Frida Kahlo and Mary Reynolds: A Serendipitous Meeting

Until now, the story of their time together has rarely risen above the level of an art historical footnote, but in our upcoming exhibition Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds, the meeting of these two formidable women and their work takes center stage.

While Kahlo and Reynolds were very different in many respects—Kahlo was primarily a painter whose likeness was almost inseparable from her work and Reynolds a bookbinder who remained behind the scenes—their lives mirrored each other personally and professionally in significant ways. Both were artists with a connection to the Surrealist movement and were also partners of artists, Diego Rivera and Marcel Duchamp, respectively.

Here, the curatorial team introduces these two fascinating protagonists through a selection of their works, focusing particularly on the relationships central to Kahlo’s and Reynolds’s collaborative practices, which bridged art and life and ultimately brought them together for a brief but consequential moment in February and March of 1939.

Born in Minnesota in 1891, Mary Reynolds moved to Paris in November 1921. Her husband, Matthew Given Reynolds, had recently died of pneumonia after commanding an artillery regiment during World War I, and her move to France was an opportunity to begin life anew. Initially, her role in the Paris art world was primarily as a collector and supporter of avant-garde practices in the visual and literary arts. However, in 1929, she began practicing bookbinding (known in French as reliure) after training for a year in the workshop of acclaimed bookbinder Pierre Legrain. Ultimately Reynolds specialized in deluxe bindings for works by her friends and acquaintances, mostly Dada and Surrealist artists and writers. 

One of Reynolds’s earliest and closest friendships after immigrating to Paris was with the artist Man Ray, a fellow expatriate who had moved there earlier the same year. Man Ray took many of the best-known images of Reynolds, capturing her in a series of striking photographs that showcase her unique presence and style.

Reynolds, for her part, engaged with Man Ray’s work in one of her most iconic bindings, for the book Les mains libres (Free Hands), a volume combining Man Ray’s illustrations with poetry written by Paul Éluard. As with many of Reynolds’s bindings, the work gives physical form to ideas evoked by the books she bound.

She played on the book’s title by placing delicate kid gloves on the cover, transforming the text into a surrealist object and creating an exterior for the work that was in dialogue with its contents. Going further, the book makes literal the idea of freeing a reader’s hands by providing an image of hands already engaged in keeping the book open.

Reynolds went on to collaborate with many of the great literary and visual artists of her day, including Marcel Duchamp, her partner during the years when she was most active as an artist, as well as Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, and Raymond Queneau.  

She and Duchamp frequently collaborated closely on bindings. Reynolds bound works by Duchamp, such as Rrose Sélavy, an anthology of his aphorisms, and with Duchamp jointly designed bindings for the works of other authors, notably Alfred Jarry. The binding design for Jarry’s Ubu roi (King Ubu), created in 1935, was inspired by the protagonist’s palindromic name, with large symmetrical U’s serving as the front and back covers, and a skinny B serving as the spine. 

Perhaps Reynolds’s greatest collaboration with Duchamp was the home that the two kept in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, a living work of art which she and Duchamp decorated with eclectic installations of works by their close friends. 

By the time Reynolds welcomed Kahlo as a guest in this home in February 1939, her practice as a bookbinder was well established, and many of the figures in her library and art collections (such as Brancusi, shown above) were also frequent guests at her home at 14 rue Hallé. 

Kahlo came to the home somewhat by accident. She was invited to convalesce there after a kidney infection capped a doomed first week in Surrealism’s capital city and led to an unexpected two-week stay at the American Hospital. However, living in the creative space at 14 rue Hallé from February 22 to March 25, 1939, Kahlo found the comfort and freedom she needed as she prepared for the exhibition Mexique (March 10–25, 1939). Organized by André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, the show was presented at Galerie Renou et Colle, one of the city’s toniest galleries. Away from the city center, Kahlo soon found many ways in which Reynolds’s life in art mirrored her own. 

When Kahlo began making paintings in the 1920s, she had little desire to present them publicly. Like Reynolds, she preferred to create artworks of personal significance, keeping them in her own collection or offering them to an audience of close friends. This began to change in the mid-1930s, coinciding with her engagement with the Surrealists who helped to organize the first solo exhibition of her work, and paved the way for her first exhibition in Europe. 

If we look at Kahlo’s 1931 double portrait, Frieda and Diego Rivera (Frieda y Diego Rivera), there are several aspects that might seem fantastical—for example, the small scale of her feet relative to Rivera’s or the presence of the bird flying above them. But it’s clear from the text that Kahlo’s works are drawn from life: “Here you see me, Frida Kahlo, with my beloved husband, Diego Rivera. I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California, for our friend Mr. Albert Bender.” When she created this work, Rivera was a far more prominent artist, and as such, she depicts him holding brushes. This would begin to change dramatically in the fall of 1938, when Kahlo had her first solo exhibition. Kahlo’s work was notably described by Breton as “a ribbon around a bomb,” yet the reviews of the exhibition touted what they called “the rise of another Rivera”—echoing the family name that she occasionally used professionally around this time.

Kahlo’s self-portraits, including The Frame (El marco), were celebrated and featured prominently in her first solo gallery show at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938, as well as in Mexique, the exhibition she was preparing while staying with Reynolds in Paris.

In some respects, Kahlo herself was the star of her first gallery exhibitions. She was frequently present at the galleries displaying her work, mingling with collectors like A. Conger Goodyear, who commissioned Self-Portrait with Monkey (Autorretrato con mono) after seeing Kahlo’s work at Levy’s gallery. Levy himself also took a series of now-famous photographs of Kahlo.

However, Levy was not the only photographer depicting Kahlo at the time of her international rise. The best-known photographs of the artist were made by Nickolas Muray, a remarkable photographer and Olympic fencer, who was Kahlo’s lover during these years. He was also the recipient of Kahlo’s most vivid letters from Paris, in which she describes her time in the city. 

In an early letter, she writes, “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 a really 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.”

Kahlo had given two photographs Muray took of her to the influential arts organizer Walter Pach, who ultimately introduced Kahlo to Duchamp and paved the way for her to meet Reynolds. As Pach wrote to Kahlo on Christmas Day in 1938: “They [Duchamp and his brothers] are such good friends of mine, that even without the letters I sent them, they will be your friends from the moment you mention my name.”

As fate would have it, Pach was correct. But in a way that even he could not have anticipated, it was Reynolds whose role would prove transformative in shaping Kahlo’s time in Paris and providing her with the creative environment necessary for showing her work abroad.

Our telling of Kahlo and Reynolds’s story in the galleries not only shines a light on this little-known chapter in the two artists’ lives but also illuminates the remarkable history of two women navigating identity, partnership, and cross-cultural exchange on the eve of World War II. Their story, sparked by a chance encounter, reorients our understanding of how artists inspire one another both within and beyond the bounds of movements such as Surrealism.

—Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Tamar Kharatishvili, Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Research Fellow in Modern Art
Alivé Piliado, curatorial associate, National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago
Tacy Wagner, research associate, Modern and Contemporary Art

Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds begins with member previews March 27–28 and opens to the public March 29.

Sponsors

Major support for Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds is provided by the Zell Family Foundation, Pat and Ron Taylor, Constance and David Coolidge, The Donnelly Family Foundation, Natasha Henner and Bala Ragothaman, and Kathy and Chuck Harper.

Additional support is provided by

Topics

• Collection
• Exhibitions
• Modern Art