Moses, 1945
“In the extraordinarily detailed painting Moses, 1945, the sun is presented as ‘the centre of all religions’. The composition is divided into three registers, which consist of images of gods in the upper section and portraits of ‘heroes’ below, including Alexander the Great, Martin Luther, Napoleon and Hitler, whom she called ‘the lost child’. At the bottom are the masses, and scenes relating to the process of evolution. The painting was inspired by an essay by Sigmund Freud that made a link between Ancient Egyptian beliefs, Moses and the origins of monotheistic religion. The infant Moses has been given the third eye of wisdom, a device Kahlo sometimes used in her portraits of Rivera.”

