The Brooklyn Rail

This exhibition is about the unlikely friendship of two marvelous women, Frida Kahlo and Mary Reynolds, one now very famous and the other deserving more recognition. People attending Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds might be perturbed that there are only a few of Kahlo’s paintings on view, surrounded as they are with the art and ephemera of the avant garde who hung out at Mary Reynold’s place in Paris. That place, with its special green wallpaper and very long table—replicated in the center gallery of the exhibition—hosted many artists, including Kahlo while she was in Paris in 1939 for her exhibition Mexique.

A thread of friendship stitches together all the artists and objects in the exhibition, creating quite a heady, somewhat academic context for Kahlo’s work. In some ways, it echoes André Breton’s Mexique, which exhibited Kahlo alongside other artists like Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Diego Rivera, as well as pre-Columbian artifacts from Rivera’s private collection. This exhibition gives a sense of the people and the objects Kahlo encountered while staying with Reynolds: Jean Arp’s Manicured Relief (1930), Constantin Brâncuși’s Two Penguins (1911–14), Yves Tanguy’s untitled etching (1938)—all part of Reynolds’s collection. Kahlo would have encountered the work of Reynolds and her partner Marcel Duchamp, too, her exquisite bookbindings and his string-and-glass interventions on the staircase. She might have seen one of their many collaborations, Hebdomeros (1936–39) by Giorgio de Chirico. This book, with its fluted spine and orange silk endpapers, slips into a muticolored striped case lined with felt. Of course, Duchamp was and remains well known, but this exhibition argues that it was Mary Reynolds at the center of this web of interconnectedness. She was a consummate bookbinder, anti-fascist, and friend to artists and writers including Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Breton, and Paul Éluard for whom she made beautiful and witty bookbindings. Alfred Jarry’s book Le surmâle [The Supermale] (1945–50) is gorgeous in its black goatskin cover, title stamped in gold with a metal corset stay springing out of the bottom of the spine. A broken glass thermometer graces the spine of Raymond Queneau’s book Un rude hiver [A Hard Winter] (1939–42 or 1945–50).

Staying in Reynolds’s home gave Kahlo access to this European art scene and a whole new set of friends. Her work, seen amongst the hundred or so objects of the Paris avant garde, takes on another register. In this context, she doesn’t seem so singular as contemporary mythology might have it. Instead, we can contemplate her in the landscape of an international milieu.

Following Kahlo’s 1938 exhibition at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York, Mexique was organized for her by Surrealist impresario André Breton. He apparently was useless, failing to secure a gallery space for Kahlo’s exhibition and to get her paintings out of customs, not to mention feeding her some bad food which landed her in the hospital. At the center of the exhibition is a letter Kahlo wrote in English to her lover and photographer Nickolas Muray complaining about Breton. The letter is marked at its close with several soft pink lipstick kisses. All this bad behavior by Breton sets the scene for Kahlo and Reynolds’s emerging friendship: Reynolds saw what was happening and swooped in to provide a place for Kahlo to recuperate and stay during her month in Paris.

The few Kahlo paintings in the exhibition are stunning to see, and even more so given that the Art Institute has never exhibited any of her works. A few date to the time of Mexique; others were completed after her month in Paris. In the first gallery of the exhibition, two works stand out: Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and The Frame (1938). In the first, a diminutive, doll-like Kahlo holds hands with the corpulent Rivera. He wears his signature suit and grips a palette and paintbrushes in his right hand; she’s dressed in a vibrant red shawl and green floor-length dress. Above them floats a pink banner held in the beak of a pink bird that announces who is in the painting and that it was painted in San Francisco for a friend in 1931. By contrast, The Frame presents a lively image of Kahlo alone in a surreal juxtaposition of found object and self-portrait. Something of an assisted readymade, the work combines a frame Kahlo found at a market in Mexico with a serene image of herself wearing yellow flowers in her hair. The frame creates a wild border of pink, red, and blue flowers, with two pink-and-yellow birds posed on either side of her face. The deep magenta of the exhibition catalogue for Mexique picks up on this vibrancy.

In the last gallery, Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) counters the wooden stillness of her image in her painting with Diego Rivera. Here, Kahlo depicts herself dressed in a suit that looks like it came out of Rivera’s closet. She holds a pair of scissors in her right hand. Painted in loose, swirling black lines that look like automatic drawings, her clipped hair covers the floor and the chair she’s sitting on, seeming to float eerily around her. She painted this work the year after her Paris trip.

There’s a politics to all this friendship, especially poignant considering the dark days of the year 1939, with the rise of fascism and impending war, and poignant now, too, with the deliberate breaking of US international connections with Mexico and Europe. It’s cheering to see on display the collaboration between the Art Institute of Chicago and art museums in Mexico, which undergirds a few of their most recent exhibitions on the modern avant garde. At the time of Mexique, friendships carried Kahlo when she was just beginning to show her work outside of Mexico. At the time of this exhibition, Kahlo—an almost mythological figure—carries the friends who cared for her then. Jacques Derrida describes friendship as the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. This exhibition presents the evidence, or the grounds on which it was possible for Kahlo and Reynolds to sense themselves as kindred spirits, brought together as if by chance for just one month in Paris.