StayOnTop: Depression

In this Suicide Prevention Week, perhaps it’s fitting to highlight a suicide case from the past. Can suicides ever be ordinary? Of course not. But if suicides could be called “ordinary”, then this was not an exceptional one. And like similar suicides, this one would have gradually faded away from memory, were it not for one thing.

    On October 21, 1938, New York actress Dorothy Hale jumped from her 16th-floor apartment. She had become utterly depressed after her career had turned into a failure, several relationships had gone wrong, and one of her best friends and colleagues had killed herself half a year before.

    Dorothy did not kill herself in an impulse. She must have thought about it, must have decided that carrying on with her life was an unbearable prospect.

    The evening before, she’d thrown a kind of party for some good friends, telling them she was going away on a long trip. She then went with a couple of them to the theater to see a late play. She spent the remainder of the night alone, writing several farewell letters. In the early hours of the morning, Dorothy took the jump. She was 33.

    I happen to have a little experience with suicide attempts myself. So I can vividly imagine how terrible and hopeless she must have felt.

    One of the friends Dorothy left behind in sorrow and bewilderment was the young, but already prominent playwright and Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce. Like often with people who need to cope with a friend’s suicide, Luce sought for something she could do, for some gesture to make. What she came up with was the idea of having a good artist make some kind of commemorative portrait in honor of Dorothy.

The artist who got the commission to make a painting, for $400, was the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Kahlo was well known among insiders for her uniquely distinctive, quasi-naive figurative style: but she had not yet gained truly wide recognition (international fame would come later, shortly before Kahlo’s early death in 1954).

    We cannot be sure exactly what kind of painting Luce expected from Kahlo. It has been suggested that Luce hoped for a painting she might give as a present to Dorothy’s mother. Kahlo already had a reputation for her many striking self-portraits (like the 1941 example shown here) so maybe Luce thought she would get a similar kind of portrait of Dorothy.

    What we do know is that Luce was shocked, was absolutely aghast when she got to see the result:

Kahlo had memorialized not Dorothy’s life, but Dorothy’s death. In a movie-esque sequence, the picture explicitly showed three stages of the gruesome event: the jump (at the top), the fall (in the middle), and the body on the ground. Complete with blood splashes on the bottom of the frame.

    Luce’s first impulse was to have the painting destroyed. After a while she thought better of this, but because she didn’t want to be associated with it, she had her own name in the subscript painted over (see my footnote below). The painting disappeared into a closet. There it remained out of sight for decades, before finally emerging again in an art museum – as an “anonymous gift”.

    Do I need to add that today, this amazing painting is one of Kahlo best known works? Or do I need to point out that without this painting, Dorothy Hale’s life and death would probably have been largely forgotten today?

    In 2007 author Myra Bairstow wrote a successful play about the tragic event – up to the (not very plausible) suggestion that Dorothy’s death might have been no suicide but a murder. There is an “Official Dorothy Hale Web Site” now about her and all the background; there are Dorothy-themed blogs, and Dorothy even has her own Facebook page! All because of this painting.

    Dorothy has become… well, some kind of celebrity. After the fact. But as sad, really sad, and touching, and intriguing as her story is, does she deserve all this hype? After all, this was just – as I said at the beginning – a fairly ordinary suicide, if we can call any suicide “ordinary”.

    The person who really deserves our attention and admiration here, is of course not Dorothy Hale but Frida Kahlo. She deserves our respect not just for the honesty of this suicide painting (or for her qualities as a painter).

    She also deserves our admiration for the brave way she managed to keep going. Unlike Hale, Kahlo was not physically healthy. Due to the lasting consequences of childhood polio and a terrible traffic accident in her youth, she suffered terrible pains for most of her life. Although her health failed her more and more, and her sufferings became ever less bearable, she went on with determination until her health failed her completely.

So I want to end here with some music to honor not Dorothy Hale, but Frida Kahlo. I know at least four songs that have Frida Kahlo in mind. The one I want to play is Freedom – tribute to Frida Kahlo, from the 2008 album Four Seasons by the Polish group Blue Café.

    Please take a look at their own Blue Café website (in Polish, but navigating is fairly easy). If your Polish really is a little rusty, then I can also recommend their Last.fm pages with links to their albums.

    Why this Blue Café song? Perhaps because it has another little thing in common with Frida Kahlo’s work. Sometimes, a Frida Kahlo painting is effective because it comes close to kitsch. In their tribute to Kahlo, the people of Blue Café dare to come dangerously close to that same kitsch borderline:

(click the “Play” button – if it does not work, install Flash)

• footnote 1: Kahlo’s 1941 Self-Portrait with Bonito is in a private collection.

• footnote 2: Kahlo’s 1938 (some say 1939) painting The Suicide of Dorothy Hale is in the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona.
    Translation of Kahlo’s Spanish subscript: “In the city of New York on the twenty-first day of the month of October, 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory (removed words: Mrs. Clare Booth Luce commissioned) this votive painting, executed by Frida Kahlo.”

• footnote 3: For two other striking suicide works (Yoshitoshi woodcut and Manet painting) see my post Suicide in Art: Two Cultures.

 
Author: Henk van Setten