Fulang-Chang and I

Frida Kahlo, 1937

It came with a mirror. Same frame. Same paint job. Nothing in it but the room. And the mirror is bigger than the painting. In the painting, it's Kahlo and a spider monkey named Fulang-Chang. Her pet. Which, as pets go, is hard to beat. A pink ribbon runs from her neck to his. He's looking straight out. She isn't, quite. Neither of them doing anything. She painted the portrait first. The mirror came later, when she decided to give the portrait to a friend. Mary Sklar. A New Yorker she'd met in Mexico. Mary had already bought a different painting at Frida's New York show. So Frida gave her this one. On the house. Then she added the mirror. The idea, she told Mary, was that now they could always be together. Frida in the painting. Mary in the mirror. That was the plan. Now it's whoever's standing there. And the mirror didn't come out of nowhere. After a bus crash, Frida began painting in bed, with a mirror fixed to the canopy above her. Lying there, looking up at herself. That's where the self-portraits start. People kept filing her with the Surrealists. The dream painters. The year before she died, she told Time magazine: "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." And she lived surrounded by mirrors. One on the wardrobe. One at the dressing table. One set into the stucco of the patio wall. And the one she gave away. Giving friends self-portraits was normal for her. The mirror wasn't. Mary kept the portrait and the mirror together for the rest of her life. Then she left them here.

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