DIEGO RIVERA & FRIDA KAHLO

The celebrated Mexican artists revered their nation’s Aztec past

Diego Rivera was a prominent Mexican painter whose large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican art. Between 1922 and his death in 1957, Rivera painted murals in, among other places, Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit and New York City, and was noted for incorporating Aztec influences into his work.

Among his most famous murals is The History Of Mexico, commissioned for the stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City, which he painted between 1929 and 1935. The north section of the mural celebrates the richness of the Aztec world and places the sun at its centre. Here he depicts aspects of the Aztecs’ religion, including the revering of snakes and jaguars. The Aztecs remained a recurring theme throughout his work.

The same is true of his wife Frida Kahlo, who emerged as arguably the most famous Mexican painter of all time. Like her husband, with whom she shared a turbulent marriage, she was highly political and looked back to the echoes of her nation’s Aztec past. Her painting Self-portrait With

Thorn Necklace And Hummingbird from 1940, for example, mixes Christian and Aztec imagery, with the thorn necklace echoing Christ’s crown of thorns while at the same recalling Aztec rituals where priests performed self-mutilation with thorns and spines. The dead hummingbird around her neck, meanwhile, is thought to be sacred to Huitzilopochtli, the god of sun and war and the chief god of Tenochtitlán.