And so to the latest episode of the Frida and Diego telenovela. No matter that both died in the Fifties: they live on through their art and larger-than-life personae, plus the mythology that’s built up around them as two tempestuous halves of art’s most famous couple.
Our previous update came last summer, when Frida and Diego appeared on either side of Mexico’s new 500 peso bills. A quite brilliant artistic conceit on Bank of Mexico’s part, bringing the pair together yet simultaneously keeping them apart – obverse and reverse, yin and yang, sun and moon, Huitzilopochtli and Coyolxauhqui – as had so often been the case in life.
Famously, Frida and Diego couldn’t live with or without each other, their relationship marked by marriage, divorce, remarriage, tantrums, affairs (hers with Trotsky, among others; his with her sister Cristina, among others), miscarriages, abortions, accidents (a tram crash at 18 left her crippled for life), passion, patriotism, murder (Trotsky’s, most notably) and even a little art.
The soap’s latest instalment comes in Chichester, where – for the first time ever in Britain – works by both artists are showing side-by-side. The fact it includes just three or four quality Kahlos and barely one decent Rivera is neither here nor there: this is a riveting show.
Its 40 works are drawn from the collection of the late Jacques and Natasha Gelman, Eastern European émigrés who settled and married in Mexico in the Forties. In time, Natasha and Frida would become good friends, but their initial exchanges were marked by jealousy and animosity.
Rivera was then his country’s most famous artist, having pioneered the Mexican Muralist movement and painted – in praise of the Mexican revolution – endless square metres of fresco on state buildings.
At six foot and 21 stone, he was a giant in every sense, and in 1942 Jacques Gelman commissioned him to paint his wife’s portrait. The resulting canvas bursts with erotic tension. Draped immaculately in décolleté white satin, Natasha stretches out languorously on a blue sofa, like a Hollywood sex siren: she’s blonde, bejewelled and surrounded by a cornucopia of white calla lilies, as long, lithe and luxuriant as she is.
Little wonder that when Jacques asked Frida to paint her own portrait of his wife a year later, the response was far from flattering. Natasha boasts a fine fur coat, diamond earrings and freshly curled hair, yet she looks cold and distant – the epitome of Slavic sullenness and antithesis of the ever-colourful Frida. So pronounced are her curls, indeed, they resemble the horns of a ram.
