Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Monkeys, 1943.
Diego Rivera, Landscape with Cacti, 1931.
In the early 1920s, a teenage Frida Kahlo met Diego Rivera while he was painting the mural ‘La Créación’ at the Escuela National Preparatoria, the oldest high school in Mexico. In his late 30s, Rivera was at the outset of a spectacular career, and was set to become one of the most prominent modern artists in the world.
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“One day they asked me who I wanted to marry, and I said I would not marry,” Kahlo told Olga Campos in 1950. “But I did want to have a child by Diego Rivera.”
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Though they never had any children, the couple married twice. Theirs was not an easy life, as Kahlo famously confirmed: “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down… The other accident is Diego.”
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Yet for all their trials and tribulations, their legacy lives on, and is being celebrated in the new exhibition Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jaques and Natasha Gelman Collection. Featuring about 140 works, the exhibition explores their lives and love affair, while placing their contributions within the larger context of revolutionary Mexican art.
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Diego Rivera, Portrait of Natasha Gelman, 1943.
Frida Kahlo, The Bride Who Becomes Frightened When She Sees Life Opened, 1943