Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera’s (1886–1957) legendary passion for each other and for Mexico’s revolutionary culture during the 1920s and 1930s have made them among the twentieth century’s most famous artists. During their life together as a married couple, Rivera achieved prominence as a muralist artist, while Kahlo’s intimate paintings were embraced by the Surrealist movement and the Mexican art world-but neither were especially well known in the broader context of art and modernism. After their deaths in the 1950s, important retrospectives of Kahlo’s work enshrined her as one of the most significant women artists of the twentieth century, somewhat eclipsing Rivera’s international fame as Mexico’s greatest muralist painter. «Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting» offers a new perspective on their artistic significance for the twenty-first century, one that shows how their paintings reflect both the dramatic story of their lives together and their artistic commitment to the transformative political and cultural values of post-revolutionary Mexico. «Frida & Diego» features newly photographed color reproductions of 75 paintings and works on paper by both Kahlo and Rivera, rarely reproduced archival photographs and new biographical information on the couple assembled by scholar Dot Tuer. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition assembled from three distinguished Mexican private collections on Mexican art, and presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the High Museum of Art Atlanta.