“It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands,” wrote Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, in one of the many missives the couple shared over their tumultuous and passionate 25-year relationship.
Kahlo met Rivera, already a titan of Mexican art, at age 15, while a student. Rivera was painting the mural La Creación at the Simón Bolívar Amphitheater in a Mexico City senior high school and she boldly asked to watch him work. Years later, the two would meet again at a party hosted by the photographer Tina Modotti in 1928. By then, Kahlo had suffered a catastrophic accident, when the bus she was riding in crashed into a trolley, severely injuring her spinal column and pelvis, and had subsequently committed herself to painting.
Frida Kahlo, Diego and Frida 1929–1944 (1944). Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Upon their second meeting, Rivera, who would later call Kahlo “the great fact of my life,” embraced her as a muse. The relationship soon evolved far beyond that, as the two great artists became confidantes, artistic and political allies, underpinned by a romantic life marked by deep passion and mutual philandering. Kahlo and Rivera would wed in 1929 with Kahlo’s disapproving parents nicknaming them “the elephant and the dove”—an unsubtle jab at the disparity between their physiques. An ever-stormy union, Kahlo and Rivera would divorce in 1939 only to remarry the following year. The couple would remain together (though living in separate residencies) until Kahlo’s death in 1954, at the age of 47.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Photo: Bettmann / Contributor.
Right now, the exhibition “Beyond the Myth” at the Dallas Museum of Art brings together dozens of works including paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs that explore Kahlo’s own creative strategies and considerations alongside works by those in her milieu. Among the lesser-known gems in the exhibition is Kahlo’s tender Diego and Frida 1929–1944 (1944), a painting made to mark the couple’s 15th anniversary, given as a gift by Kahlo to Rivera. The portrait depicts a split face, half Rivera and half Frida, surrounded by a vine, a conch and scallop shell, and a depiction of the sun and moon. The frame, an elaborately adorned tulip-shaped, is encrusted in the nacreous shells, which are painted with the dates 1929 and 1944 and the two artists’ names. The intimate, devotional painting, is filled with rich symbolic and compositional meaning. Here are three facts that reveal the depths of Diego and Frida 1929–1944.
Kahlo’s Paintings Often Reflected on Her Marriage
Frida Kahlo’s Diego y Yo at Sotheby’s in 2021. Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby’s.
“I paint my own reality,” Kahlo famously quipped. To that end, it’s no surprise that her often shambolic marriage was a recurring subject matter in her oeuvre. In 1931, the artist painted Frieda and Diego Rivera, a wedding portrait made two years after their nuptials . Embracing many of the folkloric qualities of the traditional wedding portrait, Diego and Frida appear as flattened figures, him in a suit, and her in a tiered peplum dress with a red rebozo wrap. An unfurling ribbon at the top, carried by a pigeon, describes the circumstances of the painting and that Kahlo painted the work while in San Francisco with Rivera. Reading beyond the first blush, the portrait is not one of wedded bliss. Rivera, palette, and brushes in hand, turns away from Kahlo. Their hands only faintly touch. Kahlo’s other hand, clenched at her stomach, may allude to her chronic pain. Kahlo, before her bus accident, had written “My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera” but was later unable to carry a pregnancy to term because of the gravity of her pelvic injuries, a source of deep personal pain. In her 1944 anniversary portrait, the withered vine that circles the two artists may suggest these fertility struggles.
Detail of Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait as a Tehuana (1943) as displayed during an exhibition entitled ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Photo by Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images.
Rivera had once referred to Kahlo’s personality as akin to “the two faces of Janus, as adorable as a beautiful smile and as profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.” Kalho’s imagery often, like the Roman God of two faces, merges visages, particularly Diego into Frida. In 1941, the year after remarrying Rivera, Kahlo painted Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, better known as Diego on My Mind, which pictures the Mexican muralist’s face on Kahlo’s forehead, hinting the mental space he occupied in her life. She would return to this format again in her famed Self-Portrait ‘Diego y Yo’ from 1949, painted when Rivera was deeply enmeshed in an affair with actress and singer María Félix, Kahlo’s close friend (to whom Rivera purportedly proposed). In the 1944 painting, we can see that Rivera’s face smiles, while Kahlo’s is despondently blank, hinting at the continuing disparities and tensions in their marriage, even as she celebrated their union.
The Sun, the Moon, and the Conch Shell Are Multifaceted Symbols With Aztec Origins
A journalist takes a picture of a painting by Frida Kahlo entitled Self Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States during a press visit of her exhibition “Oltre il mito” (Beyond the Myth) at the Mudec, 2018. Photo: Miguel Medina/ AFP via Getty Images)
The moon and the sun appear alongside Kahlo and Rivera, a celestial dyad whose presence hints at the couple’s unity as well as the passage of time. Kahlo depicted the sun and the moon together in her paintings with notable frequency, though their significance was thornily complex. In Diego and Frida 1929–1944, Kahlo aligns herself with the sad, solemnity of the moon, often a symbol of womanhood, and Rivera with the spikey intensity of the sun. But these symbols were also rooted in Mexican indigenous history. During the 1920s and ‘30s, following centuries of colonialization by the Spanish and new pressures from the United States, intellectuals looked to Aztecs as a model of Mexican sovereignty. Aztec identity was particularly important to Kahlo who often wore traditional jewelry. In Aztec mythology, Coyolxauhqui, the goddess of the moon, was beheaded and her head tossed into the sky, becoming the moon, by the god of war; the story underscores the sun’s symbolic conquering of the moon and stars. In this reading, Kahlo hints at Rivera’s status over her, as her husband and as an artist.
In other of Kahlo’s paintings, the sun appears as a life-giving source, but one, that according to, Aztec mythology, required blood offerings. The suffering and blood might have been Frida’s. In her painting Moses (1945) the sun appears as a massive orb with mythological and historical figures around it. The collector Don Jose Domingo commissioned the painting, asking Kahlo for her visual interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Below the sun appears a child in utero and below that a baby that looks strikingly like Rivera, in a basket, a proverbial Moses. At the very bottom of the painting is a depiction of a conch shell and a scallop, similar to that seen in her 1944 Diego and Frida, forms that became, for her, recurrent symbols of the couple’s love.
A Detail on the Frame Reveals Its Past Life
Close-up of the frame of Kahlo’s Diego and Frida 1929–1944.
The frame surrounding the painting of Diego and Frida 1929–1944 is adorned with shells that emphasize the conch shell and scallop in the painting. Kahlo was passionate about Mexican handicrafts. She painted one work, The Frame, on a reversed glass frame that she may have purchased in Oaxaca. Another work she painted on an aluminum plate.
Recent, infrared photography of Diego and Frida 1929–1944 has revealed that one of the shells on the frame reads “Recuerdo de Veracruz.” The inscription was painted over with red, likely by Kahlo, who probably purchased the frame at the Veracruz tourist market. In this way, the perhaps recognizable frame, in its own era, becomes a souvenir of the couple’s years together.