Sierra Laico

AP Art History

January 16, 2019

#140 The Two Fridas and #143 Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park

Frida Kahlo is famous for her rejection of the conventional idea of beauty and social

expectations of women during a period when many would sacrifice their personal ambitions just

to live entirely in the domestic sphere. In this piece especially, Kahlo used self-portrait to explore

this topic as well as her culturally mixed heritage.

The Two Fridas (1939) is an oil on canvas painting depicting two figures sitting beside

each other, both self-portraits of Kahlo herself, seemingly representative of her in two different

periods of her life. The figure on the left depicts Frida in traditional Tehuana costume with a

broken heart, expressing her desperation and loneliness resulting from her separation from

husband Diego Rivera. The figure to the right depicts Frida in modern clothing, expressing her

newfound sense of independence following said separation. The piece also acts as a

representation of Kahlo’s dual heritage, for her father was German and her mother Mestizo (a

mix of Spanish and Native American). The piece commented on her cultural ambiguity and

suggests a statement regarding her own sense of cultural identity as well as her identity as both a

married and divorced woman.

Diego Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park depicts hundreds

of characters from 400 years of Mexican history gathered together for a stroll through Mexico

City’s largest park. Though it’s hard to tell at first glance, Rivera intentionally put the figures in

an order in which tells a narrative about the history of Mexico, starting with its conquest and

colonization, moving to its fight for independence and the revolution, and concluding with
modern achievements. Standing among these historical figures, a depiction of wife Frida Kahlo

appears behind a child-like version of Rivera, holding a Yin and Yang to symbolize the couple’s

complex relationship and the effect they had on each other. This is comparable to the way Kahlo

depicts their relationship in her paintings and the effect their separation had on her in The Two

Fridas particularly.

These two pieces, though very different in composition and approach, have more

similarities than what meets the eye. Both touch on Mexican heritage, Rivera’s being a

celebration of it while Kahlo’s is ultimately bringing it to question. Just from looking at these

pieces you are able to tell the amount of influence these people had on each other in both their

overall lives as well as their artwork, and it shows that though their relationship was very rocky

and at times even toxic, they go down in history as one of the greatest pairs in art history.