Kahlo and Rivera

The Boston Globe

ART REVIEW

Kahlo and Rivera: power couple

By Sebastian Smee

DETROIT — 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. 

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Frida Kahlo’s “Self Portrait with Cropped Hair.”

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. 

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” a new exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, focuses on the year this illustrious Mexican double act spent in the city. Organized by Mark Rosenthal, it’s not the first exhibition on Kahlo and Rivera in recent times; two years ago, three North American museums collaborated on “Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting.” Yet given their fame, it’s surprising how few exhibitions have addressed these astonishing artists together. 

The DIA show has a tight, scene-setting prologue and a more lavish epilogue that conveys some of the harrowing brilliance of Kahlo’s post-Detroit career. The highlight is a wall of Kahlo’s self-portraits, which includes the celebrated “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair” (1940) from the Museum of Modern Art, and “Double-Portrait of Diego and I” (1944) – a tiny image showing the right half of Rivera’s head conjoined with the left half of Rivera’s, both textured like braille, the remarkable image obsessively framed in shells.