March 21: Beauty, Friendship, and the Stories Art Tells

On this first full day of spring, two of America's great cultural institutions mark occasions that are, at their heart, about the same thing: the capacity of beauty to outlast conflict, and art's stubborn insistence on connection. In Washington, nearly 4,000 cherry trees ring the Tidal Basin in a canopy of pale pink and white as the National Cherry Blossom Festival opens its 114th celebration of a diplomatic gift that almost never arrived. And in New York, the Museum of Modern Art opens Frida and Diego: The Last Dream — an immersive new exhibition placing the works of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in a theatrical setting inspired by a new Metropolitan Opera production of their story. Both events invite us to remember that the objects and gestures of culture often outlive everything else.

The Trees That Crossed the Pacific

The story of Washington's cherry trees begins not with a diplomat but with a journalist. In 1885, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore — the first woman ever elected to the board of the National Geographic Society — returned from her first trip to Japan and spent the next 24 years petitioning every Army superintendent she could find to plant cherry trees along Washington's reclaimed Potomac waterfront. She was ignored for two decades. Then in 1909, she wrote directly to the new First Lady, Helen Herron Taft. This time, the idea took hold. Tokyo's Mayor Yukio Ozaki — grateful for American mediation in ending the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 — agreed to make the gift official. The first shipment of 2,000 trees arrived in Washington on January 6, 1910, and was immediately destroyed. Agriculture inspectors found them infested with insects, nematodes, and disease. President Taft ordered the entire shipment burned.

Mayor Ozaki did not give up. He authorized a second donation — this time 3,020 trees, scions taken from famous specimens along the Arakawa River in Tokyo, carefully grafted and grown in disinfected ground. They arrived by ship in Seattle on February 14, 1912, traveled across the country in heated, insulated railroad cars, and on March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Iwa Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first two trees on the north bank of the Tidal Basin. Those two original trees still stand today. The friendship they represent would be tested severely — four of the trees were cut down in the days following Pearl Harbor, and the festival was canceled from 1942 to 1947 while Washington became the nerve center of the Allied war effort. But the trees survived, and so did the tradition. Today's festival marks the 114th anniversary of that original gift, with peak bloom expected between March 29 and April 1.

The Elephant and the Dove

When Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera married in a civil ceremony in Coyoacán on August 21, 1929, her father called it a "marriage between an elephant and a dove" — a reference to their difference in stature, but also, perhaps, in temperament. He was 42, already the most celebrated muralist in Mexico, a man of enormous physical presence and boundless appetites. She was 22, a survivor of childhood polio and a catastrophic bus accident that had shattered her spine and pelvis at 18, who had turned her long recovery into a painting practice of extraordinary intensity. They shared Communist politics, a passion for Mexican identity and pre-Columbian culture, and a volatile intimacy that would produce one divorce, one remarriage, and a combined legacy that reshaped 20th-century art. Today, MoMA opens Frida and Diego: The Last Dream — an exhibition presenting key works by both artists from MoMA's permanent collection in an elaborate theatrical installation designed by Jon Bausor, the set designer of the Metropolitan Opera's new production El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, which premieres at Lincoln Center in May.

The exhibition holds particular resonance for MoMA, whose history is intertwined with both artists. Rivera came to New York in 1931 for a solo exhibition at the museum — one of MoMA's earliest retrospectives — while Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) and Fulang-Chang and I (1937) have been fixtures in MoMA's collection for decades. Rivera's colossal public murals — painted for the Mexican government, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and famously destroyed at Rockefeller Center when he refused to remove the face of Lenin — aimed to make history visible to the masses. Kahlo's intimate self-portraits, nearly 55 of the 150 paintings she completed, turned inward: chronicling her physical pain, her fractured identity, her impossible longing for the child she could not carry to term. "There have been two great accidents in my life," she once wrote. "The terrible crash — and Diego." Both, she implied, had made her.

What connects a grove of cherry trees on the Potomac to two Mexican artists whose tumultuous lives played out in murals and self-portraits? Perhaps this: both endure because they were rooted in something real — in a genuine act of friendship between two nations, and in two artists who refused to paint anything other than the truth as they experienced it. The cherry trees were burned once and survived. Frida Kahlo was largely dismissed during her lifetime and is now considered one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed, but the work survived in countless reproductions. Art and beauty have a way of outlasting the forces arrayed against them. On this first full day of spring, Washington and New York offer two reminders of exactly that.