Diego and I, 1949 by Frida Kahlo
In this painting, Diego and I, shows Frida's great anguish over Diego Rivera. When he
had an affair with Maria Felix almost divorced Frida. Maria Felix was a beautiful film star and as well an intimate friend of Frida's. Even though
Frida was trying to joke about this affair, as she always did with Rivera's other affairs, Diego and I shows that she was deeply hurt.
In this paint she is has loose hair swirling around her neck which indicates strangulation. She lost her mask of reserve. It's obvious that the cause
of her distress is her husband Diego, for which her eyebrows serve as platform. And a third eye, which alludes to Rivera's prevalent mental and visual keenness, opens in her spouse's brow. Of the pyramid
of five eyes that post of this painting, just Frida's meet our own. Diego, whose creative venue was surrounding and epic, gazes out over viwer's heads into the past.
That Rivera was always in Frida's thoughts is revealed also in her dairy, much of which is a love poem to him: "DIEGO. I am alone." Then a few pages later: "My Diego. I am no longer alone. You accompany me. You
put me to sleep and you revive me." Another time she drew two faces that look like vases. "Don't cry at me," one of them says. The other answers: "Yes. I'll cry at you." In a more romantic moment, she wrote: "Diego: Nothing is
comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. My body fills itself with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent light of lightning. The dampness of the earth. Your
armpit is my refuge. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel your life shoot forth from your fountain-flower which mine keeps in order to fill all the paths of my nerves which belong to you."
