and kind of dresses, self portraits with monkeys, hummingbirds, thorns, and of course that unflinching gaze, possibly like on a par with the Mona Lisa.

But the theme that's probably most fascinating about her work and the themes that she depicts in her work, Adam, is actually pain, surprisingly, this defines so much of a work and I'm talking both physical and emotional [00:09:00] pain.

It started off as physical because Adam, the reality is she was not a well woman. And because of that, that physical pain manifested itself over time into this immense or consuming emotional pain that pretty much ended up plaguing her entire life.

Adam Cox (2): What kind of pain

was it?

Kyle Risi: We are gonna get into that, but she was definitely disabled. Okay. And she had a lot of an emotional strife going on in her life just 'cause of the things that had happened.

But also what I found really interesting was that as an artist, she is totally unappreciated in her time.

Adam Cox: I would love to not be appreciated in my time.

But then most artists, is that true? Most artists aren't appreciated in their time?

Kyle Risi: Well, I mean, one of the key characters in this episode is gonna be a guy called Diego Rivera, and he is completely appreciated in his time, however, by the end of her life, that was starting to change for most of it. She was just simply known as the wife of Diego Rivera, who was one of the most famous and [00:10:00] celebrated muralists, not just in Mexico, but in the entire world.

So she pretty much existed in his shadow in spite of Diego himself, telling people like Picasso she was a better artist .

And so there is this irony in death that Frieda ended up becoming more famous than Diego. She became this immortal figure, and yet he is all but been forgotten. So what would you prefer? Would you prefer to be unknown in life and celebrated in death, or would you be rather celebrated in life and forgotten in death?

Adam Cox: If you're known whilst you're alive, at least you can maybe appreciate, the freebies or the VIP events and stuff like that. You can't do that when you're dead.

Kyle Risi: That is true. That is true. But then you're missing out on legacy. That's a big thing. People wanna be remembered long after they've died.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: I'd like to be appreciated in my time and remembered in my death.

Adam Cox: Wow. Greedy.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Hey, why can't I have both?

So, Adam, today on the compendium, I'm gonna tell you about Frida Kahlo.

Thanks to Samantha Bingley, certified Freak extraordinaire. I'll tell you about how [00:11:00] extraordinary she was unappreciated in her time. We'll follow her life and we're gonna sit with her pain, both physical and emotional, but we'll also trace a very complicated orbit around this Diego Rivera guy 'cause he is insane.

Hopefully by the end of this episode, if you only know the icon. You'll leave here wanting to explore her work for yourself. And we've got loads of really cool. Little links in the show notes so you can actually follow her work. We can't discuss all of the paintings, but for the, some of the paintings that we do discuss, Uhhuh, you can click onto that link and you can see exactly what we're talking about because some of them are wild.

Adam Cox: Okay. Interested? I've got a a, an idea for the title of this episode. Go on then. Frida Carlo Beyond the uni brow.

Kyle Risi: Well, I like it

Adam Cox: we'll see More than just a uni brow. She was more than a uni brow. Exactly. She was a whole girl.

Kyle Risi: so Adam Frieda was born. Magdalena, Carmen, Frieda Carlo, kon, on the 6th of July, 1907, [00:12:00] she was born in a parents' house known as La Casa Azu or the Blue House. And it's actually the house where she would end up dying in all these years later. So as a physical spot in the universe, this house is a solid constant for her in her life.

It's actually now one of the busiest museums in Mexico. wow. yeah, which is pretty cool. It's only a small little house, which is crazy. Yet it's attracted this much attention.

Adam Cox: Oh, I guess that's the legacy she's left, right?

Exactly.

Kyle Risi: Her father was a chap called Carl Willem Carlo, and he was born in Germany in 1871. When he was 19, he decided that he was gonna escape his evil stepmother. And he made a beeline from Mexico, literally just to get away. And when he arrives, he changes his name from Carl To Gero, it's for no other reason other than for him desperately wanting to fit in because he didn't think Carl sounded Mexican enough.

Adam Cox: What about Carlos? That's Spanish, right? Yeah, I guess so. It's, I dunno if [00:13:00] it is for Carlos.

Kyle Risi: Maybe he just wanted to kind of sever that part of his identity.

Adam Cox: I'm thinking of just desperate Housewives.

Kyle Risi: That's the only Mexican we know. We know another Carl loss. Well, I mean, Phoebe calls him Carl Loss. Here's the thing. Gamero also had epilepsy, which he really struggles with for most of his life. There is a suggestion that he develop epilepsy after a traumatic head injury as a child, probably as a result of his evil stepmother, we don't know this yet, but Frieda is also disabled. And this is a factor that actually they both end up really connecting over.

But epilepsy doesn't hold him back. Within 10 years of arriving in Mexico, he becomes one of the most famous photographers in the country.

Adam Cox: Okay. So how big are we talking here?

Kyle Risi: Um,

Adam Cox: like Sybil Shepherd. Sybil Shepherd.

Kyle Risi: Wow. His best known for his portraits of politicians. But part of his fame in a notoriety comes from a new photograph. He takes some of himself. Now it is from behind, so it is very PG 13. But Adam, he looks great, but for the time [00:14:00] it was scandalous.

Adam Cox: Oh, so naked

Kyle Risi: butt naked,

Adam Cox: bunt naked. Mm-hmm. Is he just sending nudes to people? He's only taken one photograph. and this is it. Well, and that's how it starts. Just a little cheeky bum shot Uhhuh. And then he does look good. He looks amazing. Alright, calm down. It's black and white photograph and he's dead. I haven't got my water bottle to squirt you.

Kyle Risi: But the point is, is that this demonstrates his range as a photographer, like official portraits of politicians and a single instance of him dabbling in early 20th century Borno basically,

Adam Cox: bit of erotica never hurt anyone.

Kyle Risi: He was also a painter just like his father and his father before him.

So painting kind of runs in the family, before Gil Amo met Frieda's mother, he was already married to another woman, and together they end up having three daughters. But she dies during the birth of their third child. And so in a classic move, he doesn't mess around.

He meets and marries reader's mother, a woman called Matilda called Daron. Gonzales with very Mexican name. And to help him settle [00:15:00] into his new life with Little Miss New Boobs, he literally sends all his current kids to be raised in a convent.

Adam Cox: Oh, okay. That's weird because I thought it would get a new wife to look after his kids. Mm-hmm. But actually know, he is do you know what? This is really fun. I've got a new woman on the town. Boobs. Yeah. Love 'em. Miss New Boobs. So you just get rid of the kids.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Sends 'em all off.

Isn't that brutal? Yeah. Also, Frieda has almost no contact with her half sisters until she's literally fully grown So it's just history repeating itself. He escapes Germany to get away from his evil stepmother only to recreate the same conditions for his own kids, which is awful. So together, he and Matilda have four kids of their own.

Fredda is one of them. And by far, Frida is their favorite, but brutal. Again, obviously not for Freda, but for the other kids because he openly admits this like, it's fine to have a favorite, but you just don't say it out loud.

Do you know what I mean?

Adam Cox: Yeah. You just tell everyone else

Kyle Risi: but all actually, interestingly though is if you do have a favorite child, which is completely fine to have one is normally the eldest or the youngest, but Frieda is the second youngest of four [00:16:00] girls.

So it is a little bit strange.

Adam Cox: You can tell when it comes to Christmas, like what presents, you're like, oh, they got an extra present.

Kyle Risi: I, it sounds like you remembered that a lot.

Adam Cox: I was the youngest, so I think I fell into that bracket. I think everyone gives you phases, right? But I think different periods you might be bonded closer to a certain child.

Kyle Risi: We've only got the cats as a reference, but I think Keith has always been our favorite.

Adam Cox: Don't

Kyle Risi: tell James that. James. James Cameron, sorry. You have to make it on your own. And he's the youngest. So we prefer the oldest.

We do. And as I said, her closeness with her dad seems to stem from both them grappling with these disabilities. But it also seems to be, because Frieda seems to defy all conventions when it comes to gender, she acted completely differently from her sisters with a propensity to dress like a boy quite a lot of the time.

She was really also into sports, albeit for medical reasons, which I'll get into in just a minute. How does that work? She's prescribed sport.

Really? Yeah. I explained it in a second, but also I think that for her [00:17:00] dad, Frida was like the sun that he just didn't have. There's a really famous family portrait of them all together.

The girls are all dressed in their Sunday best sitting, just like ladies. But then there's Frida and her dad both wearing the slickest sharper suits. She's got a hair slicked back with thick Bri cream. She's sporting that very prominent thick brow, which adds this really androgynous street to her look, which she really is able to pull off.

But she's playing with this gender expression and it's something that she does throughout her entire life where she will play with her identity essentially.

Adam Cox: I wonder how common it was to be genderless around that period.

Kyle Risi: Oh, not very at all. Her mother is a staunch Catholic, right? She expects her daughters to live by these very strict gender rules that were in place at the time.

And I think because her dad encouraged it, there wasn't really much that Matilda could really do about it to direct Frida kind of down that more conventional path. He's just like, yeah, bitch, you do you And Frida's yeah, Bri Cream it's not really much that her mom could do.

matilda was primarily of indigenous Mexican and Spanish [00:18:00] descent. Those two heritages are something that Frida really explores and cherishes throughout her life. She's all about expression. Okay. Which is fitting for an artist. Yeah. Essentially.

And even though she comes from a relatively stable middle class family, her parents definitely have their problems.

RDA talks about how her mother would often say that she didn't love her father and this all seems to stem from the fact that she never stops loving her previous partner, who apparently she witnessed committing suicide through an overdose.

Adam Cox: Oh, wow.

Kyle Risi: Frieda says Matilda only married her father because he reminded her of their previous boyfriend, which is really sad for both her dad and her mom.

Adam Cox: and also, yeah, for his mom to, I don't know, do that.

Kyle Risi: But in 1910. Frida is just three years old across the country. The Mexican revolution kicks off and it rages on for an entire decade, 10 years, It's estimated that a million people are killed, and it all begins as a revolt against a 30 5-year-old dictatorship of the then president.

[00:19:00] People were angry that the government favored the wealthy elites like landowners and industrialists, while ignoring the rights of the lower classes. Mm-hmm. Frida talks about how very often gunfire would erupt outside her house, and she remembers, her mother just bundling them all into the small room.

So it was a very terrifying kind of formative experience for her. But she says that one time a bunch of these men had jumped over their garden wall at the time Matilda was home alone with a girl. So she does the only thing that she knew to do, and that was to play hosts to them.

She's like, come in, come in, um, make yourself at home, and then she'll go off to the kitchen. She'll cook 'em a meal. only for it to be laced with poison.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say, is she gonna do that? But that's such a. I, yeah, you can't really fight back, I guess. No. Especially they've got guns.

You're like, yeah, sure. Stay for a cup of tea, or, I don't know. Some Mexican snacks have a burrito that's probably not Mexican. To be

Kyle Risi: fair, if you just gave me a burrito with jalapenos in it, that would, that's essentially poison to me. Yeah.

Adam Cox: And so she's willing to kill [00:20:00] these men. Would they drop dead there and then, or they go off?

Kyle Risi: Oh, I have no idea. I think maybe she just made them sick so they wouldn't be able to attack her. I don't know. And the kids would be fine. But the point is she's a total badass, and she's leaning into the strengths that she has basically as a protector of her family in the absence of their father.

A bad cook. Bad cook, yeah. So the war ends up being really hard in the family, mainly because their dad's primary income was taking portraits of governments, officials. But of course, when the war breaks out, nobody's requesting portraits, so they have a real tough time, like money really runs out for them.

In the end, the revolution ends up significantly changing Mexican culture. Like before 1910, Mexican identity was largely fragmented and heavily influenced by European, especially Spanish colonial legacies, meaning that the indigenous and rural communities were mostly just marginalized.

But by the end of the war, all of this started to merge into this unified, single diverse Mexican identity, which is how we recognize today.

Of course, there's still loads of [00:21:00] facets to it, but everything is more equal rather than being heavily influenced by European kind of colonial powers.

or And Adam, this is a huge deal. So much so that Frida started selling people that she was born in 1910 instead of 1907, making her three years older than she actually was.

But this meant now that she had more of a connection to this really pivotal moment in Mexican history which gives you a sense of just how important the revolution was from a cultural standpoint.

Adam Cox: I guess were there other people that did this?

Kyle Risi: Guess so. I think anyone wanted to be connected to it. Who knows?

Adam Cox: And people are always gonna opt for being younger than they are older. Exactly.

Kyle Risi: Proving how significant this moment was.

So when Frieda is six years old, she contracts polio, so it's not great.

She does recover, but it leaves her right leg way thinner than the other. she's mercilessly bullied for it. People call her peg leg.

Adam Cox: I imagine polio back then was pretty common. Yeah. Quite common back then, but then to survive it, that's still a big feat, [00:22:00] right?

Kyle Risi: It really messes you up. I used to know a friend of mine, their aunt had polio. She was completely wheelchair bound.

Adam Cox: So did they have wheelchairs or what, you know, did she walk on a crutch? Well, how did she recover? She seemed to

Kyle Risi: have a mild case of it. Mm-hmm. So she does recover. Yes. Her leg is damaged, but she can still walk. She can get around. Mm-hmm.

But the fact that she had this skinnier, weaker leg is partly the reason why she becomes so known for wearing those really long toan and kind of style dresses, which reach all the way to the ground is basically just to cover up a gamy leg. Ah, okay.

But it isn't accurate to say that it was just about that she's deeply proud of her heritage and her identity. But these dresses are not typical fashion choices, especially among like middle class, young urban women. So wearing them for her is this deliberate act that comes out of this cultural pride and rebellion that she has. She's really staunch and expressing her identity. Mm-hmm. But conveniently, it covers up the gammy leg.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's just a perk.

Kyle Risi: It's a perk. [00:23:00] Exactly. But the point is, she's this middle class woman who lives in this urban environment and she's walking down the street dressed in this traditional dress. So people are just like, what the fuck? Mm. As a result of a polio, her parents end up spoiling the pants over her, which is how she learns that she is their favorite.

But I do get the feeling that maybe she's conflating this with pity. I think her parents felt sorry for her. So she's basically a pity child.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I was just wondering is it favoritism or is it they just wanna I dunno, cheer her up or support

Kyle Risi: her.

Yeah, don't be down at the dubs. I don't know. She's a, basically a pity child, but still considering everything that she's been through, I would do the same. So why not?

Adam Cox: But she sounds like she's got a supporting family and

Kyle Risi: Yeah, to a degree, yes. Largely so. And so to help with strengthening her weakened gamy leg, doctors suggest that she take up exercise to build up the muscles.

So her dad starts encouraging her to take up football, swimming for a time. Adam, she gets really into wrestling. Wrestling like nacho style.

Adam Cox: So do we see, is there any portraits of her, like a leotard?

Kyle Risi: [00:24:00] No, but it's very much on the record that she was into wrestling. And it's 'cause of this type of kind of strenuous sport, would help strengthen the muscles in her legs. Uh,

Adam Cox: And this is why she's prescribed sport. She's prescribed

Kyle Risi: sports.

Adam Cox: Well, that makes more sense. I always remember my mom had a to-do list and it was normal things, clean the oven, do some washing. But one of the things on her to-do list was exercise. Adam,

Kyle Risi: what? Manual exercise?

Adam Cox: I, I dunno. But apparently I needed exercise. I needed taken for a walk or whatever.

Kyle Risi: Oh, okay. I had this vision of your mom putting you on your back on the sofa and just grabbing your legs and doing like the, the bicycle.

Adam Cox: No, I dunno. Maybe I was, I dunno. I was a slightly chubby Asian looking child. So maybe you

Kyle Risi: did really look a, you look like knickknack.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So yeah, that was, I made mom's to-do list, so it was a slight concern.

Kyle Risi: Well here in the uk what you tend to find when you have like little pockets of Chinese students in your school, they all tend to gravitate towards each other. They all kind of stick within that cultural kind of bubble. And because you look Chinese as a child, they basically [00:25:00] adopted you into their fold.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I would go around my Chinese friend's house and I'd sit there and have dinner. It's just, yeah, it was, it's great. And

Kyle Risi: it all stopped when their mother found out that you were Chinese? Yes. Is that true? No. No. So hang on a minute. Something not right here. Yeah. You're too white for this family. What's your two times stable? And you'd be like, ah, I dunno. Yeah. And you're like, get outta here. Exactly. Show no doctor material. Yeah, that was it.

Because obviously she's doing all the sport, she again, ends up bonding really strongly with her dad.

He begins seeing this kinda really fierce, defiant spirit within her, and this actually ends up deciding Frida's entire trajectory differently from her sisters because in 1922 he enrolls her in one of Mexico's most prestigious schools, while the other daughters just end up going to regular school like jumps.

Adam Cox: Or is it because it's just, better for her and her abilities?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, well he was the one nurturing her and [00:26:00] therefore he saw her potential and then he's run with it. But if he had given his other kids that same attention, they could have also demonstrated their potential and he would've enrolled them in the same school.

Adam Cox: Sure. Yeah, I guess so. But maybe just could be bothered to learn their names.

Kyle Risi: He did ship three of them off to a convent, so.

Adam Cox: Exactly. Wow. I've got one. I don't need you.

Kyle Risi: No, the school only just started allowing girls to enroll anyway, and so she was one of the first to do so, and Adam at school ashamed to say it. She's a massive hoe. Is she?

She's completely surrounded by these boys who don't have regular access to girls. And so she's a clear favorite. unlike the other girls, she's not afraid of boys, right? She's reading into sports. She knows how to talk to them. She dresses like them on occasion at this point as well.

Adam Cox: She'll wrestle with them.

Kyle Risi: She will wrestle with you. And so more than the other girls, she was able to connect with these boys way more. And so she literally has the pick of the crop.

Adam Cox: Okay, go Frida.

Kyle Risi: I read out of the 2000 students at that school, she [00:27:00] was just one of 35 girls. Wow. Intense. And at school, she was famously outspoken and rebellious teacher said She had this confidence and bravery about everything she did. But this is basically a nice way of saying that she was a complete and utter nightmare because she finds her people amongst the bad kids of the school who call themselves the Los Chacha.

Is probably wildly incorrect. But I tried to look up what the word actually meant. And the closest I could find was slang for the word Fannie. So, or some part of Fanny.

Adam Cox: So the fannies,

Kyle Risi: I no idea, I dunno if they were just girls in this group, or boys and girls, I got the sense there were mostly boys and her.

But yeah, as a gay man, I have very little experience in that domain. So honestly, I can't tell you what part of the vagina, platinum, gay, but basically if Weda was an nor girl. She was often caught pulling pranks and teachers and students constantly back chatting, always in detention.

And I like that about her. But honestly, despite her bad behavior, she's academically gifted at this point. [00:28:00] She has ambitions to become a doctor. Which is why you'll often see body parts, hearts, uterus, even medical instruments inside. A lot of her work.

The next key piece of a story that helps her define the trajectory of her life starts when the school hires Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, to paint a mural in the school's auditorium.

Okay?

At the time, he was pretty much her father's age, so 20 years older than she's, he's verging on 40 years old. diego Rivera studied art at the Mexican Academy. After this, he headed off to Europe where he gets swept up in the social circles of some of the most prominent artists of the day.

I'm talking like Pablo Mcso.

In Europe. He starts experimenting with all sorts of artistic styles. The revolution really has an influence on him, and so his work starts to reflect this. It features a lot of communist and Marxist kind of themes and so he decides that this is what his work will entail.

But the issue is that he's [00:29:00] lacking a medium. He wasn't sure if he wanted to be a landscape painter or specialize in portraiture or sculpture, but after a quick trip to Italy, he becomes fascinated by the frescoes and the murals that he sees in Italy, and he decides that this is going to be his specialism, which is bold and arrogant at the same time, because painting frescoes is extremely time sensitive.

Do you know much about what a fresco is? That is the, the paintings on the ceilings, right? So like the cyan chapel? Yeah, those are frescoes yeah. So the point is that when you paint a fresco. You have to paint while the plaster is still wet. And so if you don't do it really quickly, it'll dry and then you'll have to rip it off to then kind of more plaster on there to finish that section of painting.

Adam Cox: That seems like a lot of work.

Kyle Risi: You also need to be skilled enough to know how the plaster will dry, because as it dries, it starts to shrink in different directions. And if you don't know what you're doing when it dries, it'll look like shit.

Adam Cox: Ah. So yeah, that explains some of the faces I might have seen on some of these things.

Kyle Risi: If you [00:30:00] know what you're doing, then it won't be the case.

Adam Cox: And does he know what he's doing?

Kyle Risi: He gives it a crack and he is amazing at it. And so he gains some more experience. And then when he is done, he decides to head back to Mexico and straight away he secures a series of commissions to paint a bunch of public murals all over the city.

Adam Cox: I see.

Kyle Risi: And Adam, these are massive, like the one that he paints at free to school covers over a thousand feet. That is huge. So 99% of the time he is up on scaffolding really high up.

Adam Cox: And that's gotta hurt. 'cause you are like you, you know, you gotta probably crook your neck, you've gotta paint with your mm-hmm.

Arm up. You're gonna get like pins and needles And you've gotta make that thing look good.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Before it dries.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And this is

Kyle Risi: Mexican sun we're talking about.

Adam Cox: That's gonna dry real quick.

Kyle Risi: As well as his muriels being massive. I feel sorry for the scaffolding. 'cause Diego himself is absolutely massive. He's almost 300 pounds.

Adam Cox: Just a second. Are you saying Muriels or Murs? Murs. You've been saying reels. Reels. I think someone's corrected you before this. We have,

Kyle Risi: we've the, [00:31:00] when we did the, the hidden apartment episode Yeah. With, uh, Michael Townsend, it was like, yeah, that's wrong. I sorted over the difference.

Adam Cox: Meel, Merl, whatever. I'm gonna

Kyle Risi: say, whatever comes naturally to me at the time, MES

Adam Cox: I think the audience will probably gather what you're trying to say.

Kyle Risi: But my point is that Diego himself, absolutely massive guy. He's 300 pounds, not muscular. He's just huge. He's gristle and all, but despite this, he is an absolute fuck machine. Oh. Apart from quickly becoming one of the most famous and celebrated artists in Mexico, he's also very well known for his sexing with many, many women.

Adam Cox: Wow. Sounds a stud.

Kyle Risi: By the time he's commissioned to paint a Frida's school, he's already been married a couple times, and even then he can't keep in his pants. Apparently he gets caught having an affair.

His wife obviously kicks him out. He's desperate for her to forgive him. So he persuades a doctor to write him a note saying that he was physically incapable of being faithful. He is like, see, the [00:32:00] doctor says it's a medical condition. You have to take me back. Oh, okay. Then sweetie, come on inside. Yeah. So Diego's at Frida school in 1922, hired to paint this mural.

Mm-hmm. Uh, I read that while he worked. Actually, he always had to carry a epistle on him at all times because he just keeps getting attacked by various conservative, like factions in the country. Remember he's painting a lot of these murals out in public spaces, like political tensions after the revolution are still pretty high.

And so people who see him painting his murals, if they're on the wrong side of politics, they get really upset by what he's painting. And so they'll literally just attack him. So he had to protect himself in some way.

Adam Cox: I reckon it was just a bunch of husbands from all the wives that he screwed. Do you think?

Yeah.

Kyle Risi: What he doesn't realize is that the person he needs to watch out the most for was Frida Carlo herself.

What's she gonna do?

Frida sees him in real life for the very first time. Apparently she tells her friend that is gonna be the man that I'm gonna marry him one day. Oh wow. Bear in mind [00:33:00] she's 15 at this point. He is 300 pounds. He looks like a literal ogre and he's almost 40 years old.

I don't know if this is just part of the law that's told around the story kind of to create the, I dunno the intrigue of the story. Like, Oh, she saw her destiny before it even happened, sort of thing. so I don't know if this is just part of the law told around the story or if this is actually what she said.

Adam Cox: But then is it because she knows he's like this artist? Yes. And therefore there's this peel, there's this romanticism. He's an older guy. He's painting a ceiling.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. I think it's more about who he is rather than what's in his pants, in his body. Look up a picture of him.

Adam Cox: Oh, I see. I was a 15-year-old girl, I don't know if he would be the man for me.

Kyle Risi: He's not, he's not a pan dropper, is he?

Adam Cox: No, but clearly women around town, were happy to drop their panties.

Kyle Risi: And I think it's because of who he was.

Adam Cox: Maybe people were asking him to paint them like a French girl.

Kyle Risi: Gosh, I, no, I would [00:34:00] not want him leering over me, my supple breasts or a lay on the sofa. No. Thank you.

We'll see this quite often throughout her life, is that she does seem to form these obsessions with people later in life. I think the attraction is more to do with what he does rather than any physical attraction. But that's just my assumption.

So while painting this mural, he is actually in the middle of having an affair with one of his models.

She routinely shows up and they are literally banging right there in the auditorium where kids can literally walk in at any time. No shame. Wow. One day he's mid affair, he suddenly hears a voice echoed through the auditorium, laughingly saying, Diego, here comes Lupe.

Lupe is obviously his wife. He spins around cigar half falling out of his mouth. There's no one there. His mistress kind of sort of bolts out the way he composes himself. And then in walks Lupe with his, uh, packed lunch. He's forgotten his lunch the other day. And so Frieda has saved the day, and Diego said that in the following days, the same voice would just continue to [00:35:00] taunt him.

In his autobiography, he says, he would suddenly hear this voice shouting on God, Diego, the whore is coming, and the whore being obviously is mistress, but she wasn't coming. He'd turn around, there'd be no one there, but that's just RDA messing with him. Oh, then one day Freda walks into the auditorium. She tells him that she's going to sit and just watch him paint, and he's like, okay, weird girl, but okay.

And then she just sits there and she watches him for literally hours.

Diego writes that after a few hours, his wife Lupe comes in just to see this random girl sitting there watching him work. She's already suspicious that he's having an affair. So she starts accusing Frieda of sleeping with her husband, which is insane.

She's 15 and apparently Frieda just completely ignores her. Lupe eventually says, look at this girl. Smaller. She is. She does not fear at all strong women like me. I really like her. And she just walks

Adam Cox: up.

Kyle Risi: It's just really

Adam Cox: random. It does sound like his wife is just checking [00:36:00] up on him all the time. Oh, you've forgotten your packed lunch. Which I deliberately made you forget so I could come in and check on you.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, exactly. So it is nice that she doesn't see Frieda as a threat in the end.

Adam Cox: She should.

Kyle Risi: So After hours of watching him paint in silence, Frieda gets up, she says goodnight, and she walks out and Diego is just left there standing thinking fucking weirdo man,

Adam Cox: I've got the ceiling to paint.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. O me and Adam. That is actually the last time that he will see her for like several years. He goes on with his life. She does the same until three years later.

On the 17th of September, 1925. When Frieda is 18 years old, her and her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez are on the way from school. When they are involved. In a horrific accident, basically the wooden tram that they're riding in collides with another moving tram. This is so devastating that it completely changes Frida's entire life.

What happens?

Well, the thing is that What's wild about this accident is that it could so easily been avoided. Before they caught the tram. Frieda had realized that she had lost a [00:37:00] tiny umbrella that she was carrying. They go looking for it. and In the end they end up catching this later tram.

While they're traveling, the tram is sideswiped by another. Alejandro says that the carriage literally bursts into a thousand pieces. By some miracle, he walks away completely unscathed.

But Frieda, she breaks her spinal column, she breaks her collarbone, she breaks several ribs, she fractures her pelvis she even gets 11 fractures in her right leg, which is also dislocated. And also her foot is crushed in the process.

Adam Cox: Geez.

Kyle Risi: Her shoulder is torn out of its sockets. What's wild is that because of the adrenaline rush that she felt in that moment? She's completely unaware that she's even injured at this moment in time.

But Adam is not even the worst of it. After the crash, Frida goes to move but realizes that she physically cannot, and that's because an iron handrail has pierced through her abdomen, through her uterus and has come out the other side.

Oh my God. She doesn't feel it. I [00:38:00] mean,

Adam Cox: I dunno, like, yeah, I, I. I would've thought you would've spot something sticking half you.

Bloody hell. This poor woman, apparently the force of the collision had ripped all of her clothes completely off of her body.

Kyle Risi: So she's basically just naked in the street. This cart has exploded into a thousand pieces. There's blood everywhere. She's literally a broken mess. Even more surreal is that there was a house painter on that tram he was carrying a packet of powdered gold paint, which during the crash completely dusts her so

she's just this broken bleeding mess covered in gold paint.

Adam Cox: She's like a piece of art. What as it's,

Kyle Risi: that's exactly the point. Like if you know Frieda's work, people often say the style is quite surrealist. Mm-hmm. Those kind of dreamlike paintings like Salvador Dali. This moment feels like a living version of that.

The blood, the injuries, the gore, the gold. It's very strange. It's like surreal beauty born out of this horrific incident. It's really like reading a description of

performance arts.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So I mean, with this amount of [00:39:00] injuries,

I imagine most people would struggle to survive

back then.

Mm-hmm. She does. But I'm guessing she's left with a lot of like long-term problems.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. She's gravely injured, yet she does survive, but she's left in excruciating pain for the rest of her life. She spends three months completely bedridden, and her first doctors don't think that she'll ever walk again.

Miraculously she does.

And throughout the rest of her life, she will go through something like 30 something surgeries, mostly desperate attempts to try and just ease the pain that she's in. But the thing is though, they're all experimental. Mm-hmm. So every time she completes an operation, it often leaves her in worse pain than she was before the operation. It's brutal.

Adam Cox: And I guess the painkillers back then, maybe just, you know, that she just didn't have anything.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. While she's recovering, she's just stuck in bed. She has nothing to do. And so

she starts painting.

Her mother makes this makeshift easel that allows her to kind of paint lying down, but she has nothing to paint, she can't look out the [00:40:00] window. She can't stare at a bowl of fruit. And so her father fixes a mirror to the canopy of a bed. And so. She paints herself.

Adam Cox: Ah. And this is why she paints so many self-portraits.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. Yeah. She says, I paint myself because I'm alone and I'm the best subject I know. Isn't That's heartbreaking.

Adam Cox: Yeah. What was our skills like on the very first one to the last one? Ah,

Kyle Risi: well, her first official portrait is something called self portrait in velvet dress, which is exactly what it is.

And considering this is one of the earliest first attempts, it's pretty damn good. Like she paints herself as this demure slender figure, which she was. And of course, sporting that very iconic unibrow.

And actually this painting was painted for her boyfriend Alejandro, in an attempt to wind him back after the accident.

Adam Cox: Oh, so he dumped her.

Kyle Risi: Well, after the accident, he was actually incredibly supportive. He visited every single day. He sat with her for hours, but then a rumor started circulating that she had actually cheated on him before the [00:41:00] accident. And it's probably true. So he then just broke up with her when he received the painting he apparently just sent it back unopened and the next thing she heard is that he had gone off to Europe and she's just left heartbroken.

Ah, awful. Yeah. Eventually she does recover. She keeps painting, but she's not really sure if she's any good, despite obviously her parents telling her again and again that she was, and again, it's probably pity, so she probably recognizes that.

Adam Cox: So she doesn't know who to believe. It's like, oh, we would put that one on the fridge, darling. But, um, yeah.

Kyle Risi: Pardon coming darling.

Ah, we've all been there. But she then remembers the artist Diego that she used to taunt at the school.

And so she goes looking for him and at the time he's painting some fresco at the side of some building somewhere, and she finds him, he's up high on some scaffold and he hears a girl shouting up at him to come down San Diego. I have something important [00:42:00] to discuss with you. So he's thinking, who the hell is this? Do I need my pistol? In his book, he says, beneath me stood a girl about 18. She had a fine nervous body top with a delicate face. Her hair was long, dark and thick. Her eyebrows met above her nose.

This is why he needed the word for un brow. He could have saved himself like five words. He goes on, he says, they seemed like the wings of a blackbird. They're black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.

So he is really into the uni brow.

Adam Cox: Wow. I guess when he last saw her, she didn't have a,

Kyle Risi: oh, he has no idea. This is her.

Adam Cox: Oh yeah. So yeah. Has no idea. Yeah. But when? Three years ago? Mm-hmm. Did she have the uni brow? Oh yeah. Probably. Or did like you just grow it Adam, I don't know, like puberty. You mature a little bit and it just like it sets in, right?

Kyle Risi: Sweetie, you wait till your unibrow comes in. Where is it gonna allow for you? It's not a puberty thing. I don't know.

So he climbs down. Fred just says, I didn't come here for fun.

Adam Cox: I came for the brow.

Kyle Risi: He climbs [00:43:00] down. Frieda says, I didn't come here for fun. I have to work to earn my livelihood. I've done some paintings and I want you to look at them professionally. I want an absolute straightforward opinion because I cannot afford to go on just to appease my vanity.

Basically. Do my parents epi me or am I actually good?

Adam Cox: Yeah, it's like, um, in English, in Spanish, please.

Kyle Risi: She says, I want you to tell me whether you think I can become good enough as an artist to make it worth my while to continue. I brought three paintings with me. I want you to have a look at them.

So Diego goes like, she's intense. Yeah.

He examines the pieces and says, the canvases revealed this unusual kind of energy of expression, the precise kind of delineation of character and true severity.

I have no idea what that means, but that's what he says. And then he tells her that, listen, they're really good, but she's like, hell no. She says, I've not come looking for compliments. I want the criticism of a serious man. I'm not an art lover nor an amateur. I simply am a girl who must work for a living, [00:44:00] and he's like, bitch, they're good. Just calm down.

Adam Cox: I guess she just wants to be critiqued. Right? And if he's maybe being a bit like, oh, this is amazing, then yeah, if she doesn't believe it, she doesn't believe her own ability just yet.

Kyle Risi: No, exactly. It's like an imposter syndrome that she's going through. I get it. So he is like, no, no, I'm deeply impressed. But now it's not just her work that he likes. He really likes the spunky side of her that he's seeing. So he looks at them in the eye and he says, in my opinion, no matter how difficult it's for you, you must continue to paint.

So she says, will you come to my house and see the rest of my paintings? And so he agrees.

That's a pickup line.

She tells him her name and that's when he realizes who she is. She's the girl that's been taunting him all those years earlier.

Adam Cox: You're the creepy girl.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. In his autobiography, he says, I was about to say you are the girl from the auditorium. But before I could say anything, she puts her hand over my mouth and says, yes. So what? I'm the girl from the auditorium, but that has absolutely nothing to do with now [00:45:00] will you still come to my house on Sunday?

And he says he was so afraid that if he showed any excitement that she might not let him come at all. So he just said yes. So he's dead keen.

Adam Cox: okay. That's interesting. She's very, confident, isn't she? Yeah.

Kyle Risi: You have to hand it to her, like even after everything she's been through to have the guts to walk up to one of the most famous artists in the world and say, am I good?

Adam Cox: Yeah, that's

Kyle Risi: bold.

Adam Cox: And I'm not saying if you have these accidents, you'd be more like jam or whatever. Mm-hmm. But it doesn't sway her. It doesn't. No. She hasn't really changed. She's still this headstrong woman that will get in the wrestling ring with you and throw a couple of punches. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Oh, by the way, just remind you, she's 18 at this point. He's 40. Okay, he's 300 pounds so that Sunday, Diego goes to her house, he sees her paintings, blah, blah, blah. They end up kissing, and from there they start dating. They date for four years, much to the horror of her mother who says that the pairing is like the elephant and the dove.

Oh, which is what she actually names one of her [00:46:00] paintings. She can't call her daughter the elephant. No, it's him And then eventually in 1929, they get married By 19 31, 2 years into their marriage, Fredda paints their wedding portrait. It's just simply titled Frieda and Diego Rivera.

And this really sort of underpins everything we know about their relationship up until this moment. Because Adam, it is very tumultuous at best.

First off, the portrait really shows that contrast between their different sizes, right? He is a massive hunker spunk, and she's this tiny little woman. And for an official wedding portrait, they do not look in love at all. There's no embrace.

She's just holding his hand almost like a child holds a parent's hand. Can I see it? Sure.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I'm just taking a look at, that portrait now, and they don't look like they're a couple.

Kyle Risi: No. They just, they do look like father and daughter.

Adam Cox: Yeah. She, she looks unhappy, but that could be the unibrow and he looks slightly mischievous, a bit like on what I'm doing here.

[00:47:00] Interesting.

Kyle Risi: And the thing is though, at this point, he's already having an affair with a huge tennis champion at the time called Helen Wills.

Adam Cox: So he's already doing it behind her back.

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: And Frieda knows this too, and it's partly because a, she's not a fucking idiot, but also because he literally paints Helen Wills nude body into a mural that he is doing in San Francisco.

Adam Cox: And she's like, how do you know her nipples look like that? Yeah, exactly. I've

Kyle Risi: checked in those exact right around Niles.

But again, this makes me question whether or not for Freeda, her attraction to him is more about who he was as a public figure rather than any feelings of lustful love.

Like I find it difficult to understand what she saw in him being 20 years older than her , but also 300 pounds. And also not the best looking guy.

Adam Cox: Was it though? Like, you know, looks are one thing there. Surface deep. Yeah. You know, she loved him for his ability and maybe the way, you know, they could have had great conversation, all this sort of stuff.

So yeah, I think we have to look past, just looks, yes. I think it's perhaps, um, [00:48:00] unconventional Yes. For a 18-year-old or a very young woman to go for someone like this. Sure. But clearly there's something much deeper even though he is obviously a bit of a cheating rag.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. Adam. 100%. That's a really nice way of describing it because she 100% definitely loves him.

But I don't think it is love in the way that we recognize it. And even saying that maybe she did love him and that it just eventually settled into the love that they've got now. I don't think that's true. 'cause I get the sense that even from the very beginning it was more about his ability and, and the connection that they had potentially.

Adam Cox: But also he's having it off with so many different women that clearly he has something that appeals, even if it's just having an affair or lust. It's wild. Yeah. So we can't see it. Maybe the paintings didn't capture his best light. Maybe the photos didn't either. But yeah, maybe he's just got this charisma that just makes you wanna drop your pants.

He must have.

Kyle Risi: He has to. It can be the only thing that it is, but she does more or less just accept that he's just gonna sleep around. Another woman from the, she says diego is not anybody's [00:49:00] husband and never will be, but he is a great comrade.

Her saying Comrad is basically the communist in her.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It's not very affectionate is it? No. Quite cold.

Kyle Risi: Even Diego convinces her that his needs to sleep with other women is just another necessary bodily function like urinating.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I'm sure he got out his doctor's note and said look, I have to do it. It's how I get my, art ability.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. It's his long hair like Samsung. But it is very clear that they do have a very deep respect for each other as artists.

Diego talks about one time tearing up with pride after Picasso once admired the way their free had painted the eyes in one of her pieces. So he is like, yeah, that's, that's my girl. So it's nice that they support each other in this way.

Mm-hmm. Do you know what I mean?

Now we can't talk about Frida and Diego without mentioning their politics. Because they are both deeply committed communists very active in the Communist party. Like I said, his work features tons of communist iconography, like sickles workers rising up against authoritarian governments.

He is also super celebrated as a [00:50:00] communist, but. In 1927, Diego is kicked out of the Communist Party in Mexico, and I did try to find out some sources as to why. The reason it keeps cropping up more than anything else is that he seems to openly sympathize with a guy called Leon Trotsky. Have you heard of him before?

No. He's basically Stalin's left wing opposition. Okay. In particular, he opposes Stalin's policy on isolationism. Basically wants Russia to be more cooperative with the rest of the world rather than shutting themselves out back in Mexico. This really pisses off the rest of the Communist party.

But the second reason is that despite being a communist, Diego is actively accepting commissions from capitalist clients, particularly capitalist United States clients, which completely contradicts the communist ideology. Essentially, he's sleeping with the enemy and then getting paid for it.

Adam Cox: I see.

Kyle Risi: So eventually the party kicked both him and Frieda out for essentially being too involved in capitalism.

[00:51:00] It doesn't help the fact that both of them are complete and utter gob. They're really outspoken, really aggressive in their views, both perfectly happy to tell anyone to just go stuff themselves if they disagree with their views or their stances on anything.

And so in the end, Adam, they just had to go

Adam Cox: And so from that, they're just like shunned from the party. Mm-hmm. Can't get, not involved with that anymore. That's it. Yeah. Do they paint like a few painting?

Kyle Risi: Well, this is the thing though. He doesn't leave commun, he's still a communist at heart and he always will be.

By the 1930s, Diego is still being commissioned to paint more and more murals for these capitalist clients in America. So it just makes sense for Frida and for him to just relocate to essentially capitalize on this, which is ironic since they're both communists.

When there Diego is commissioned by Henry Ford to create a mural celebrating American industrialism, they wanted him to paint a mural depicting American workers, building factories, railroads, cars, as a way to [00:52:00] glorify American industrial power and to portray workers at its noble center.

Mm-hmm. Essentially. Mm-hmm.

That was the brief, and they pay him handsomely for it. But Diego sees us as an opportunity to subtly critique the capitalist system that he was taking money from. And it's because he believed they were exploiting workers just like Mexicans in Mexico were exploited for decades and decades and decades before the revolution.

So he starts to strategically hide all sorts of communist imagery within these murals that he's making in America. He's hoping that the capitalist bosses won't notice these iconographies in these paintings. But for the workers that see him every day, he's hoping that it'll quietly spark this revolutionary consciousness within them and inspire them to rise up against the capitalist machine.

Adam Cox: So it's kind of like subliminal messaging within his paintings then.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. He's like a Trojan horse, He does brilliantly, like the bosses like Henry Ford, they do not notice, but honestly need to do the workers.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say, like, do they even know what it represents and all [00:53:00] this sort of stuff?

Kyle Risi: Probably not. I it's too subtle for anyone to really notice. Yeah, because he rinses this and he repeats this dozens and dozens of times.

Adam Cox: Does he get pissed? It's like, why is there no revolution yet? Have they not seen my mural?

Kyle Risi: Exactly. I think he gets to the point where he's like, I need to be a little bit more obvious. These, these Americans are stupid. So, like I said, he rinses this, the bosses, they get their grand murals. He leaves behind iconography that he hopes to spark the revolution.

He moves on to the next fat cat, all with Frida in to, they end up traveling basically all over the United States. And in the process, his fame, Adam climbs to our whole new level. He's famous enough to be invited to the newly open Museum of Modern Art, a MoMA,

To do a retrospective of his work. That is huge.

Off the back of this, he's then commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a mural titled Man of the Crossroads on the RCA building at the Rockefeller Center. Again, same or brief, glorify industrialism. [00:54:00] Celebrate the worker, right?

Mm-hmm. Diego does his usual thing. He subtly, he thinks, embed symbolic communist imagery into this mural, but this time he goes as far as including an actual portrait of Lenin in his mural. Like there's no mistaking that as Lenin.

Adam Cox: And so are they. A bit like, um, why have you, why have you painted Lenn in our mural?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Nelson Rockefeller's horrified. He is like, hang on, is that fucking Len? Yeah. And Diego doesn't even deny it. So Nelson gives him an ultimatum, either remove the portrait of Lennon or the commission is pulled altogether.

And so Diego refuses, he says, to do so, would compromise his artistic integrity. And so true to his word, Nelson Rockefeller, they literally paints over the entire mural. but he still gets paid like in full. So it's a win. Like he got paid and didn't have to finish the job.

Adam Cox: Brilliant. But then he's not gonna get recommended again.

Kyle Risi: Possibly it's going to, squash his reputation. And I think this is one of the reasons that they come back to [00:55:00] Mexico.

Meanwhile, Frieda is still very much living in his shadow at the time. She's mostly socializing, being introduced as Diego's wife. She's painting, but she's still very much developing her artistic style.

She's experimented with different compositions and mediums, but in America, her health issues are persistent. Adam, she undergoes a few more of those surgeries that she kind of collects up across her life, mostly for her back pain. But she's also deeply, deeply homesick. Like her cultural heritage is such a massive part of who she is.

So not being in the mix of her Mexican identity starts to really shine through her work Probably the most notable of these is another self portrait that she does. She's basically wearing this very American pink dress. She's standing in front of the skyline of factories and smoke bluing up through the chimneys.

You can see an American flag in the background. You see loads of machinery representing American industrialism. But in the foreground, scattered across the floor are all these Mexican iconographies that are just [00:56:00] scattered around the ground. discarded, like rubble.

Mm-hmm. And you just see her standing there arms crossed with holding this tiny little, um, Mexican flag. It's meant to kind of signify her losing touch with her Mexican heritage the longer that she's staying in the United States.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It seems like there's a lot of meaning behind her paintings, isn't there?

Kyle Risi: Yeah, for sure. And I think the thing that definitely shines through are those themes of identity and also pain around this time, she also suffers a miscarriage, which brings the devastating realization that she'll likely never have a child of her own.

And as a result, she falls into this real deep, dark depression, which is only amplified by her homesickness.

To deal with this grief,

as she always does, she paints one of the most haunting works that she's ever done. It's called Henry Ford Hospital. It's also known as the flying bed.

And in it, she's basically lying naked on this hospital bed extending out of her body are six red ribbons like umbilical cords. You'll often notice these red ribbons in a lot of her work , and I think they do represent these umbilical cords. They're [00:57:00] connected to her in some way. Right. One of these red ribbons connects to her fetus representing obviously the baby that she's lost.

Mm-hmm. Another connects to an orchid symbolizing her uterus and the ongoing reproductive trauma that she's faced over these years.

Another one connects to a snail, which represents the slow painful miscarriage process that she's just been through, another ribbon links to a pelvic bone as a reminder to that tram accident and the source of all the grief that she's experiencing at the fact that she's unable to have a child of her own.

Wow.

There's also loads of like surgical instruments in this painting as well due to obviously the countless medical procedures that she's had to undergo. During her time in the United States.

And it sounds really surreal. And it is, but these works start helping her define that artistic style and she starts getting nudged towards surrealism.

But here's where she's really special compared to [00:58:00] other surrealists, like Salvador Dali, and that is that these other surrealists, they're deliberately trying to paint Annette style. Mm-hmm.

Frida has no idea what surrealism even is.

When she paints that is how it's coming out.

Not deliberately, it's just how it is.

She's not trying to be something, she is that something?

And I think that's what makes her quite amazing.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It's her emotion, how she's feeling. All these things going on in her head, her body, her history. Yeah. That's what she's putting onto these canvases.

Mm-hmm. Not, I think this looks cool or abstract

that's interesting actually.

I didn't realize

that was, one, perhaps a lot of her work and two,

how she is different to perhaps some of these other artists.

Yeah.

Kyle Risi: But Adam, the trauma keeps coming because while she's in the States, her mother dies. And again, it's just more depression for her. She decides to try and honor a mother by painting a painting called My Birth. Mm-hmm. It's exactly that you see her mother lying on a bed. She has like a sheet draped over her, just her face. the [00:59:00] kind of composition is shown from a gynecological point of view.

So you see directly between her mother's legs and there's frieda's head emerging from her mother's vagina or uterus.

Wow.

And believe it or not, this painting is actually one of the very few paintings of Frida Carlo in this world that is owned privately and is owned by Madonna. Is it? Yeah. Most of the photos that you find online when you Google this are of Madonna, posing really proudly next to it.

And it's just like hanging like in a dressing room somewhere in their house. What do you think? First impressions?

Adam Cox: Wow, that is, I mean, if you, I'm just a thought of actually having that hanging up on our wall and then having like Christmas dinner and everyone looking at that and go, oh, that's, that's different because it is a grown woman.

With a grown head coming out. I know, I know. It's not, I was expecting, oh, is it gonna be like baby Frieda with a monobrow? Yeah. Um, but no, that's adult Frieda coming out of her mother's vagina.

Kyle Risi: That's the thing. I wasn't sure if Frieda just doesn't [01:00:00] know how to paint the baby. Um, 'cause there's a few portraits of her as a baby where it's adult frieda's head.

Oh really? Yeah. It's really strange.

Adam Cox: Maybe she's like, I've always looked like this. It's so weird. And because the mom is covered by the sheet, like a top off in a haunting

Kyle Risi: way. Like she's dead. Right, exactly. That's what you put over, someone who's died like that.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And even Frida coming out looks almost dead because she, well, her eyes are shut, I think.

And yeah, there's blood around that, which naturally might happen during childbirth, but yeah, that is haunting. What is she saying with this painting?

Kyle Risi: There's quite a lot that she's saying in this photograph.

There's lots of religious iconography in there as well, which kind of connects back to her mother's devout Catholicism, there's a lot going on in that, you could spend hours literally going through what these paintings mean.

Adam Cox: It is. You just think like, I dunno, a lot of artists, okay, they're painting these beautiful landscapes and all this sort of picturesque sort of paintings, but this is. The, her state of mind to think of this, especially at this time as well. Mm-hmm.

Like, I can't imagine anyone else, this would be quite rare to see [01:01:00] this kind of iconography and stuff like that.

Kyle Risi: So eventually Diego and Frieda, they have had enough of the United States. She's too depressed, she's grief stricken. Diego has his tail between his legs after the Rockefeller debacle, and so they go home.

Big mistake, however, because once they get back to Mexico, Diego starts having an affair this time with Frieda's younger sister Christina.

Adam Cox: Wow. And keeping it in the family.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Like she's just had a miscarriage. Her mom is dead. She's at the lowest point of her life. And this shit bag goes and shacks up with her favorite sister,

Adam Cox: a scandal law.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: But don't forget Kyle. Mm-hmm. He does have that note

Kyle Risi: Yes. He can do what he wants.

So of course RDA and Christina, they fall out, especially since Diego refuses to stop seeing Christina. What a dick. Rita eventually has enough and she decides to move out.

She doesn't go very far because she moves next door. Not only that I'm leaving. Oh yeah. To next door See ya. Dinner.

But also the studio is [01:02:00] connected by like an elevator bridge between the two houses. So they can still come and go. But also the separation only lasts like a year before they get back to living together again. But what's weird is that by this point, Frieda is far more independent. She starts sleeping around, herself, which get Frieda Exactly.

Which doesn't end when they finally reunite. And it's not just with men, it's also with women. Like she's openly exploring her bisexuality. She apparently has a relationship with Chavela Vargas, which is a Costa Rican Mexican singer, very famous of the day, apparently. They even lived together for a while, so they could scissor whenever they wanted.

Also, she ends up having an affair with Josephine Barker, a famous African American entertainer that she meets in Paris in 1939, but also she's very close to Georgia O'Keefe. famous for those paintings of flowers that, let's be honest, very suggestive of vaginas.

Adam Cox: So where is she finding all these people? Because it's not like she's just hooking [01:03:00] up with Sally from down the road. She is hooking up with some big people.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. She goes about, she's in these social circles as well. She does know big people. Mm-hmm. And she meets them through there and they're like in awe of her, and she's in awe of them. And they get close and they start like,

Adam Cox: banging, I guess. Um, good. That they're on a level playing field with her husband. Mm-hmm. Good. Yeah. Um, so that's good.

They've got like a mutual understanding. Yes. It's an open marriage. That's fine. And yeah, if she's exploring with other women, good for her.

Kyle Risi: I think to a degree there is resentment towards his cheating. Mm-hmm. He very much loves the fact that she is having relations with other women. He loves it, but I think she does, to a degree, want to hurt him.

Sleep with the women doesn't really hurt him in the way that she hoped it would do. Mm-hmm.

But in 1937, Diego gets word that his hero, Lenin Trotsky, the same man who indirectly got him booted from the Communist party in 1929 because he was sympathetic towards him.

He finds out that he has been exiled from the USSR and is looking for political asylum [01:04:00] somewhere, Trotsky. Like I said, was this key figure in the Russian revolution. He helped establish the first Soviet government under Lenin and the later Stalin, he was also the architect behind the Red Army, leading countless victories against council revolutionaries, et cetera.

But when Stalin takes over from Lenin, Trotsky pushes for Russia to be more open, arguing that better international relations and trade would be better for the country. Warning that a country would be left behind if they decide to stay isolated.

Stalin, of course, does not like this, and so Trotsky is forcibly the country. Diego petitions the Mexican government to Grant Trotsky and his wife asylum, which they eventually do. And so Trotsky and his wife end up living with Frida and Diego.

It's wild. Adam, you've got this titan in communist history, literally living with one of the most beloved artists of the 20th century. Like people do not realize how big it is that you've got Frida Carlo and [01:05:00] Diego Riveras that are the staunch communists that really celebrate and love these huge figures that are responsible, literally millions and billions of people being killed.

Now, one of Frieda's most famous paintings is of her sitting in front of a giant portrait that she's painted of Stalin. Really? Yeah. We have to take into consideration that fact for what we know about who Fred Carlo was.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It's crazy that she's, that much adoration or respect look up to him sort of thing. I guess I know that she's a communist, but then what he did.

That's odd.

Kyle Risi: But it might be early history as well. So a lot of the atrocities that silent carried out hasn't come to light yet.

Adam Cox: Sure.

Kyle Risi: But yeah.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Weird.

Kyle Risi: And so Trotsky is living with them. Diego is over the moon that his literal hero is living under their roof. Frieda, on the other hand, thinks I'm gonna fuck him.

Adam Cox: It feels like some weird comedy set up.

Kyle Risi: So Frieda and Trotsky, they start bonding over political ideas. They start exchanging secret letters that are hidden inside [01:06:00] books. They'll arrange kind of secret meetups often at Frieda's sister's house, which is how Diego finds out about all of this. He's absolutely crushed, but he doesn't say anything. Partly because it's like the pot calling the kettle black.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And you're not gonna argue with Trotsky.

Kyle Risi: No, but also Trotsky is his absolute hero, right? Mm. So she's kinda like giving his wife over to his hero, which is kind of gross in a way.

But Frieda wasn't really trying to hide her from Diego anyway. She's more concerned that Trotsky's wife. Natalia might find out if she does, then it's game over for them.

Adam Cox: And is she staying with them as well? She is. Ah, that's awkward.

Kyle Risi: Now Natalia doesn't speak English. So it's how they're able to keep it a secret from her for so long. Like the three of them would literally be sitting in the kitchen together.

And in English, Frida, Trotsky would basically be just engaging in dirty talk in front of her.

Adam Cox: Wow. And in English as well. Not in like Russian or No

Kyle Risi: in English. And so over time, Natalia starts looking up some of the words that she keeps hearing, like, like reverse cowgirl [01:07:00] and 69.

No, just kidding. Like words like love and kiss. And basically she pieces it together and that's how she finds out that they're having an affair.

Adam Cox: Wow. I mean, it's quite brazen to kind of do that, right?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Mm-hmm. So she gives Trotsky an ultimatum, either end things with Frieda or she'll leave him to Diego's relief. Trotsky chooses Natalia and he ends things with Frieda. Frieda's like, yeah, whatever. I don't give a shit. But she can't resist teasing Diego, telling him how much better of a lover Trotsky was compared to him.

Oh, Frida. And Exactly. And apparently this drives him nuts. Which again, makes me wonder, did she really kind of want to hurt him because he didn't really mind the affairs with certain people, but he really minded the affair with Trotsky.

Adam Cox: It does seem like she's trying to get some kind of revenge over him.

I

Kyle Risi: think so. But just leave, why, just

Adam Cox: don't put up with it. Like if she's, is she earning money through her own work at this point, or is she relying on Diego?

Kyle Risi: I think, oh, it's a good question. I, she's not [01:08:00] really making too much money. Remember, she's only had 143 paintings. She's still owned a lot of those paintings, so she's not really selling them. She's largely unknown.

So three years after their affair ends, Stalin's men managed to track Trotsky down in his office in Mexico, and they basically assassinate him with an ice pick right through the skull, and you can actually go and see that same ice pick in the International Spy Museum in Washington, dc.

They still have it on display. Wow. Around this time, partly due to her growing reputation among elite circles she and Diego went about in.

While they're in the USA, a friend of theirs, a woman called Claire Booth loose reaches out to Frida.

Claire is an American writer, politician, and diplomat, and she wants to commission Frieda to paint a memorial for her friend Dorothy Hale, who recently committed suicide. Dorothy was a very famous actress and a socialite in New York, but the year before she died, her whole life basically just turns to shit. After her husband ends up dying in a [01:09:00] car accident.

Depression meant her acting career started to fail. She becomes more and more dependent on her wealthy friends, and the story goes that one day she decided that she was just gonna end her life.

Dorothy throws this huge party at her Manhattan apartment in Hampshire House overlooking Central Park South.

You've most definitely seen this building. If you've been to New York, it's right in the middle of kind of Central Park South between sixth Avenue and seventh a avenue. If you're as if you're looking directly at the park, just turn around in the center, there is that building. It's so iconic.

Apparently after the party, she sat down, wrote all of her goodbye letters to all of her friends and family.

She then put on her favorite black velvet dress and then proceeded to throw herself out of the top floor window of her apartment.

Wow.

So when Claire Booth loose contacted Frida after all these years, she basically wanted Frida to paint something to remember Dorothy by something that perhaps was elegant and serene. Something that she could give to [01:10:00] Dorothy's family as something that they could treasure.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: Instead, frida paints an unflinching, almost cinematic step-by-step depiction of Dorothy's suicide.

Adam Cox: I don't think she hit the brief.

Kyle Risi: She did not hit the brief in it. You see Hampshire House rising into the clouds. You see Dorothy mid-fall, hurtling towards the ground at the bottom of the canvas. You then see her body on the pavement. Blood is literally pooling all around her. Then below that, readers painted a written account of what the viewer is looking at,

Adam Cox: just in case they haven't quite worked out.

Yeah. Why does she go with that angle?

Kyle Risi: Claire is obviously horrified. She said it made her physically sick to look at it. She was expecting a portrait, not a reenactment. She says she considered destroying the paintings and she couldn't give this painting to Dorothy's [01:11:00] family.

so in the end, against her better judgment, she just decided to put it into storage. And that's where it stayed for decades and decades and decades. No one saw it. The Frida that Claire thought she was commissioning, clearly wasn't the Frida that she got.

Frida had been through so much by this point, but she'd also found her style and to Frida, there was an honesty in that style.

Mm-hmm. And I get why she would paint like that. That's an honest representation of what had happened.

And when you think about the. The tragedy that Dorothy left behind through her suicide. I think by looking at that and being reminded of the hurt that suicide can have on the people that has left behind, I think is quite a powerful image.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Because I guess that is reminding, people like, well, how I interpret it is if it's reminding people that if you do commit suicide and you look at that painting, you think of like the hurt or mm-hmm. What one the person was feeling and then two, the people afterwards what they're gonna have to contend with.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. that same year, Freda's also asked to do her first solo exhibition in [01:12:00] New York, so not Mexico. Which is surprising, 'cause there's nothing more she wants than recognition in her home country. Mm-hmm. After New York.

She's invited to exhibit in Paris in 1939, where she begins befriending artists, not just as Diego Rivera's wife, but as an artist in her own right. Mm-hmm. Which is where she starts licking letters with Josephine Barker, and they get involved in a relationship licking

Adam Cox: Le. Oh, licking letters,

Kyle Risi: licking letters.

Kyle, the Louvre, end up buying one of her paintings called The Frame, which is the first work by a 20th century Mexican artist to be owned by an internationally renowned museum.

So this is a huge moment, not just for Frida, but for Mexico as a country. It's also one of the earlier self portraits that you instantly recognize as her style today.

It's got that kind of classic bus composition, the flower crown, that confident gaze. It's not her best work, but it's a clear precursor to what would become her signature style. [01:13:00] Mm-hmm. Especially when it comes to her self-portraits. So 1939 is a massive year for her. It's also the year that she divorces Diego.

Adam Cox: Oh, she does? She breaks free.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. They get married one year later.

Adam Cox: Oh. So why bother? Yeah,

Kyle Risi: exactly. Nothing changes as well when they get remarried. Like they still largely live separate lives, but they both still keep sleeping with other people and again, is baffling to me why they even remarried at all.

It seems to come down to the fact that they were both, each other's kind of muses and anchors and rocks.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And it feels like they're a couple that maybe can't live with each other. Can't live without each other. No.

Kyle Risi: I, I get it. But 1950, Frieda's health is progressively getting worse and worse or stemming from their tram accident.

Her right foot starts developing constant infections, which eventually turns gang doctors try everything they can to save it, but in the end they have to amputate it.

By 1953, that infection comes back and they have to take off more of a leg this time just below the knee. This is [01:14:00] all just terrible timing as well because after Paris and the Louvre buying one of her paintings, Mexico starts waking up to just how amazing she is.

And she's invited to hold a solo exhibition in Mexico. But doctors forbid her from leaving her bed. And at first it looks like she won't be able to attend. But then in true freedom fashion, she arranges for an ambulance to take her bed and all.

To the gallery. They wheel her in. She greets all of their guests. They laugh, they celebrate together. All from this hospital bed .

Adam Cox: So was she confined to that bed then, or just recommended She couldn't leave. Recommended,

Kyle Risi: yeah. Remember, she's had an amputation but she was like, this is what I've been dreaming of my entire life, finally getting some recognition.

And she makes it work.

Adam Cox: I just imagine this, with a kind of prepping or doing a wreckee of oh, how are we gonna get her in here? Oh, we're gonna widen the doors. Mm-hmm. Knock down a wall so they can wheel in a bed.

Kyle Risi: Yeah,

so with this little spark of genius, nothing holds her back. She ends up going everywhere by hiring the same ambulance to just transport her places in her bed. In her bed, in a [01:15:00] hostile bed. One of the last things she does is attends a Marxist rally. So everyone is waving banners, chancing slogans, and there's RDA doing the same thing from a hospital bed.

Adam Cox: How long was she confined to this bed?

Kyle Risi: Well, on July the 13th, 1954 Frida Kahlo dies. The official cause of death is listed as pneumonia, but her assistant says that she has reason to believe that she had taken her own life.

Wow. Because she noticed that 12 pills were missing from her prescription muscle.

Mm-hmm. This was also supported by the fact that a few days earlier, Frieda had insisted on giving Diego his anniversary, present a month early. And at the time of her death, Adam, she was just 47 years old.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Not, not old, really at all.

Kyle Risi: No. It's the accident. It's the trauma that she received from that accident.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And just living with one ailment or another. Mm-hmm. Which is called something else to go wrong.

Kyle Risi: Later in his autobiography, Diego writes, the day that [01:16:00] Frida died was the most tragic day of his life. Adding too late. I realized the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for her.

Adam Cox: Could he have realized that a bit more than screwing around?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Don't worry though. 'cause he remarries one year later.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say he stopped for a morning. Yeah. And then was back at it.

Kyle Risi: You know what they say, the best way to get over your grief is to marry your agent.

Adam Cox: Is that what you did?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Married his agent. Oh. So as we know in death, readers fame started to skyrocket.

And this is, believe it or not, largely thanks to an art historian by the name of Hayden Herrera. In the 1980s, she published an international bestselling biography on Frida and her work. This is the primary reason she's so well known today, following the success of that book, Mexico.

Then declare all of Frida's work, part of the country's national cultural heritage, and they prohibit any exporting of any of our work. So the fact that Madonna has a painting, the Louvre obviously bought their painting age scope, but the fact that Madonna has one or [01:17:00] anyone has one in the private collection is extremely rare.

Adam Cox: And so did Madonna get this in the eighties?

Kyle Risi: I have no idea when Madonna got that painting.

Adam Cox: Or on the black market

Kyle Risi: probably.

Adam Cox: Who knows? On the dark market. Madonna,

Kyle Risi: right?

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: that's why retrospectives of her work abroad are so rare, and probably why this exhibition in 2026 is such a massive deal and why it's trending at this moment in time.

Adam Cox: I want to go. We should absolutely go. I wanna see her head coming out of her mother's, that's in Madonna's house. Um, Madonna can rent it out for a month or two.

Kyle Risi: And in total, across her life, she painted 143 paintings. 55 of them, as we know, are self portraits. And apparently the tape modern is going to showcase 130 pieces of a work. And I cannot overstate just how huge that is gonna be. When is it? June next year.

Adam Cox: Oh, that's quite a wide away. June

Kyle Risi: 20, 26.

Adam Cox: We're going.

Kyle Risi: we are definitely going. Our friends would love it. Yeah. We should all go,

like I said in the show notes, I'll include a link to all 143 paintings and it's really, really easy for you to kind of just scroll through you'll see some [01:18:00] really fascinating pieces. Some of my favorites are the ones she paints of Diego. I honestly, genuinely believe that she's trying to make him uglier than any actually hits.

There's a painting of her sitting in front of a portrait of Stalin, as I mentioned earlier on, clearly her hero. So again, we have to factor that into what we know of who she was Also. You'll find a few portraits where she is really playing with her gender identity. She's dressed up in men's clothes like suits and things like that.

She's got her hair kind of Bri cream back. Of course. Lots and lots of surrealist themes. There's even a fun, one of her being breastfed as a baby. And again, the baby's head is Frieda's adult woman head. So, so that's fun.

Adam Cox: Yeah. She had such an imagination. When you look at some of her artwork, it's just crazy.

Kyle Risi: But she's also incredibly popular, not just because of her art, but because of her story and her disabilities, especially the pain, both physical and emotional and her defiance in the face of it all.

Adam Cox: Was she doing this almost like an activist or [01:19:00] actively, or was she just,

Kyle Risi: Well, she was an activist, wasn't she? She was a staunch Marxist and communist.

Adam Cox: Yeah. But did she do these paintings? I don't know. In a way to be seen to say something, or a lot of the time she was just doing them for fun.

Kyle Risi: No, I think she probably was trying to make a statement. Everyone has a statement to make, and you really have to stand out in those statements if you want to be recognized. And so she was very well attuned into making those things stand out through her imagery.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And I guess even from a young age, she wanted to be a good artist. She was looking for reassurance, validation.

Mm-hmm. To be critiqued. So it does make sense then actually, that she wanted to make a statement or be known. Get her work out there.

Kyle Risi: And the thing is that her sexual fluidity is also a massive kind of cause for celebration, the way she challenged gender norms. And as a result, she's become this massive symbol for many marginalized communities.

In a gala poll, in the early two thousands, her face was found to be more recognizable than Bob [01:20:00] Marley and Sheika. Really? That's a legacy. Mm. In 2002, Selma Hayak was nominated for an Oscar for playing Frieda in the film. Frida, which is heavily based on Herrera's 1980s biography.

And the film does really well. But Adam, the thing is though, the production is a complete nightmare, and it's because that the center of all of it was bloody Harvey Weinstein.

Adam Cox: Ah, that pest. Yeah. What was he up to then?

Kyle Risi: He was one of the key producers through his company, Miramax. And he subjected Selma to repeated sexual harassment and coercion, basically. Really? And it all seems to stem from his insistence that she perform a fully nude lesbian sex scene with Ashley Judd and Selma's like, well, yeah, like Frieda dabbled in her sexuality, but that's not the point of the film, right?

Mm-hmm. So she argues that he was just trying to turn it into perverted spectacle. And so in the end, she refuses, but from there he ends up retaliating against her and Adam, it gets vicious.

We cannot go into it today, but [01:21:00] basically you have people like Tarantino and George Clooney that rally around her to create this wall of protection around her because wow, how bad the retaliation was.

He actively tries to sabotage the film's production. He's constantly undermining all of Selma's creative input. He deliberately limits the theatrical release to just a single screening.

But in the end, honestly, the film is so good, it just could not be suppressed. It ends up receiving critical acclaim, six Academy nominations and won two of them. And Disgustingly, Harvey Weinstein takes credit for the success. A film wanted to fail.

It's just gross. And what year was this? 2002 is when the film came out.

Adam Cox: Isn't it crazy that all these other people that you mentioned, like Tarantino and George Clooney, they probably knew what he was like yet he was still able to do what he did for years and years after this.

Probably power, probably power. That's crazy. 'cause you think that. Tarantino, I dunno, [01:22:00] maybe what? Yeah, he was still a big deal then. And George Clooney. Mm-hmm. Could people have not spoke up?

Kyle Risi: It's wild. Why did these people not speak up when they knew?

Adam Cox: Uh, that's a whole episode probably by itself.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. I've seen like clips of Courtney Love for example, being interviewed on the red carpet somewhere in the nineties saying, right. What advice do you have for young actresses looking to make a big in Hollywood and on the camera, like in the nineties, Courtney Lu looks at the camera and goes, if Harvey Weinstein advice you to choose hotel rooms, say no.

And then she looks at her agent and she's like, can I say that? It's like, I don't care, actually, I've already said it. And she just walks off. Yeah. That, that exactly. So people knew.

Adam Cox: And the thing is though, I guess it's other people connected to him that are probably hiding his secret, probably involved in some way. And that's why, you couldn't take him down.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. So he is an absolute scumbag. There's so much more to the story that I can't obviously cover, but definitely worth falling down a rabbit hole if you are interested.

But as for Diego, not long after marrying his agent. He develops penis cancer.

Adam Cox: Penis cancer. Yeah. That's a thing. I've gotta worry about that as well. Of [01:23:00] everything on my plate.

Kyle Risi: Um, yeah. Which for a notorious womanizer, it's erotic really?

Adam Cox: Yeah. Maybe he caught something which turned to cancer.

Kyle Risi: He does eventually die a few years later of heart failure. So penis cancer doesn't get him in the end. And when he dies, he's 73 years old.

After Frieda's death, he decided to lock all of her personal belongings, her clothing, jewelry, letters, medical courses, everything inside the bathroom of their home. And he then instructs his wife, the agent, that it was to be sealed for 15 years after his death

Adam Cox: in the bathroom. Yeah. Really random. Yeah. That's a whole, you could put it in like a cupboard or something. Yeah. You've just lost a whole room of the house.

Kyle Risi: 15 years come and go. And because she didn't really like fri or there's some kind of thing going on there. Uhhuh. She just leaves it all locked up. The bathroom isn't opened until 2004. So since 1954, right through the publication of Hayden Herrera's famous [01:24:00] biography, through countless waves of kind of fame coming and going, all the freeish things have been locked away from the world in this kind of perfect little time capsule.

Adam Cox: That is wild. Yeah. How big was this house to be able to lock a a room away for 15 years? I have

Kyle Risi: no idea. What is crazy is that in 2026, many of those same items, we'll be coming to London, and so we'll be able to see them. We'll be able to physically see the things that she wore and touched and used. I cannot wait.

Adam Cox: Yeah,

wow.

Kyle Risi: And Adam, that is a story of Frida Carlo.

Adam Cox: What a woman.

Kyle Risi: What a woman. Magnificent breasts. I mean eyebrow. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: Did she ever, did she ever think about plucking?

Kyle Risi: Why should

Adam Cox: she? She

Kyle Risi: also had a mustache that she did not shave

Adam Cox: and hairy feet.

Kyle Risi: She was a hobbit.

Adam Cox: No, I, I guess there wasn't this pressure back then to have two eyebrows. I don't know. Maybe it was quite normal.

Kyle Risi: I dunno. I just guess it was a fashion back then. But at the same time, she was [01:25:00] quite edgy.

She really appreciated that fact about herself. Yeah. Fair enough. Did she have hairy armpits? I don't know, Adam, just wondered. Maybe I get the feeling that she probably did. Yeah, she had a mustache. She definitely had really hairy armpits. Fair enough. But there's nothing wrong with that.

Adam Cox: No, there is not. I'm just curious.

Kyle Risi: And so should we run the outro this week?

Adam Cox: Let's do it.

Kyle Risi: And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did.

Adam Cox: If today's episode sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show.

Kyle Risi: And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon and completely free to access.

Adam Cox: And if you want, even more than join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next.

Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday and until then, remember, every portrait can be a protest and every [01:26:00] wound can become a masterpiece. See you next time.

Adam Cox: See ya.