The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera had divorced in 1939 and remarried a year later, and by 1949 they had settled into something calmer. She painted that truce as a set of nested embraces. A vast day-and-night sky cradles the Mexican earth, the earth cradles Frida, and Frida holds a grown, naked Diego across her lap like an oversized infant, a third eye on his forehead. She could not have children, and she often called him her baby. At her feet sits the hairless dog, named here for Xolotl, the Aztec dog-god who guides the dead through the underworld. The desert plants split down the middle, one side lush and one side dry, the way older Mexican belief paired life with death rather than opposing them.