On a brisk January morning in Paris, 1939, Frida Kahlo collapsed on the street and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. She spent the next two weeks writhing in pain and unable to keep food down because of an intense infection. She also thought about her upcoming exhibition, “Mexique,” with dread and regret, the disappointing artistic scene she had seen since arriving in Paris, and the rising fascist rule to France’s east and south. She wrote to her lover, Nickolas Murray: “I am just hoping to get well soon and scram from here.”
Injury and illness were a constant for Kahlo, cascading tragedies since her (in)famous car crash at the age of 18 — let us imagine the hospital as a place for Kahlo’s reflection; shaping her life and her work.
The newest exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,” opened on March 29 and runs through July 13. It follows the legendary surrealist as she departs the hospital and finds her disquietude melting into fellowship and community from the friendship of book binder and résisteur, Mary Reynolds. Paying close attention to this transformation, one can see that this is not just a display of the work of Reynolds and Kahlo. It’s a statement on the power of artistic friendship in navigating the tragic march of history.
While the exhibit bears Kahlo’s name and uses her face for the associated marketing campaign, there are only four of her paintings in the exhibit. This is the Art Institute’s first time showing Kahlo’s work. The exhibit mostly consists of letters, a way of letting Kahlo narrate, regaling her loved ones with tales like the aforementioned struggle with illness, and books bound by Mary Reynolds.
Reynolds was once regarded only as the wife of Marcel Duchamp but is now enjoying her overdue exposure as a groundbreaking artist in her own right. The exhibit directs the visitor to imagine themselves in Reynolds’ and Duchamp’s lounge, being visited by the who’s who of Parisian surrealism (André Breton, who was organizing “Mexique;” Man Ray, Max Ernst, etc.) and surrounded by the masterful craftsmanship of Reynolds’ booksmithing.
The exhibit, if nothing else, is an incredible opportunity to view Reynolds’ reliure up close. Her work is careful, evoking the text within the pages without distracting from it, capturing not just the subject of a book, but how it feels to read it. For Raymond Queneau’s “Les Derniers Jours” (The Last Days), Reynolds coats her contemporary’s memoir in black calfskin and stains the endpapers with agate, creating a marbled texture that, when abstracted to its readers, presents as a blue and taupe void expanding and encompassing beyond the pages. Reynolds’ binding elevates Queneau’s tale of modern melancholia, the gold stamping alluding to the gilded petit-bourgeois attitude the novel dwells in.
Reynolds’ cover for “Les Mains Libres” (“Free Hands”) stands as a triumph in the exhibition: she pastes thin gloves opposite each other on the covers of the Paul Éluard book of poetry. The final product, almost proto-minimalist, describes two forms reaching towards each other, wanting, in a void. Éluard’s text reads, “May your hands untie you.”
The exhibit describes that it is in this lounge, surrounded by these books (and Reynolds making them), where Kahlo’s heart softened from despising late 1930s Paris into the measured, critical state she exhibited and left the country in.
Kahlo minces no words in her first letter, drawing a parallel between the bourgeois, decrying both Front populaire (left-wing) aligned artists and the very fascism they failed to stop: “They sit for hours on the ‘cafés’ warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about ‘culture’ ‘art’ ‘revolution’ and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true. Shit and only shit is what they are. It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people — good for nothing — are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.”
The curators draw a progression from this letter to Murray to the next, barely a week later, in which she states, “Mary Reynolds a marvelous american woman who lives with Marcel Duchamp invited me to stay at her house and I accepted gladly because she is really a nice person and doesn’t have anything to do with the stinking ‘artists’ of the group of Breton. She is very kind to me and takes care of me wonderfully.”
It seems as if this friendship compelled Kahlo to stay and present work in “Mexique,” some of which is on view in “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris.” It made up the first presentation of Mexican Surrealism in Europe, undoubtedly laying the foundation for the surrealist experimentations that formed after this visit, now immortalized in countless textbooks and exhibitions.
Reynolds’ capacity and character were most clearly revealed only after Kahlo returned to Mexico. The kindling fascism Kahlo despised fanned into a roaring blaze as Hitler invaded Poland months after Kahlo left Paris. This caused many of the surrealists and art collectors who attended (but evidently did not purchase anything at) “Mexique,” including Breton and Duchamp, to flee occupation. Reynolds, however, stayed. Organizing and financing the French Resistance, Reynolds lived in Paris, rebelling and saving lives until 1943, when she learned the Gestapo were surveilling her. Only then did she save herself, crossing the Pyrenees on foot and catching a plane to the United States.
“Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris” shows Mary Reynolds as inspirational to Frida Kahlo as Kahlo is to us today. Unfortunately, we may be forced to learn a lot from Kahlo and Reynolds’ friendship as we look deeply at the recent months of American policy. Kahlo, frustrated with performative resistance and trite platitudes of revolution, found inspiration and friendship in the modest and strong Reynolds.
The exhibit hypothesizes that its final piece, “Tree of Hope, Remain Strong” may hold some truth of Kahlo’s values, developed seven years before the painting’s creation in 1946. In the double self-portrait, Kahlo lies facing away from the viewer, wrapped in white cloth and bleeding from surgical incisions, basking in the Mexican sun, opposite from Kahlo at night; seated proud and holding the orthopedic brace she has been shackled with since that first traumatizing crash. The painting exudes resolute tenacity, the kind one learns from those in our lives who truly inspire us. As day turns to night, let us sit with each other as friends and artists, waiting, undaunted, for the sun to rise.
