Frida Kahlo
1931–1933: Travels in the United States

After Rivera had completed the commission in Cuernavaca in late 1930, he and Kahlo moved to San Francisco, where he painted murals for the Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts. The couple was "feted, lionized, spoiled" by influential collectors and clients during their stay in the city. Her long love affair with Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray most likely began around this time.

Kahlo and Rivera returned to Mexico for the summer of 1931, and in the fall traveled to New York City for the opening of Rivera's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In April 1932, they headed to Detroit, where Rivera had been commissioned to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. By this time, Kahlo had become bolder in her interactions with the press, impressing journalists with her fluency in English and stating on her arrival to the city that she was the greater artist of the two of them.

"Of course he does well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist"

The year spent in Detroit was a difficult time for Kahlo. Although she had enjoyed visiting San Francisco and New York City, she disliked aspects of American society, which she regarded as colonialist, as well as most Americans, whom she found "boring". She disliked having to socialize with capitalists such as Henry and Edsel Ford, and was angered that many of the hotels in Detroit refused to accept Jewish guests. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that "although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development of the United States", she felt "a bit of a rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger." Kahlo's time in Detroit was also complicated by a pregnancy. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion, but the medication used was ineffective. Kahlo was deeply ambivalent about having a child and had already undergone an abortion earlier in her marriage to Rivera. Following the failed abortion, she reluctantly agreed to continue with the pregnancy, but miscarried in July, which caused a serious hemorrhage that required her being hospitalized for two weeks. Less than three months later, her mother died from complications of surgery in Mexico.

Kahlo and Rivera returned to New York in March 1933, for he had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Rockefeller Center. During this time, she only worked on one painting, My Dress Hangs There (1933). She also gave further interviews to the American press. In May, Rivera was fired from the Rockefeller Center project and was instead hired to paint a mural for the New Workers School. Although Rivera wished to continue their stay in the United States, Kahlo was homesick, and they returned to Mexico soon after the mural's unveiling in December 1933.
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