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The Artists’ Way

Two of Mexico’s most iconic artists, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, have inspired millions of admirers, but their most ardent of followers can actually walk in their footsteps.

By Christina Hoag

If there's one story in Mexico’s rich history of art and culture that has captured the international imagination, it’s that of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
The tale of the two artists, which intertwines painting, passion and politics, has inspired Hollywood movies and documentaries, books and a slew of commercial trinkets, even down to “Frida” brand vodka.
But nothing beats following the Rivera-Kahlo trail around Mexico City to gain insight into the artists and their work.
There are so many sights to see on the trail that it takes a couple days to make all the stops—from Rivera’s famed murals depicting Mexico’s history around the Zocalo, to the Casa Azul, the Blue House where Kahlo lived, to the modest Museo Casa de Trotsky, where the couple spent many an evening discussing politics with the exiled Leon Trotsky.
Born in 1886, Rivera was one of Los Tres Grandes, Mexico’s “big three” muralists—the others being José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros. Rivera and his compatriots used walls to raise political consciousness about themes such as the oppression of Indians and the Mexican Revolution.
Rivera painted larger-than-life shapes, figures and objects such as big limbed Indian peasants, revolutionaries and geometric factories, all in vivid colors. His influences trace back to Cubism, Impressionism and the Italian Renaissance, which he studied in Europe as a young man.
Kahlo, his wife 20 years his junior, was an accomplished artist in her own right, but during her lifetime her work was largely overshadowed by her husband. It wasn’t until decades after her death in 1954 that she became an international icon who attracted her own devotees. Her style is rife with symbolism and intensely personal, often depicting self-portraits and events from her own life.
It was a tortured love between these two creative talents. Kahlo was heartbroken by Rivera’s incessant philandering, and she engaged in her own extramarital affairs with both men and women. The couple married in 1929, divorced in 1940 and remarried less than a year later.
Most aficionados start delving into the story of Frida and Diego with a tour of Rivera’s powerful murals, concentrated around the center of Mexico City.
At the National Palace, which borders the east side of the huge plaza known as the Zocalo, Rivera’s colorful artwork lines the interior courtyard. The walls are alive with depictions of centuries of Mexican civilization, starting with Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god believed to be personified in Cortes, and ending with the 1910 revolution.
More murals can be seen nearby at the Secretaria de Educación Pública, where Rivera was commissioned to paint some 235 panels in 1921-1922 when the building was constructed. Themes include agriculture, handcrafts and industry in the first courtyard, and festivals and markets in the second.
From there Rivera went on to tackle the theme of “Creation” at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria from 1923 to 1933. He decorated the amphitheater’s walls, while Orozco and Siqueiros were assigned to paint other parts of the building.
One of Rivera’s most reknown murals is at the next stop: the Palacio de Bellas Artes, at the east end of the Alameda, a short walk from downtown. The Fine Arts Palace houses the work “Man at the Crossing of the Ways,” which Rivera originally painted at the Rockefeller family’s behest at the Rockefeller Center in New York in the 1930s. The Rockefellers ended up destroying the piece because of it depicted anti-capitalist themes, showing the struggle between social classes and the dehumanizing side of industrialization. Rivera returned home and resurrected the work, painting the mural even more dramatically than he had in New York.
Another famed Rivera work is the huge mural titled “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park,” painted in 1947. The work, which measures 15 by 4 meters, is housed in its own building, the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, which was originally the Hotel del Prado until it was badly damaged in the 1985 earthquake. The following year the present building was constructed as a home for the mural, which depicts historical figures who walked in the city—from Cortes and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz through President Benito Juárez, Gen. Santa Anna, Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota, José Marti, Porfirio Diaz, Francisco Madero and Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
Rivera’s murals don’t stop here. In the Museo Nacional de Historia, a Rivera work stretches around a huge hall of La Lucha de Independencia.
For a more personal glimpse of the man who was the artist, however, a trip to the suburbs is in order. In the quaint village of San Angel, the Museo Estudio Diego Rivera is in itself one of the city’s architectural landmarks. Architect Juan O’Gorman, a close friend of Rivera’s, designed the two-story European modernist home in 1931.
On the ground floor exists a gallery for changing exhibits, while upstairs is Rivera’s studio, where he sketched out his famous murals and painted his smaller works.
The house was left largely as it was at the time of Rivera’s death in 1957. His denim jacket and shoes rest on a wicker chair and unfinished canvases stand on an easel, as if waiting for their creator’s return.
The studio also houses some 6,000 artifacts, including Rivera’s collections of pre-Columbian pottery and Judas figures, papier maché dummies that are stuffed with firecrackers and lit on Easter Saturday.
Some of Rivera’s works on canvas can be viewed nearby at the Museo Arte Alvar y Carmen de Carrillo Gil, known as one of Mexico City’s best art galleries. It boasts both a permanent collection of Mexican and foreign masters, as well temporary exhibits.
A short distance away lies Coyoacan, which means Place of the Coyotes in Nahuatl, where Kahlo’s Casa Azul and Trotsky’s house are located.
The Casa Azul is just that—a cobalt blue, Spanish-colonial style house with rooms situated around an interior courtyard. Kahlo was born here in 1907 and later lived here until her death in 1954. Rivera donated the house to the government in 1955 so his wife’s memory would be preserved.
The house is a fascinating window into Kahlo’s Bohemian-style life and personality. Exhibits include the Mexican regional garments she was fond of wearing—elaborately embroidered blouses, long flouncy skirts and heavy jewelry. They also reveal her passion for folk art—religious figurines, ceramics and lacquerware.
Other exhibits, including her paintings, show the suffering she endured throughout her life. Many of her works reveal her distress over her husband’s unfaithfulness, her inability to bear children, as well as the physical pain throughout her body.
When she was 17, she was severely injured in a horrendous streetcar accident, in which she was impaled by an iron hand rail. It left her with pain that dogged her throughout her life. It was while convalescing from the accident that young Frida began to paint.
The body cast she wore now sits on her bed. On the ceiling above is a mirror she used to paint her self-portraits while bedridden.
Her emotional pain is displayed in another item on her bed—a pillow embroidered with the words “Don’t forget me, my love,” a message to her adulterous husband.
Pictures of Mao, Stalin and Trotsky dot the wall, underlining Kahlo’s allegiance to communism. In 1937, Rivera used his influence with President Lázaro Cárdenas to allow Leon Trotsky to move to Mexico after Josef Stalin took power in the Soviet Union.
Trotsky, with whom Kahlo is said to have had a brief affair, lived for a time in the Casa Azul before moving to his own house a short walk away. That house, now the Museo Casa Leon Trotsky, was the scene of Trotsky’s murder at the hands of a Spanish Stalinist agent. Pictures of the Trotskys with Rivera and Kahlo are on display.
Twenty-five of Kahlo’s 143 paintings, including famed works such as “The Broken Column” and “Henry Ford Hospital,” can be viewed in the private collection that’s been opened to the public at the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City’s Xochimilco district, which is famed for its festooned canals. The museum-house, set in the grounds of a 16th century monastery, also displays 137 works by Rivera.
If you have more time, you can follow the Rivera-Kahlo trail outside Mexico City —the house where Rivera was born in Guanajuato is now a museum and more murals are on display at the Detroit Institute of Man and Machine and the New York Workers School, among other locations.
But Mexico City provides the most intimate look into the lives of these two intriguing personalities that loom large in Mexico’s cultural history.

Along the Way

Want to know where Diego and Frida made their marks in and around Mexico City? Be sure to stop here, among other places.

Museo Frida Khalo
Casa Azul
247 Londres and Allende
in Coyoacan
55-54-5999
www.museofridakahlo.org

Palacio de Bellas Artes
Eje Central Lazaro
Cardenas and Av. Juarez
52-55-5512-1410
www.bellasartes.gob.mx

Museo Casa de
Leon Trotsky
Av. Rio Churubusco 410
Col. Del Carmen, Coyoacan
52-55-5554-0687
museocasadeleontrotsky.
blogspot.com

Secretaria de Educación Pública
Jalapa No 15, Piso 10
Col. Roma
52-55-55-14-3138 ext 2008
www.educacion.df.gob.mx/se/se.htm

Palacio Nacional
Av. Pino Suarez
Corregidora Esquina Guatemala
52-55-2232-8550
www.apartados.hacienda.gob.mx/cultura/museo_virtual_palacio_nal/shcp_mv.htm