Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting

Conventional wisdom says it’s futile to try to figure out why a couple of seemingly ill-fit people stay together. You can speculate, but unless you are one of the players, how can you possibly know for sure? And sometimes, even the people involved in the relationship can’t pinpoint their reasons for remaining a pair. Yet from the moment Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera met in the late 1920s until now, many have tried to answer that question. Why did Kahlo and Rivera stay together? She was the petite, self-taught painter of some of the 20th century’s most riveting portraits of suffering, misery and vitality. He was the gargantuan, classically trained artist and titan of the 20th century’s muralist movement. And their 25-year marriage seemed the very definition of tumult, betrayal and grief.