Frida Kahlo’s artwork is instantly recognisable; her images as powerful today as the day she painted them. But equally as famous are the photographs one man – Nickolas Muray – took of the Mexican artist. A new Frida Kahlo exhibition which includes her personal belongings reveals secrets about a love affair which has largely lain hidden in the shadows. We revisit their story.
In the spring of 1931, as the rainy season drenched the country, Frida Kahlo returned to Mexico ahead of her husband, the renowned artist Diego Rivera. The pair had been travelling through the US for his exhibition. And while their time there was proving to be successful professionally, their marriage was far more tumultuous. It was not helped by Diego’s numerous indiscretions and Frida’s ongoing health problems – including the first of three miscarriages.
Also in Mexico was Hungarian-born colour photography pioneer Nickolas Muray. Nickolas had struck up a friendship with caricaturist and painter Miguel Covarrubias and his wife, Rosa, when they visited his New York salon. It was here that he photographed movie stars and creatives from Clara Bow to Greta Garbo before innovating commercial photography with his use of colour.
Miguel and Rosa had invited him to visit them in Mexico City, where they planned to introduce him to fellow local creatives – Frida included. And when the duo met, their attraction was electric and instant.
“They have a brief affair,” Gannit Ankori, a professor and Frida Kahlo scholar who is also the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, tells The Weekly.
“And she gives him two presents that tell us a lot about her. The first is a drawing of Frida and Diego from 1930, a kind of marriage portrait. It’s a simple drawing, small and beautiful. She is holding [Diego’s] hand and on her abdomen there’s a slight – you barely see it – drawing of a foetus and then she erases it. It’s almost like a symbolic abortion or something like that. She gives this to Nick, which is kind of strange.
“Then she also, on a doily, writes Nickolas a note. She writes, ‘Nick, I love you like I would love an angel. You are a Lillie [sic] of the valley, my love. I will never forget you. Never, never. You are my whole life, I hope you will never forget this.’”
The portrait, along with several letters Frida wrote to Nickolas (who was 15 years her senior) over the course of what would be an on-again-off-again 10-year-long affair and eventual friendship, will form part of the exhibition which is heading to Bendigo Gallery this month.
Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image will feature personal belongings – some being shown for the very first time – including clothing, make-up, correspondence, medical items and much more in between. The treasures were recovered some 50 years after Frida’s death where they’d been sealed in the bathroom of her beloved family home, La Casa Azul, the Blue House. Today, they give an incredible insight into the woman behind the myth and the passions and pain that drove her.
“I had the supreme privilege of spending two days of my life inside Kahlo’s home,” Curatorial Manager Lauren Ellis tells The Weekly of putting together the exhibition.
“It’s just so luscious and peaceful and idyllic. You really can imagine why it was such a place of comfort and solace during her convalescences and most difficult times. But also, why it was such a vibrant, bubbly cultural hub where she welcomed luminaries and guests from around the world.”
Born on July 6, 1907, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was the third-born daughter of Guillermo Kahlo – a prolific photographer – and his second wife, Matilde Calderón y González.
As the well-told story goes, Frida was a sickly child, a bout of polio at the age of six having left her with one leg thinner than the other and suspected spina bifida affecting her spinal development. At 18, she was a victim of a catastrophic bus accident which left her bedbound for three months (and tragically in life-long pain), during which time her parents gifted her a set of paints to while away the time as she recovered at La Casa Azul.
It was then, with the help of a mirror above her, that Frida began painting the first of her captivating self-portraits and her ongoing passion for art was sparked.
In 1928, she joined the Mexican Communist Party, which is where she and Diego Rivera began their relationship, marrying in 1929.
Together, they would travel in both Mexico and the US, during which time Frida developed her unique artistic style – heavily drawing on Mexican folk culture.
“Frida and Diego moved in modernist and highly progressive political circles where the traditional ideas of monogamy just didn’t really apply,” Lauren says.
“You often hear a story repeated that Diego was comfortable with Frida having affairs with women, but not men. Entering their marriage, there was a strong sense that Diego was not capable of being monogamous. I had a sense they both led their own lives but had this intense adoration that brought them back.” It was into this world that Nickolas entered.
Following their liaison in 1931, Nickolas and Frida remained in touch. He supported her both personally and financially, sending her money when she was separated for a brief time from Diego and buying several works – as she had two more miscarriages and an operation on her right foot which resulted in several toes being amputated. In 1937, Nickolas returned to Mexico City where he took a series of portraits of Frida and Diego at La Casa Azul.
“Frida was going through hell with Rivera,” Gannit Ankori explains. “They’d come back from the United States, and she barely painted because he was having an affair with her sister, Cristina. She was having a hard time and that was fertile territory for her to have an affair with Nick.”
In 2004, historian Salomon Grimberg published a book, I Will Never Forget You, which documented the relationship in both pictures and words. “He did a lot of research,” says Gannit. “And his view is that Nick fell madly in love with Frida. And she loved him, but she was toying with him.”
Nickolas was also an Olympic fencer and his talent along with his dashing good looks and debonair dress meant he was no slouch when it came to wooing women either. In fact, he was on his third marriage when he and Frida met.
“Women loved him,” Gannit says with a smile. “It wasn’t like he was waiting for freedom [from marriage to pursue Frida solely]. But there was a deep affection on both sides.
“Nick was a really good friend. She wrote to him about her illness, about her pain, about her procedures, about everything. During her hardships with Rivera, he also gave her money. Nick sent her funds throughout.”
In 1938, Frida was preparing for her very first solo exhibition that would take place in New York. Nickolas travelled to Mexico to help her pack and photograph all her works.
When the exhibition opened at the Julian Levy Gallery, she was wined and dined and had a great time, says Gannit.
“But the reviews were more like a gossip story about little Frida. There was a review in Vogue that was by Rivera’s biographer that says they were all wowed by her special look. It was about how she looks and about her being Diego Rivera’s third wife. There was a lot of misogyny in the writing those days. But her work was incredible, and I think well received by those who understood it.”
It was on this trip that Frida went to Nickolas’ studio to create more of the stunning portraits which remain her legacy as much as her own artworks.
“Can you think of any subject that would be better suited for colour photography than Frida Kahlo?” questions Gannit. “With all her dresses and tresses and hairdos? With the embroidery and all the
beautiful woven rebozos?”
But more than that, it was the way the subject and photographer looked at each other that made these portraits so breathtaking. Having grown up posing for her father’s lens, Frida knew how
to work a camera when it came to posing and composition. But it was the look of love she gave her adoring father that made these images special. And the same rule applies to Nickolas’ portraiture.
“Through Nick’s eyes – you know, he’s in love with her – she’s looking at him, and you see the beauty and that he really appreciated her,” Gannit says. “They were both artists, and they had a very special love affair.
“When Nick sent Frida the photograph of her with the red rebozo – her favourite – she said she just loves it and that he will always be under the magenta rebozo on her left side, meaning close to her heart. And she asks him, do you remember that I am your FW? Which means, ‘Fucking Wonder’.”
However, it was clear that, while he adored her and she him, Nickolas would never trump Diego in Frida’s heart. By now, Nickolas’ third marriage had ended. And at the end of 1939, during the
height of their renewed affair, Frida divorced Diego. But as ever, she couldn’t stay away.
“She writes to Nick and she also writes to Rivera,” says Gannit of what transpired. “She’s playing a double game. She also writes to another friend that she can’t live without Rivera and she also thinks of Nick. She’s playing the two of them. She writes to Nick that there was an invitation to London but she’s not going there. ‘I just want to get back to you,’ she says to him. And so she takes the boat to New York and they pick up where they left off. But she also tells him that she had an affair with a young man when she was in Paris.”
Not that Nickolas is remaining chaste. Ironically, Frida is fuelled by jealousy as he has relationships with other women, writing him passionate letters to declare her adoration.
On December 8, 1940, Frida remarried Diego and Nickolas cut ties as her lover. He’d hoped to marry her by all accounts and was devastated at this reunion. He would, however, remain a friend and champion. Not that she was a good friend to him in return, Gannit reveals.
Nickolas’ daughter, Arija – the product of his second marriage to Leja Gorska – was the apple of his eye. Arija was a budding artist and told her father she wanted to go to Mexico to spend time with Frida, who she’d met during one of her trips to New York. Travelling to Veracruz in the east of the country, she was on her way to make that happen. And then, suddenly, Arija fell ill. She was flown back to New York but she did not recover. She died abruptly at the age of just 19 on September 19, 1941.
“He writes to Frida,” says Gannit, stating Nickolas was desperate to find out what had happened. “She sends him a telegram saying she’s sending a letter. That letter never arrives.
“Then he writes back and says, please, just one thing. He sends her photos of Arija and asks that Frida draws her portrait. He writes her again and again and she never writes him back and never paints the portrait.”
In 1942, Nickolas married his fourth – and final – wife, Margaret Schwab, and the pair had two children. He was a devoted family man, and his children remained unaware of his relationship with the tempestuous artist until after both their deaths – Frida’s at just 47 in 1954 and Nickolas’ in 1965 aged 73.
Yet they would actually meet Frida before her end. While Nickolas took her picture again in 1946 when she came to New York for her final spinal surgery, in 1951 the entire family travelled to Mexico to see about building a house there. During that time, they visited Frida at her gallery. She then gave Nick Still Life, a painting which was consigned to the gallery. It would join Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird – which he bought from Frida in 1940 – in the family home.
“To my knowledge, that was the last time Nick saw Frida,” Gannit says.
Still, the duo’s relationship remains alive today for those left behind thanks to their prolific correspondence and the impact they had on each other as artists. Their works are still as mesmerising today as they were decades earlier.
Head to my.bendigoartgallery.com.au to buy tickets for Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image, opening March 15
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