'Always and forever'
As we gear up to the annual love-fest that is Valentine’s Day, few would deny that there is always something special about receiving a handwritten letter or card through the post from someone special.
With that in mind, this week, we’ll be sharing some of the more notable handwritten love missives sent from one bleeding heart to another throughout the ages.
Today, we bring you one of Frida Kahlo’s passionate hand-written love letters to Diego Rivera.
Mexican painter and reconstructionist Frida Kahlo is among the most remarkable figures of contemporary culture.
Born of a German father and a Mexican mother in 1907, Kahlo was almost crippled by polio and then terribly injured in a near-fatal bus accident in 1927, when an iron rod penetrated her uterus. She spent the next three months in a full-body cast and endured 30 operations and a lifetime of pain.
While recovering, Kahlo started to paint. It was here where she met the already prominent Mexican painter, Rivera, who became her artistic mentor and lover. He was 42, she 20. They married in 1929, but the marriage was notoriously tempestuous and they divorced in 1939.
For a long time, Kahlo was known mainly as Rivera’s wife. But now, the paintings of Frida and the huge, exuberant murals of her husband form the national art of Mexico.
Kahlo’s dramatic artistic style, a flamboyant mix of fantastical and realistic, magical and folk, was inspired by both Mexico itself and her own extraordinary life. All of this is revealed in her letters to Rivera, in which physical love and emotional turbulence are often expressed in the colours of a painter.
‘Diego: Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth.
‘The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves, which are yours.’
