How Mexico's Diego Rivera Met Teenage Frida Kahlo and Fell in Love with Her Years Later Maria Popova - Brain Pickings
go to original September 14, 2014

“I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And she would continue to be, up to the moment she died…”

My Art, My Life: An Autobiography by Diego Rivera, Gladys March Check it out on Amazon.com

There is something singularly mesmerizing about the fateful encounters that sparked epic, often turbulent, lifelong love affairs — take, for instance, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But one of modern history’s most vibrant, passionate, and tumultuous loves is that between legendary artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the unusual and enchanting beginning of which is recounted first-hand in My Art, My Life: An Autobiography — a rare glimpse of Rivera’s inner life posthumously published in 1960, based on the interviews Gladys March conducted with the artist while shadowing him between 1944 and his death in 1957. March describes the book as “Rivera’s apologia: a self-portrait of a complex and controversial personality, and a key to the work of perhaps the greatest artist the Americas have yet produced.”

In a section titled An Apparition of Frida, Rivera describes his first encounter with the fierce teenage Kahlo while painting his first significant mural, Creation, at the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in 1922. Kahlo was one of only thirty-five female students at the prestigious institution.

    "While painting, I suddenly heard, from behind one of the colonial pillars in the spacious room, the voice of an unseen girl.

    Teasingly, she shouted, “On guard, Diego, Nahui is coming!”

    Nahui was the Indian name of a talented woman painter who was posing for one of the auditorium figures."

The invisible voice continued to play pranks on Rivera until it finally presented itself in the mischievous flesh.

Read the rest at Brain Pickings

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