Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo And Paris In Two Exhibitions

Forbes

15-04-2025

Frida Kahlo, 'Frieda and Diego Rivera (Frieda y Diego Rivera),' 1931. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, gift of Albert M. Bender.
© 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And Paris.
Art history's most beloved and toxic couple both spent time away from their native Mexico in Paris.
Rivera (1886–1957) lived there for roughly 10 years. He loved it. He made friends with figures who, like him, would become the icons of Modern art. He fell in love–not with Kahlo.
Kahlo spent two months in Paris and mostly hated it. In typical Kahlo fashion, she fell ill.
Kahlo's and Rivera's experiences with Paris are brought to life in vivid, intimate detail through a pair of unconnected exhibitions on view at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (Rivera) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Kahlo).
Diego Rivera (Guanajuato, Mexico, 1886 - 1957, Mexico City, Mexico), 'Dos Mujeres (Two Women),' 1914, oil on canvas, 77 3/4 x 63 1/2 in., Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection: Gift of Abby Rockefeller Mauzé. 1955.010.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock's interest in Rivera stems from his Cubist masterpiece, Dos Mujeres (Two Women) (1914). Yes, Rivera had a Cubist phase, a phase developed in Paris during the height of the Cubist movement. Yes, the Arkansas museum possesses the painting as part of its permanent collection.
The painting was gifted to AMFA by Abigail 'Babs' Rockefeller Mauzé (1903-1976), daughter of Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960) and Abigail 'Abby' Greene Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948), in 1955. It was the first art donation to the Museum by a member of the Rockefeller family and the first genuinely modernist work of art to enter an Arkansas museum collection; a masterpiece at that. It is one of Rivera's largest and most important Cubist works, a picture that would be prized at The Met or the Louvre or the Prado or anywhere else in the world. Other members of the Rockefeller family later gifted artworks to the Museum, many of which are now foundational to the collection.
Babs Rockefeller was the older sister of Winthrop Rockefeller, who first moved to Arkansas in 1953 for business pursuits and later became the state's governor.
The painting was given to Babs by her mother. How Abby Rockefeller acquired Dos Mujeres is not precisely known. AMFA research suggests she purchased it through Frances Flynn Paine, Rivera's American sales agent and a close friend of the Rockefellers.
Rivera and the Rockefellers have a storied history.
Famously, in 1932, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Rivera to paint a giant mural on the lobby wall of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. Into the mural, Rivera, a communist, painted a portrait Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. This had not been part of Rivera's initial design.
Discovering this, avowed capitalist Nelson Rockefeller asked the artist to change or remove it.
No dice.
Rivera was taken off the project and the mural–a treasure, a room-filling testament to artistic brilliance, a would-be, should-be, bucket list pilgrimage for art lovers worldwide–was subsequently destroyed.
Despite this, many Rockefellers continued collecting and supporting Rivera throughout his career.
The centerpiece of AMFA's 'Rivera's Paris' exhibition, on view through May 18, 2025, and free to visit, is Dos Mujeres (Two Women).
Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957), 'Portrait of Ilya Ehrenburg,' 1915. Oil on canvas, 43 3/8 x 35 1/4 in. (110.2 x 89.5 cm). Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas. Algur H. Meadows Collection, MM.68.12.
Photography by Michael Bodycomb.
As an artist, Rivera was a child prodigy. Following formal training at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City and showing great promise, Rivera's teacher, Gerardo Murillo, provided his pupil a letter of introduction to Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera.
With money from a three-year study abroad grant provided by the Veracruz government and further supported financially by the sale of all 26 works he presented in his student exhibition, a 20-year-old Rivera arrived in Spain. He spent two years studying in Chicharro's Madrid studio with off hours at the Prado museum studying Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya. Rivera travelled widely throughout the country. He met Spain's famous 'master of light,' Joaquín Sorolla.
In 1909, Rivera moved to Paris, at that time, a hotbed of radical artistic experimentation and the center of the Western and Modern art worlds. Cubism was at its peak. Picasso's Cubist and modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was produced in 1907. It shocked the world and remains one of the most important paintings in art history.
'I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso,' Diego Rivera said.
He considered Picasso his 'idol.' The two met in Paris and became good friends. Rivera also befriended Amedeo Modigliani. And Piet Mondrian. Rivera's Paris circle additionally included Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, and Jean Cocteau–the exhibition has a fantastic portrait of Cocteau by Rivera. Marc Chagall was there. And Matisse.
Paris at the time was bursting with artists from Russian, Poland, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. Hundreds of Latin American artists like Rivera.
Along with drawings and paintings by Rivera, works by his influences and contemporaries including Modigliani, Cézanne, Picasso, Chagall, Sorolla, and others are featured in 'Rivera in Paris,' providing a rich portrait of the artist's life at the time. In addition to the artworks, detailed wall text and contemporary photographs of the artists, their studios, and Paris taken at the time add delicious context.
Between 1908 and 1914, Cubism was all the rage in the City of Lights. Substituting single-point perspective, Cubist artists portrayed subjects from multiple perspectives, usually using abstracted and fragmented forms. Rivera's Cubist period is little-known; this exhibition and Dos Mujeres seeks to correct that.
One of the two women in Dos Mujeres is Russian artist Angelina Beloff (1879–1969). She stands at the right. She was also a Paris transplant. She and Rivera met through his Spanish artist-friend, María Gutierrez Blanchard, in Bruges, Belgium 1909. Beloff would become Rivera's common law wife in 1911, long before he met Kahlo.
The other woman in Dos Mujeres, seated, is their close friend, fellow artist, and neighbor, Alma Dolores Bastián.
Rivera briefly returned to Mexico in 1910-1911, a period that coincided with the Mexican Revolution. A massively successful show emboldened him financially and artistically to return to Paris. He also missed Beloff. Reunited in Paris, the couple lived together for the next 10 years, though never officially married.
'During all that time, she gave me everything a good woman can give to a man. In return, she received from me all the heartache and misery that a man can inflict upon a woman,' Rivera, as quoted in exhibition wall text, said.
As Kahlo would be, Beloff was treated shabbily by Rivera. Perhaps along with Cubist theory he and Picasso commiserated over drinks on the Left Bank about their shared terrible mistreatment of women.
Rivera and Beloff's relationship produced a son, Diego, who died at 14-months. This strained the couple and resulted in their separation. Rivera, typically, soon took a lover and had an on-again, off-again, multi-year relationship producing a daughter. As would be the case many years later with Kahlo, an ill-fated reconciliation with Beloff was attempted.
AMFA organizers went through great pains in securing the loan of a wonderful 1914 still life with bottle by Beloff from a private collection in Mexico. Beloff ultimately moved to Mexico and had a relatively successful career there.
Rivera's time in Paris coincided with the onset of World War I which brought terrible devastation to the city. Fortuitously, Rivera, Beloff, and a group of friends had left for Mallorca just prior to the war's beginning. Throughout his time in Paris, Rivera travelled widely across Europe.
Shortly before leaving for good and returning to Mexico, the artist received a grant to visit Italy and saw and studied murals there. That's where he picked up the skill that would lead to his becoming the world's greatest muralist and one of its most famous artists–then and now.
'He didn't descend from the heavens fully formed as the Mexican muralist that we know him to be,' Catherine Walworth, Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr. Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, told Forbes.com.
'Rivera in Paris' and Chicago's Kahlo in Paris exhibitions show how the two were both part of wide communities of artists, all sharing and shaping each other's work, defeating the 'Lone Genius' myth of artmaking. From the Renaissance through today, the world's greatest artists have influences, teachers, mentors, and colleagues they take direction and inspiration from.
'It's a cacophony of voices (in Paris) and (Rivera and his circle are) picking up on different influences, and some of those influences are Spanish religious paintings, El Greco, it's not always the extremely modernist sources we expect,' Walworth said.
By the time Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921, he had spent most of his adulthood in Paris.
'What I love about this era, what everyone thinks of New York in the 1950s with the Abstract Expressionists being rowdy and competing with each other and hanging out at Cedar Tavern, there was a whole even wilder bunch of people in Paris doing that in the aughts and teens and twenties,' Walworth said. 'This moment is incredibly exciting, and Paris is not monolithic. It's not a story about one identity. These people came from all over the world.'
Frida Kahlo, 'Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (Autorretrato con pelo cortado),' 1940. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.
© 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © 2025 MoMA, N.Y.
A 15-year-old Frida Kahlo first met 37-year-old Diego Rivera in 1922, the year after his return from Paris. Rivera was flush with all the currents of Modernism, gargantuan talent, career success, and stories of hobnobbing with fellow legends of the day while barnstorming around Europe. This was before the bus accident that nearly took Kahlo's life.
The couple were reintroduced in 1927, entering a passionate love affair. Marriage, affairs, miscarriages, abortions, divorce, remarriage.
'Frida Kahlo's Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,' on view through July 13, 2025, at the Art Institute of Chicago focuses on a pivotal period in 1939 when Kahlo resided at the Paris home of Mary Reynolds (1891–1950), an American avant-garde bookbinder, whose home was a hub for the city's artistic community. Kahlo was invited to visit Paris by André Breton, the architect of European Surrealism. He had visited Kahlo in Mexico the year prior. Rivera did not accompany her.
The show illuminates the period of Kahlo's rise as an international artist and her chance meeting with Reynolds, a lesser known, but highly compelling artist and maker of innovative, one-of-a-kind book bindings. During Kahlo's first and only trip to Paris for two months early in 1939, she fell ill and was invited by Reynolds to recover at her home. This home—where Reynolds lived with long-time partner Marcel Duchamp—was a living work of art and abundantly installed with their own artworks, from unique books to paintings and sculptures from close friends and artists.
In this space and in her friendship with Reynolds, Kahlo found new inspiration and set off down a new artistic path for the remainder of her career.
The exhibition features extraordinary loans from public and private collections across the United States, Mexico, and Europe, and also draws on the Art Institute's own extensive Mary Reynolds Collection. Reynolds was born in Minneapolis. Following her death in 1950, Reynolds's brother, Art Institute of Chicago Trustee Frank Brookes Hubachek, collaborated with Duchamp to place her bindings and collection of books and papers at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago.
On view are 100 objects, including seven of Kahlo's most important self-portraits, a stupefying assemblage of her greatest works on loan from the greatest art museums in the world–the paintings for which she's become an icon, an unsurpassed self-portraitist, the best of the best, art history textbooks come to life–letters written by Kahlo recounting her time in Paris, book bindings, works on paper, photographs, and more.
In addition to works by Kahlo and Reynolds, the exhibition also incorporates many artworks created for Reynolds by artists who socialized in her home and welcomed Kahlo into their circle, including Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Constantin Brâncuși. These works form a collective portrait of the Paris avant-garde during Kahlo's time in Europe on the eve of World War II, particularly the Surrealists, a generation after Rivera first arrived there.