To celebrate its rebirth as an independent museum after the city’s brush with bankruptcy, the Detroit Institute of Arts is mounting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, focusing on what is arguably the quintessential Detroit work of art, Detroit Industry, Rivera’s monumental twenty-seven-panel mural for the museum’s courtyard.
Preparatory drawing for Pharmaceutics, part of the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, 1932. Detroit Institute of Arts.
At the invitation of the museum’s then director William R. Valentiner, the Marxist Mexican artist and his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, arrived in Detroit in April 1932, and over the course of the next year he completed the commission that would transform both their lives. The show juxtaposes approximately seventy works created by the two artists before, during, and after their year in Detroit, providing a comprehensive context for the impact the city had on their creative development — both together and apart. Previously, the couple’s work had focused primarily on Mexican politics, society, and communal identity — Rivera on the dynamics between farmers, laborers, and indigenous peoples, and the less-well-known Kahlo on folk art motifs and culture as the purest expression of Mexican heritage. Rivera considered Detroit Industry the high point of his career. For Kahlo, who was unhappy in Michigan, the time there led to the deeply personal subject matter that augured her now-famous artistic identity.
Self Portrait with Monkey by Frida Kahlo, 1945. Robert Brady Museum, Cuernavaca, Mexico; photograph by Tachi. © 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit • Detroit Institute of Arts • to July 12 • dia.org
