My artistic life and friendships with Kahlo, Warhol and Basquiat

When I was growing up in the San Ángel neighbourhood of Mexico City in the Sixties, the Studio House – where Frida Kahlo lived with Diego Rivera – was my second home. Most afternoons after school, I’d go there to see my best friend Ruth María, Rivera’s granddaughter, who lived there after her grandfather’s death. The presence of Kahlo and Rivera, great artists and lovers, whose legendary passion led them to marry and divorce twice, inhabited the rooms. I was encircled by the smell of oil paints, which still lay out in used tubes alongside brushes and bottles of turpentine. Rivera’s death mask cast in bronze lay on a table. His face was there for all of us to look at, and I could kiss his cold metal cheek on a dare.

Only by looking back on my childhood and youth while writing my memoir The Promised Party did I understand how deeply I’d been influenced by Kahlo’s surrender to artistic freedom. Later, living in New York City in the Eighties, when I knew Jean-Michel Basquiat, I found a similar kind of independence and courage on his canvases. Both artists were painting portraits of their lives and their place in the world, and their integrity was inspirational.

On hot afternoons, Ruth María and I liked to cool off in Kahlo’s bathtub, and we bathed in her world. It felt as though she were nearby, as her objects lay everywhere – her hard black hairpins, half-used bottles of Sanborns orange-blossom cologne, and a tortoiseshell hairbrush that was always beside the sink waiting for her return. One of Kahlo’s most famous paintings, What the Water Gave Me, depicts a scene of her lying in this tub. A whole universe of her life floats around her body in the soapy liquid, like rubber ducks and toys in a child’s bath. There’s a volcano, one of her traditional Tehuana dresses, a dead hummingbird, two female lovers, a wood-pecker, a seashell with a bullet hole, a crumbling skyscraper, a ship setting sail, and a woman drowning.

When we weren’t taking baths or afternoon naps on Kahlo’s bed, Ruth María and I spent our days together running around the neighbourhood. We liked hanging out in the street in a Mexican-Dickensian world of street sweepers, rubbish collectors, gardeners and vendors selling exotic birds from Mexico’s jungles, where the feathered creatures were organised in one cage over another in a tall scaffolding. Juan O’Gorman, the great architect and muralist who designed Studio House, lived a block away and was always at my home.

Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York, 1985

"This generation of artists shared a defiant courage in exploring Mexico’s many faces – or masks"

A younger generation of artists with new visions that moved away from muralism and nationalism were also a part of this world, such as my mother Kathleen Clement, José Luis Cuevas, Gunther Gerzso and the sculptor Helen Escobedo, as well as musicians, film directors, dancers and writers including Gabriel García Márquez, whose children went to my school. This new generation of artists shared a defiant courage in exploring Mexico’s many faces – or masks. The women writers in particular were interested in its indigenous culture and their vision had a strong influence on my own work. At the core of my 2001 novel A True Story Based on Lies is the exploration of the complex, syncretic world of Catholic and indigenous Mexico of the 1970s.

At this point, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened Mexico up to the commercial and cultural influences of the world, and especially the US, was still decades away. Mexico was cut off and self-reliant, which helped to make tradition important. Surrounded by this world, I began to write poetry at a very early age and form ideas about art. I knew I was the daughter of Surrealism. The ideas and lifestyle were a part of my creative DNA. I could quote parts of the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, signed in 1938 by Diego Rivera and André Breton: "True art is unable not to be revolutionary." I understood that Surrealism was not an art movement but a way of life, both conscious and unconscious. Poetry was not an instrument of political propaganda but a revolutionary act in and of itself.

What The Water Gave Me (1938) by Frida Kahlo

In many ways, I was raised at the end of an era. A finale for the varied world of Latin American communism, Surrealism and spiritualism, in which the artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo immortalised their séances or imaginary visits from spirits on their canvases, and I, as a young teenager, went to many veladas espiritistas – 'spiritist evenings' – where mediums led sessions by candlelight.

In Mexico, I’d studied dance since I was a child and at 18, I moved to New York City to the NYU dance department and joined the directors, dancers and writers including Gabriel García Márquez, company of Bertram Ross, who had been one of Martha Graham’s principal dancers and a disciple of the groundbreaking modern dance she created. In New York, I found that, unlike Mexico City, everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone seemed to have entirely left their backgrounds behind. We never spoke the words 'return' or 'go back', and we were not missing. There was something liberating in this lack of ancestry, geography and past. There was no sense that anyone had the usual domestic structures around them – parents, homes, a bedroom, pyjamas, a dinner time. Even today, when I think of the people I knew, they seem to stand without childhoods, as if they had just been born at the age of 19. We were alone in a city of strangers.

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in New York, 1984

This was when the gay movement burst into freedom and joy. The baths opened; discos and after-hours clubs appeared downtown in old warehouses. Boom boxes filled the streets with the rowdy sound of Village People singing 'YMCA'. I wrote poetry, as did Keith Haring, and I’d take part in the Wednesday-night readings he held at Club 57. He was childlike and full of surprises; he declaimed his poetry with his head inside a broken television set he’d found thrown away on the street. I met Suzanne Mallouk when we were both waitresses at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan. She was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s girlfriend and became my best friend. He and I shared Suzanne. Jean-Michel painted her, and I wrote poems about her. Suzanne looked like a young boy; she was very skinny and wore oversized clothes and was always giggling and talking non-stop.

Frida Kahlo in 1931

Jean-Michel painted her 'chatter' on his canvases with letters of the alphabet jumbled together. He was very tall and shy – he would play various instruments in his band, Grey, and even homemade percussive gadgets created with pots and pans, hiding in a huge, empty cardboard refrigerator box so no one would see him. This also demonstrates his original sense of the absurd. I met the artist Colette Lumiere while I was a waitress at Max’s Kansas City. I went to her risky, and beautiful, live performances where she slept out on the street in public spaces. Elsewhere, Madonna was a fixture at the Mudd Club, and everyone knew her because she was always there. She carried a large plastic bag of popcorn with her at all times, which she munched on in order to not gain weight, as at that point she was a dancer. But we were nobodies. The only famous person around was Andy Warhol.

In the beginning of those New-York-City-runaway, love-your-heart-out days, we didn’t see Aids coming, but when it did, it put a stop to the exuberance. To our outings to dance parties, nights at clubs, gay baths, transvestite fashion shows, disco and punk-rock parties we added a trip to a laboratory to have a blood test. The words ‘Aids test negative’ became the best words in the English language – they were even written on walls in a joyful graffiti swirl.

Jennifer Clement (left) and Suzanne Mallouk (right) in 1984

Faced with our mortality at such a young age, we asked ourselves the universal unanswerable questions – ‘'Why are we here?'; 'Is there a god?'; 'How much do luck or chance count?'; 'Is beauty the centre of a moral life?' – and searched for truth and solace even in the invisible things in life that have no answer. I wanted to understand. I wanted not to understand.

Meanwhile, I found that there were places where my Mexico and New York lives came together. I once asked Jean-Michel what he ate. He answered, "Paper, missy, it’s not very appetising but it serves to trick hunger," quoting the surreal film The Exterminating Angel, shot in Mexico, that we both loved. This was also a reference to my Mexican nanny who, as a child, ate paper to stave off her constant hunger. Jean-Michel and I would sometimes talk in Spanish together – his was very good, as his mother was Puerto Rican and he’d lived on the island for several years. And there were connections to the Beatnik writer William Burroughs, whom Jean-Michel admired and knew, and who shot his wife in Mexico City playing William Tell, having balanced a glass of gin on her head.

Dancing at the Mudd Club in New York in 1979

This event is infamous to many Mexicans, and Joan Burroughs is buried in the American Cemetery in the north of its capital. On one of his canvases, Jean-Michel painted the bullet that killed Joan, and Suzanne painted her portrait. This picture hangs in my house in Mexico City today. Unlike many of my friends who stayed in New York, I was always dreaming about returning to this city. In 1987, the year Jean-Michel died of an overdose, I moved back to my home town and decided to to give up dance for good and become a writer.

The Mexican Surrealist idea of art being intrinsically revolutionary was ingrained in me, and therefore, the political was a given. Frida Kahlo’s paintings exposed her raw pain and defiance, which was symbolic of the female experience everywhere. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintbrushes, paint sticks or little-kid crayons were swords, daggers and knives against racism and injustice. When I worked on my poems about science or love, or my novels on gun violence or the trafficking of little girls in Mexico, above all I searched for the aesthetic and poetic, even while I knew my words were also battlefields.

When I think of these two artists in their – and my – worlds in Mexico and New York, I realise these were not influences that I ever sought out. Chance has been at play throughout my life. I’ve been so lucky.

The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me

The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me

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