In the house-turned-museum where the artist Frida Kahlo grew up and lived with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, the little twin clocks are probably not the first things that would catch most visitors’ eyes.
In fact, the glazed pottery pieces — molded and decorated to look like clocks but never functional — could be easy to miss among all the other Mexican folk art displayed in the Casa Azul, now the Museo Frida Kahlo, a major tourist draw in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood. (The Kahlo family announced last month that an additional museum would open in an adjacent house in the fall.)
The clocks, each about eight inches tall, were crafted in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. And although they appear in a 1940 photograph taken inside the house, it is not known exactly when or how they came into the artist’s possession, said Perla Labarthe, the museum’s director.
“What we do know,” she added, “is that they meant something important to her.” Using some kind of marker, Kahlo hand-inscribed the clocks to record two significant moments: her divorce from Rivera in 1939 and their remarriage the next year.
“In this house, we’re surrounded by objects that tell us stories, and these two clocks tell us the story of Frida and Diego,” Ms. Labarthe said.
The couple, first married in 1929, had an often-stormy relationship, punctuated by affairs and reconciliations until her death in 1954. As Hayden Herrera wrote in her 1983 book “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo”: “Their marriage was, to contemporary observers, a union of lions, their loves, battles, separations, and sufferings beyond petty censuring.”
The clocks, which over the years have been displayed in different places in the museum, are now part of an exhibition exploring the role of the Casa Azul in Kahlo’s life and work.
Each shows a pair of birds, labeled Diego and Frida, perched on either side of the pendulum under fruit-laden branches and looking up toward the clock face.
A phrase written on one clock reads, “Se rompieron las horas,” or in English, “The hours were broken.”
The other has the details of when the couple remarried: in San Francisco, California, on Dec. 8, 1940, at 11 o’clock.
Kahlo had the ability to create not only memorable images, but also memorable words, Ms. Labarthe said. “Frida has wonderful phrases, and I think this one, ‘The hours were broken,’ is one of them,” she said.
Ms. Labarthe said that of the approximately 150 oils that Kahlo painted, she knew of only one that depicted a clock: a 1929 self-portrait, “El Tiempo Vuela,” or “Time Flies.” But clocks were included in some of the artist’s drawings, she noted.
Rivera turned one of those drawings into a stone mosaic mural, decorating the underside of the roof that overhangs a terrace where they often entertained. The clock face is in the center — part of an eye — and around it are a yin-yang symbol, a sun and the names Frida and Diego.
And Kahlo, who was a prolific letter writer and diarist, often wrote about the subject of time. “Nothing is absolute,” she once wrote in her diary. “Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”
Her sense that time was fleeting was not surprising, given the physical suffering Kahlo endured for most of her 47 years; a bus she was riding at age 18 was hit by a trolley car, leaving her with numerous injuries.
“Frida has, in many of her phrases, this intensity of living, how each minute for her is a possibility to live,” Ms. Labarthe said.
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