Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera: Mexico's Power Couple Sebastian Smee - The Boston Globe
go to original March 16, 2015

Detroit Industry, east wall (detail), Diego Rivera, 1932. (Detroit Institute of Arts)

When Frida Kahlo came to the United States in 1931, she found the entire country “ugly and stupid,” and longed to return home to Mexico.

Her husband Diego Rivera, on the other hand, was mightily stimulated. The charismatic, cow-eyed, fat-belted muralist was already an international art star, and he arrived in Detroit in 1932 ready to execute what he thought of as his life’s masterpiece, the Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Kahlo was barely an artist at this point. She had talent, she had dabbled, but her efforts had been sporadic. She and Rivera, both avowed communists, had met when she was an art student. By the time they came to America, he was not long returned from a nine-month stint in Soviet Russia, and their marriage was less than two years old. She was very much in his shadow.

Detroit changed everything for Kahlo — and, more obliquely, for Rivera, too. It was in that city — convulsed at the time by massive labor protests, murderous police responses, and a Depression deepening in severity by the month — that Kahlo’s art began to wriggle to life.

Read the rest at The Boston Globe

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