Forgive my not going to your house to say this in person, but given the circumstances and my condition, I’m not allowed to leave the room, not even to use the bathroom. Explore museums and play with Art Transfer, Pocket Galleries, Art Selfie, and more, http://www.museodoloresolmedo.org.mx/english/coleccperm/gfrida.html.

Especially now that I know what they are up to. That clash of interior and exterior forces – heart and trees – almost distracts us from the unexpected sweetness of the simple sign-off that Rivera has inscribed below her: “For the girl of my eyes”. These treasures might have come to light earlier save for a judgment call on the part of Dolores Olmedo, Rivera’s patron, former model, and friend. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Every man is the product of the social atmosphere in which he grows up and I am what I am…I had never had any morals at all and had lived only for pleasure where I found it. I could discern other people’s weaknesses easily, especially men’s, and then I would play upon them for no worthwhile reason. His decision to paint the portrait on asbestos shingle invests the work with a secret poignancy and suggests the alternatingly insulating and toxic nature of their love. Let’s not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. The references to amputation are both literal and metaphorical: No doubt, she was sincere, but this couple, rather than holding themselves accountable, excelled at reversals. Self-Portrait as Tehuana (1943) is often referred to as ‘Diego on my mind’ (Credit: Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, DF/DACS 2017). Good bye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you. What can we gather from the cockeyed, quizzical tilt of her own gaze, fixed as it is in dead space somewhere to our left, refusing either to run in parallel with his or engage ours? Kahlo’s remains were placed in Mexico City’s Rotunda of Illustrious Men, and have since been transferred to their home, now the Museo Frida Kahlo. Be happy and never seek me again. Rivera painted this portrait of Kahlo in 1939, and held onto it until his death in 1957 (Credit: Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, DF/DACS 2017) Nine years later, that innocent sense of serenity has sharpened into something rather more severe with the creation by Rivera of Portrait of Frida Kahlo (1939) – described by the institution that owns it, the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as “the only known easel portrait of his wife”. Among the many revelations when this chamber was belatedly unsealed in 2004, her clothing caused the biggest stir, particularly the ways in which the colorful garments were adapted to and informed by her physical disabilities. Take Frida and Diego Rivera (1931), the famous double portrait she painted two years after they married for the first time in 1931, when the couple were living in California’s Bay Area. In 1934, Frida soon became aware of the affair going on between Diego Rivera and her sister Cristina Kahlo. The lover she’d tenderly pegged as “a boy frog standing on his hind legs” now appeared to her an “ugly son of a bitch,” maddeningly possessed of the power to seduce women (as he had seduced her). Her prosthetic leg, shod in an eye-catching red boot was given a place of honor in an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum.. And a locked bathroom in which he decreed 6,000 photographs, 300 of Kahlo’s garments and personal items, and 12,000 documents were to be housed until 15 years after his death. Fire, as a resonant symbol for Kahlo’s spirit, will continue to ember in Rivera’s mind even after her premature passing in July 1954 at the age of 47, following a bout with gangrene a year earlier that had resulted in her leg being amputated. Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online, What the Iconic Painting, “The Two Fridas,” Actually Tells Us About Frida Kahlo, Discover Frida Kahlo’s Wildly-Illustrated Diary: It Chronicled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. The fist she makes at her gut – her fingers wringing a wad of shawl – may be an allusion to the chronic uterine pain she’d been suffering the past six years, since the handrail of a bus she was on in Mexico City ripped through her body, leaving her in recurring agony. Self-Portrait as Tehuana (1943) (often referred to as ‘Diego on My Mind’), was begun in 1940, during the brief interlude between the couple’s two volatile marriages.