Frida and Diego Rivera

Frida and Diego Rivera is an oil-on-canvas double portrait by Frida Kahlo, painted in San Francisco in April 1931; it belongs to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Albert M. Bender Collection, gift of Albert M. Bender). Made two years after the couple married, it is usually described as a wedding portrait, painted for the San Francisco collector and Rivera supporter Albert M. Bender during their first stay in the United States.

Rivera fills the left of the vertical canvas, dark-suited and looming from edge to edge, a palette and four brushes in his right hand; Kahlo stands smaller at his side in a green dress and bright red fringed shawl, her head tilted toward him while her eyes meet the viewer's. They hold hands loosely at the centre. Above them a bird carries a ribbon inscribed in Spanish, which the museum renders as: 'Here you see us, me, Frieda Kahlo, with my adored husband Diego Rivera; I painted these portraits in the lovely city of San Francisco, California, for our friend, Mr. Albert Bender, in April of 1931.'

The banner is a piece of self-assertion inside a marriage portrait: Rivera holds the painter's tools in the picture, but the first-person inscription names Kahlo as the maker of 'these portraits'. The canvas, 100.1 by 78.7 centimetres, had its first documented public showing at the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists in late 1931 and was lent to a San Diego fair in 1936 — the year Bender gave it to SFMOMA, where it remains on display.