Nearly sold to pay off debt, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo art on view in Detroit

An exhibition celebrating Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo is set to open in Detroit on Sunday, featuring artwork that was almost sold at auction last year to help pay off the city’s crippling debt.

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” at the Detroit Institute of the Arts will feature about 70 paintings, drawings and murals the couple created during their 11 months spent in the Motor City from 1932 to 1933.

As part of the “grand bargain,” the plan that saved the museum’s collection, private donors and foundations raised more than $800 million to help pay Detroit public workers’ pensions and wrest control over the museum away from the city and into the hands of an independent charitable trust, the New York Times reported.

The city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy in 2013 following decades of financial decline.

Detroit Industry, east wall (detail), Diego Rivera, 1932. Detroit Institute of Arts.

Rivera, known for his revolutionary artistic and political style, stirred controversy while working in Depression-era Detroit with his wife and critically acclaimed painter Kahlo.

One of his most successful works, a 27-panel mural that lines the walls of the DIA, was criticized at first for being pornographic, blasphemous and even sacrilegious, the Detroit Free Press reported.  The mural, which pays homage to Detroit’s labor force, depicts laborers working at Ford Motor Company and advances in the medical and technology industries.

Detroit was also an apparent source of strain on Rivera and Kahlo’s volatile relationship. He was said to adore the industrial city, while she was unhappy living there, according to the DIA.

In Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States,” also included in the exhibit, Kahlo can be seen holding the Mexican flag and standing between an industrialized United States and a pre-industrial Mexico.