The big picture: Frida Kahlo in New York, 1939
Tim Adams
Sat 17 Mar 2018 14.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 17 Mar 2018 20.10 EDT
The Hungarian-American photographer and Olympic fencer Nickolas Muray took this photograph of Frida Kahlo in traditional Mexican dress and cigarette in hand on a rooftop in Greenwich Village, New York, in March 1939. The pair were at the end of a secret love affair that had begun in Mexico eight years earlier.
Kahlo, whose life will be celebrated in a large-scale exhibition of her personal belongings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opening on 16 June (for which tickets have just gone on sale), was then 32. She was in a moment of typically contrasting fortune, having just returned by boat from France where the surrealist André Breton had organised an exhibition of her work and where a painting of hers, the self-portrait The Frame, had been purchased by the Louvre. While in Paris she had, however, been ill once again: in hospital with a kidney infection. A few months earlier, her first solo show in New York had been a great success – the actor Edward G Robinson had bought four of her paintings – but all the time she was aware that, back in Mexico, her incendiary marriage to the painter and revolutionary Diego Rivera was unravelling.
Having come to New York to see Muray, Kahlo discovered that the photographer was involved with several other women and he broke off their relationship. In other portraits he made of Kahlo, she stares full on into the camera lens. Here, she looks away, eyes almost closed. The backdrops of her self-portraits (and of Muray’s previous pictures) have invariably been as studiously “Mexican” as her costume; here that make-believe is replaced by a very uncontrived bare-brick tenement wall, and a smudge of New York skyline.
When Kahlo returned to Mexico the following month, she and Rivera divorced and she made one of her most enduring images, The Two Fridas, one in a lacy European ball gown, the other in a Tehuana dress similar to the one she wears in this photograph. In both self-portraits the vessels of her heart are brutally exposed to the viewer. You wonder, as she sits for Muray, whether she imagines they are also on display here.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/17/big-picture-frida-kahlo-nickolas-muray-portrait-new-york-1939-mexican
(Image at link.)
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Even with the hair!
