Review: ‘Frida & Diego’ at High Museum

Bottom line: A thrilling and comprehensive look at the divergent and also shared interests of the famed Mexican artists and married couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

An art world power couple for the ages, the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are celebrated for their union and their influential artistic output in an intoxicating High Museum exhibition, “Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting.”

An exhibition that does justice to this pair of artists’ tortuous, creative and history-making love affair, the expansive, illuminating “Frida & Diego” is a sweeping exploration of their individual talents and the largest exhibition — more than 120 works — of the couple’s combined output shown at one venue.

But “Frida & Diego” is also dedicated to a unique relationship defined by enmeshed political commitment to the Marxist philosophies of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, a reverence for nature and Mexican identity, and a tortured personal life that encompassed Rivera’s wanton infidelities (one of his conquests including Kahlo’s own sister), a divorce and remarriage, Kahlo’s ongoing hospitalizations and surgeries and inability to conceive.

What emerges from this life-affirming, moving show are two willful, deeply human figures whose love endured despite often devastating personal tragedies and infidelities.

A fascinating look at their intertwined destinies since marrying in 1929 when Kahlo was 22 and Rivera was 43, the exhibition is also a glimpse into their very different artistic paths.

Rivera spent formative years in Paris working as a friend and contemporary of some of the 20th century's most important artists, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Amedeo Modigliani, whose cubist principles he first embraced in work represented in this show, before turning to more overtly political representations of class struggle often captured in his renowned murals, several of which are re-created in "Frida & Diego." In numerous lithographs on view, like "Sleep (The Night of the Poor)" (1932), in which a mother's hand is outstretched in a gesture of want even in sleep, Rivera documents Mexico's impoverished peasants, crowding them into the parameters of the picture frame to give an even more profound sense of entrapment.

While Rivera was a trained artist who had worked alongside some of art history’s legends, Kahlo, in contrast, was self-taught. And though Rivera was more likely to look outward, to the class struggles of his day, which he depicted with both dogma and tenderness, Kahlo more frequently looked inward, often with a movingly frank tendency to express her personal pain. She depicted miscarriages, sexual betrayal, heartbreak and the decades-long trauma of multiple surgeries and bedridden recuperation from a devastating bus accident that left her unable to conceive.

Her paintings are undeniably intimate eviscerations of self, but one of the most revealing pieces in the show is the body cast “Frida’s Plaster Corset With a Hammer and Sickle (an unborn baby)” (ca. 1950) that Kahlo wore after one of her numerous surgeries in the years following her bus accident. Painted while Kahlo was still wearing the cast, it expresses a ravenous desire to create even amidst the most painful moments, and a literal interest in using her own body as the canvas.

In the heartbreaking painting “Hospital Henry Ford” from 1932, Kahlo paints her pregnant body floating above the Detroit hospital bed where she recovered from a miscarriage, amidst a barren landscape of American factories. Tethered to her bleeding body is an embryo, a wilted flower and machine parts in a deeply disturbing evocation of solitude and emotional trauma experienced in a foreign land. Kahlo’s often primitive, folk art-reminiscent style gives paintings like these a searing jolt of authenticity and truthfulness unbuffered by a gloss of seductive style.

Even when her work was not so pain-wracked, Kahlo managed to offer a moving insight into her psyche that has made her beloved by both fellow artists like surrealist Andre Breton and by legions of contemporary art fans enamored by the warts-and-all rendering of her life including the void of childlessness she filled with charming self-portraits like “Self-Portrait With Monkeys” (1943), where she is draped with the suggestive baby-substitutes of spider monkeys.

There are numerous surprises in this rich and complex exhibition, including a series of photographs of the couple by other artists, psychologically loaded Kahlo still lifes distinct from the self-portraits she is known for, and numerous cubist works so different from the realist murals on which Rivera built his prodigious reputation. There are many reasons to appreciate this far-ranging life-to-death portrait of the creative spirit as it is embodied in two of the art world’s most fascinating artists.