|
 Mexico City is also a memory lane of their stormy romance,
with murals and museums marking their early encounters, shared
Communist ideals and intended burial in an archeological
treasure house.
The epic begins in 1922 in central Mexico City when Kahlo, a
teenager, spent hours observing Rivera, 21 years her senior,
paint his first mural "The Creation" in her high school
auditorium, today the amphitheater of the Antiguo Colegio de San
Ildefonso.
Kahlo's presence aroused the jealously of Guadalupe Marin,
Rivera's second wife, the model for the mural's Eve-like nude.
Rivera's autobiography recalls Kahlo brushed off her belligerent
insults.
Six years later, and one block away at the National Education
Ministry, Rivera was toiling on a three-floor mural, his
biggest, when Kahlo approached for a critique of her artwork.
He soon cast Kahlo in the mural's fresco of an arsenal where she
distributes munitions under a hammer-and-sickle banner. Rivera
was then a Communist Party member, and Kahlo joined it after
their 1929 marriage.
Shades of a marital crisis - his affair with her younger sister
Cristina – appear six blocks away in Rivera's National Palace
mural.
A panorama of Aztec life, Spanish colonial depredations and a
paean to rebellion, the mural glamorizes Cristina as a
benevolent educator, seated with her children, her fair skin
glistening and green eyes translucent.
Standing behind, as if secondary, Kahlo looks dowdy, her
expression blank and complexion a dull brown.
Heartbroken by the affair, Kahlo's self-portraits took a
lacerating turn, symbolized in extricated hearts, sheared hair
and a torso-piercing spear.
The couple divorced in 1939 but remarried in 1940.
In 1947, he portrayed Kahlo as a mother-like figure to his
childhood self in “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda
Central”, housed at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum one mile (1.5
km) west of the National Palace.
[to top of second column] |
Looking protective, Kahlo rests a hand on the shoulder of Rivera,
depicted as a boy hand-in-hand with a skeleton. Cupped in Kahlo's
other hand is the yin and yang symbol of complimentarity.
To the south, in the leafy Coyoacan district, is her Blue House
family home. Now the Frida Kahlo Museum, it is a mecca of
memorabilia visited by over 350,000 people last year.
Its current exhibit, sponsored by Vogue, showcases Kahlo's dress
designs and colorful garments, largely inspired by natives of the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and notes her influence on contemporary
couturiers like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Givenchy.
The couple’s other residence, also a museum, is in adjacent San
Angel.
Its separate him-and-her house-studios are linked by an aerial
footbridge.
Rising on a lava bed 8 km (five miles) west is Rivera's pyramid-like
Anahuacalli museum built with volcanic stone. It displays more than
2,200 archeological artifacts.
Rivera instructed he and Kahlo be interred there in side-by-side
niches.
She predeceased him, dying in 1954 at the age of 47. He lived
another three years. Against his wishes, he was buried in Mexico's
Rotunda of Illustrious Men. Kahlo's ashes stayed at the Blue House.
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Larry King)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
