Frida Kahlo's diary: An intimate self-portrait is the name with which this notebook has been baptized with paintings, drawings and documents authored by Frida Kahlo. In it, the artist expresses her tastes, emotions: her feelings throughout her last ten years of life (1944-1954).
The pictographic content makes it unique, as well as several letters addressed to Diego Rivera and the small annotations and poems. In addition to this, we found several pages of the newspaper devoted to dogs, especially the xoloitzcuintle, a type of dog whom the Rivera-Kahlo couple had in high esteem as being a legacy of pre-Hispanic Mexico.
Thus we have, in a colorful sheet, called Dance to the Sun - where the reddish, yellowish and orange ocher tones abound - to two xoloitzcuintles around which anthropomorphic figures dance with perrun heads, in the manner of a fertility rite of mercy, where the breasts of a newly born bitch seem to underline this purpose. Does the color of the xoloitzcuintle represented have to do with the Mesoamerican tradition, that a reddish dog is in charge of passing the dead across the river to reach Mictlán? Does the illustration represent the life-death duality?
Then there is a drawing, where the strokes of crayons, violet, purple, yellow and orange, combined with floral and vegetal motifs, reflect the mood of the painter, there are two small red dogs playing with a series of threads running through the whole scene involving the cubs and two skeins that seem to be the origin of the framework.
Similarly we find a sketch that, apparently, at first, was going to represent the same Frida Kahlo, to which were added abundant and thick beards. In front of him-she has a dog that looks like a xoloitzcuintle that seems to be tied to body and legs, under which the word "DOG" is read.
However, within these drawings and paintings, one is dedicated to Mr. Xolotl, where reference is made to the role of dogs in helping deceased men to reach Mictlán. There he is called the dog "Ambassador of the Universal Republic of Xibalbá Mictlan, Chancellor and Minister Plenipotentiary", referring to the Mayan underworld that was ruled by the deities of death and disease: Hun Camé and Vucub Camé, as well as, kingdom of Mictlantecuhtli, god of the death of Nahua mythology.
In two separate pages, and as the fifth space dedicated to the dog, there is another note where La Capulina, one of Frida Kahlo's bitches, is represented in several sketches.
All these illustrations, as Sarah M. Lowe said, "transmit immediacy of first-hand sensations transcribed and captured on paper", as well as reflect the duality of life and death. Life in a fertility ritual that has as its central part a red-colored xoloitzcuintle bitch and death where "Mr. Xólotl" is named ambassador of Mictlan, representative to the pelona, a death "as hairy as his beloved itzcuintli dogs", as noted by Carlos Fuentes Macías, referring to Frida Kahlo Calderón, to that woman who stopped everything with her presence.
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