Diego y yo (Diego and I)

Frida Kahlo's "Diego y Yo" is one of her earliest works in a series of portraits chronicling her marriage to the great muralist, Diego Rivera. Inscribed "San Francisco, Calif Diciembre 1930," "Diego y Yo" was created during the couple's first trip to the United States, where Rivera was commissioned to paint murals at the Luncheon Club of the California Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Four months later, while still in San Francisco, Kahlo painted a colorful wedding portrait of herself standing hand-in-hand again with her husband in a nineteenth-century folkloric style, which she would later develop into the extraordinary autobiographical artwork that she is known for today.

Kahlo's additional ink inscription on the drawing, "For Nick with love, Frida," adds a layer of intrigue to the artwork's provenance as "Nick" is celebrity photographer Nickolas Muray, the artist's Hungarian-born collector and lover.

Muray met Kahlo in 1931, thanks to Mexican caricaturist and author Miguel Covarrubias. Along with "Diego y Yo," the Nickolas Muray collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin includes Kahlo's "Still Life with Parrot and "Fruit" (1951), from Frida Kahlo's last series of paintings created while she was confined to a wheelchair, and her oil on canvas, "Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird" (1940).

The work is part of the collections at the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.