The Two Fridas

Two Fridas sit side by side against a bruised, stormy sky and hold hands: one in stiff Victorian white with her heart exposed and severed, the other in Tehuana dress holding a small portrait of Diego Rivera, a single artery running between them and clamped shut with surgical forceps. Painted in 1939 as her marriage to Rivera collapsed, it is her largest canvas and the most explicit of her self-portraits about doubled identity — European and Mexican, loved and abandoned. Held by the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, it is the work that carries her reputation past biography and into the canon.