Nobody ever accused Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera of being a typical “happy couple.”

In the span of a year, they separated, divorced and remarried. He slept with her sister. She drank, swore and had affairs with women and men. He called her “the most important fact in my life.” She loved him “more than (her) own skin.”

“I think I could best describe them as two teenagers in love,” says Chicago muralist Francisco Mendoza about the two Mexican painters, whose works are on display at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St., through April 27. The exhibit is the largest collection of Kahlo’s work outside of Mexico.

For Mendoza, the exhibit — which, at a student price of three dollars, could be a cheap, if somewhat twisted, Valentine’s Day date — is long overdue.

“It’s all about Frida. She’s receiving the center stage, the limelight.”

Kahlo, who was diagnosed with polio at age six, fractured her pelvis and spine at age 18 in a streetcar accident. She spent the rest of her life in and out of wheelchairs, angry at her constant pain and inability to bear children.

“She was a lady who had so much pain and yet she was able to create her artwork,” Mendoza says. Most of her 200 surviving works are self-portraits, mixing her pain with politics. She was 23 when she married 43-year-old Rivera, already famous for his detailed murals. “Frida was painting from within,” says Mendoza, “whereas Diego would paint every nook and cranny, every historical person.”

Kahlo died in 1954 but was rediscovered in the 70’s with feminsim’s second wave and Herman Herrera’s biography, “Frida.” In 2002, Salma Hayek starred in a same-titled movie, garnering press for donning a unibrow and mustache.

Jose Guerrero, who leads neighborhood tours around the museum, says that there is a “kinship” between Kahlo’s and Rivera’s work on the outdoor murals of Pilsen’s predominantly Mexican community. “There’s no art for the sake of art,” says Guerrero. “They painted the problems of their time and we paint the problems of ours.” nyou