Zwei Akte im Wald

Kahlo made this small panel in 1939, a hard year for her. Her marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera was coming apart, and by the end of it they had divorced. In the painting two naked women rest together in a dense forest, one pale-skinned and one brown-skinned, the fair one lying back into the other's lap. Kahlo often split herself in two like this, the European side of her family and the Mexican, the two halves she felt she carried, and here they are folded into a single quiet embrace. A monkey watches from the leaves, an old emblem of temptation. She first called the picture The Earth Itself, and she gave it to the film star Dolores del Rio, a close friend she was rumoured to have loved. The forest grows right up to the edge of the frame, tangled and alive, closing around the two of them.