1929 -1954 · love, art and politics in Mexico

Frida Kahlo paints Diego Rivera as husband, child, idea and mental presence: their relationship becomes a language where love, dependence, conflict and creation remain inseparable.

Frida Kahlo met Diego Rivera in Mexico in the late 1920s and married him in 1929. She was twenty-two, he was forty-two, and he was already the most famous muralist in the country. Their relationship spans travel, commissions to the United States, communist commitments, affairs, divorce in 1939 and remarriage in 1940. Diego's importance in Frida's work is not reduced to marital biography. However, he appears as a face, child, third eye, half of the body and center of a personal cosmology. In the Portrait of Diego Rivera, the tight effigy affirms admiration and attention to the artist. He appears as face, child, third eye, half of the body and center of a personal cosmology. In the Portrait of Diego Rivera, the tight effigy affirms admiration and attention to the artist. In the Portrait of Diego Rivera, the tight effigy affirms admiration and attention to the artist. Diego and I place his face on Kahlo's forehead, as an impossible thought detach. Diego and Frida 1929 -1944 merges two profiles into a single face, image of union and fracture. The loving embrace of the Universe, the Earth, me, Diego and Señor Xolotl builds a chain of protective arms: the universe contains the Mexican earth, which contains Frida, who carries Diego in the form of an adult-child with a third eye. The relationship between the two painters is also a difference in scale and method. Rivera works on the wall, in collective history; Kahlo concentrates the body, the intimate and the symbol on small surfaces. Their separate but connected workshop houses materialize this tension between autonomy and dependence. This collection therefore explores less a legendary couple than a system of images where loving, painting and defining each other remain continually linked. The "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera" selection notably compares The Amorous Embrace of the Universe and Portrait of Diego Rivera. His reading favors details.

In Kahlo, Diego is never just a portrait: he becomes a thought on his forehead, a child in his arms, half of his face and a force impossible to keep at bay.