Frida Kahlo's passion on paper

I suffered two serious accidents in my life... the first was a tram that knocked me down, and the second was Diego.

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is one of the most exceptional, but also the most sensitive figures of contemporary art. As an eight-year-old girl, she suffered from cerebral palsy, and a decade later, a student at the prestigious Mexican National Preparatory School had a serious car accident.

The metal bar pierced her stomach and uterus and almost took away her ability to walk. Plaster and bandages covered her body for three whole months, but when she took them off, she not only regained the old but also gained a new power: she began to make safe movements with her legs and the most beautiful movements with her hands and brushes. During breaks from operation to operation, from pain to pain, the journey of one of the most influential painters of modern art began in the hospital.

Everything about her was specific: life, appearance and style. The shorter leg marked by the disease, loneliness and talent led her to build something new and to become recognizable for her special, unrepeatable colorful skirts, and then to spill those colors on canvases in the most original way.

The accident and illness left a mark on her, and she responded with an even stronger mark on life.

Only a mountain can know the core of another mountain.

Two years after the accident, in 1927, Frida met a painter whose works she admired and who soon became her mentor. His name was Diego Rivera. Two years after meeting, despite Frida's mother's objections, the two painters got married and that marriage certainly marked the entire history of modern art. Both had numerous affairs, yet remained committed to each other.

Among the most famous affairs that Frida had during her marriage are those with the French singer, dancer and actress Josephine Baker and the Russian Marxist Lev Trotsky. Even so, her relationship with Diego was a unique relationship of surreal passion and endless love.

The truth is so great that I would not want to speak or sleep or listen or love. To feel myself trapped, without fear of blood, outside of time and magic, in your fears, your great suffering, within the very beats of your heart. From all this madness, if I asked you for it, I know, in your silence, it would only be confusion. I ask you for violence in senselessness, and you give me grace, light and your warmth. I wish I could paint you, but I have no colors, because you have too many in my confusion, in the tangible form of my great love.

Nothing compares to your hands, nothing to the green-gold color of your eyes. My body has been filled with you for days. You are the mirror of the night, the violent light of lightning, the humidity of the earth. The hollows of your armpits are my shelters. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel the life that springs from your flowery fountain, which mine never ceases to fill, to feel all my nerves that are yours.

My Diego,

mirror of the night,

Your eyes are green swords in my flesh, waves between hands.

You are all in a space full of sound - you are in the shadows and in the night. Your name is AUXOCHROME – the one that captures color. CHROMOPHORE menu - the one that gives color.

You are every possible combination of numbers. Life. My desire is to understand the lines that make up the movement of the shadows. You fulfill, I receive. Your word travels the whole universe and reaches my cells which are my stars and then travels back to your cells which are my light.

It was that of many years kept in our body. Chained words we could not utter, except on the lips of dreams. Everything was surrounded by the green wonder of the landscape of your body. On your form the petals of the flowers responded to my touch, the gurgling of the stream. Everything was like fruit in the juice of your lips, the blood of your pomegranate, the sight of mamea and purified pineapple. I held you to my chest and the monster of your form entered my blood through my fingertips. The smell of oak, memories of walnut, the green breath of ash.

Views and landscapes = I followed them with a kiss. Forgetting words will create a precise language to understand the flash behind your closed eyes. You are untouchable here and you are the whole universe to which I give the shape of my room. Your absence gives birth to a tremor in the ticking of the clock, in the flickering of the light; you breathe through the mirror. From you to my hands, I caress your whole body and I'm with you for a minute and I'm with myself for a moment. And my blood is a miracle that flows through veins of air from my heart to yours.

The green wonder of the landscape of my body becomes your nature. I fly through it to caress the sides of the hills with my fingertips, my hands sink into the shadowy valleys in that need to possess and I am wrapped in the embrace of tender branches green and cold. I permeate half of the whole earth, her heart colors me with coal and my whole body is touched by the freshness of tender leaves. Their dew is the sweat of ever-never lovers.

It's not it's love or tenderness or affection, it's life itself, my life is what I found in your hands, your lips and breasts. I can taste the almonds from your lips in my mouth. Our worlds never went outside. Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

Your presence hovers for a moment or two, as if enveloping my whole being in eager anticipation of the morning. I notice that I am with you. In a moment filled with feelings, my hands are immersed in oranges, and my body feels wrapped in your arms.

To the silent giver of life to the worlds, what is most important is non-illusion. The morning is breaking - friendly reds, big blues, hands full of leaves, noisy birds, fingers in hair, nests of pigeons, a rare understanding of human struggle, the simplicity of a meaningless song, a crazy wind in my heart - don't let it rhyme girl - sweet chocolate of ancient Mexico , storms in the blood coming from the mouth - convulsions, predictions, laughter and pearl needles for some gift for the seventh of July, I asked, I got, I sing, I sang, I will sing from now on our magic - love.

Frida's love letters to Diego span a twenty-seven-year relationship and speak of the deepest and strongest connection these two people shared. Through the letters collected in the book The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, we discover a true eruption of emotions, a cauldron in which desire, suffering, devotion, longing, happiness and joy are mixed. In breathtaking tension, the written words float in the same celestial sphere as those exchanged by Georgia O Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, Ennis Nin and Henry Miller, and Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

These letters certainly give a unique stamp to a time, a special life and round off the picture of an exceptional woman of the most beautiful colors that came together in the name of Frida. We hope that you enjoyed them, that you enjoyed them and that Lola helped you experience the strength and complexity of emotions that permeated this unusual relationship.