Diego & Frida

When Diego Rivera met Frida Kahlo in 1929, he had shed his childhood insecurity and assumed the provocative personality of a celebrity artist, as famous for his paintings as for his ceaseless affairs. Having been physically crippled by polio at age six, and then by a bus accident at 17, Frida was a skilled painter and an irreverent daredevil hungry for an affection that would balance her for her physical suffering.

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Frida knew when they married that Rivera would not be faithful, but Rivera could afford her medical care, and the two shared a deep commitment to Communism and Mexicanismo, performing the role of scandalous and provocative artists to wealthy sponsors and patrons.

 

The idea of a working marriage was a fiction Diego and Frida allowed each other till Frida’s death in 1954.  Frida was the only one of Rivera’s women whose advice he would take on his murals, but Diego never ceased to betray or abandon Frida, and if they nourished each other’s artwork, Frida’s last journal entries acknowledge that Diego belonged only to himself.