The Surrealist Circles of Frida Kahlo and Mary Reynolds

Some of these figures were regular guests at Reynolds’s home at 14 rue Halle, while others participated at a remove, engaging in Kahlo’s Paris sojourn through correspondence that today preserves a record of her participation in the Surrealist group. Here we take a close look at six figures from the larger “cast of characters” who together created the social context of Kahlo and Reynolds’s intersecting lives.

Julien Levy (1906–1981)

Gallerist who championed Kahlo

Julien Levy opened his eponymous gallery on the fourth floor of 602 Madison Avenue in New York in October 1931 with the intention of promoting photography. By the time he wrote to Frida Kahlo offering to mount a show of her work in 1938—her first-ever solo exhibition—his gallery had become the city’s most prominent outpost for Surrealism in all media. 

Levy wrote to Kahlo regularly throughout the planning of the exhibition, including to ask her preference regarding the display of her name. For the exhibition announcement, they agreed that her husband Diego Rivera’s fame would attract visitors and settled on “Frida Kahlo” printed in bold capital letters with “Frida Rivera” set parenthetically below in smaller type.

Levy also gave Kahlo pointers on how to get her “strong” pictures, as he described them, through US customs from Mexico without issue. The show, featuring 25 of her works, was a popular and commercial splash, garnering mostly admiring reviews in Art News, The New Yorker, Time, and Vogue, and the sale of six of Kahlo’s paintings to American collectors. Kahlo was often present at the gallery during public hours, and the high spirits recounted by attendees are apparent in Levy’s photographs of the artist.

Notably, Levy was also well connected within Mary Reynolds’s Parision circle and proclaimed the artist Marcel Duchamp, Reynolds’s long-term partner, to be one of his “godfathers.” Levy had acquired many artworks on a trip to Europe with Duchamp in 1927, and he was a frequent presence at Reynolds’s home at 14 rue Hallé whenever he was in town.

Jacqueline Lamba (1910–1993)

Artist and friend of Kahlo

Artist Jacqueline Lamba was one of Frida Kahlo’s closest friends during her time in Paris, and Kahlo initially planned to stay with Lamba and her husband André Breton during the trip. They first met in April 1938, when Kahlo and Rivera hosted them at their home in San Ángel during a four-month visit to Mexico City. Even after Kahlo decided she could no longer stay at Breton and Lamba’s apartment due to spatial limitations and general discomfort, Lamba was Kahlo’s unwavering companion in Paris, accompanying her on explorations of the Montparnasse neighborhood and the Louvre Museum.

Like Kahlo and Reynolds, Lamba was both an artist herself and the partner of a well-known figure in the art world, having married Breton in 1934. Few of Lamba’s paintings and drawings from the 1930s survive, but those that remain, such as this work in the Art Institute’s collection, demonstrate significant artistic prowess.

Of Kahlo’s work in her Paris exhibition, Mexique, Lamba noted that “everyone has agreed in recognizing her paintings as the best that a woman has created so far,” an assessment that esteems Kahlo while also acknowledging the limitations placed on women artists at the time. In contrast to Breton’s short-lived and sometimes transactional relationship with Kahlo, Lamba developed a lasting friendship with her. In 1944, after opening her first solo exhibition in New York as an exile during World War II, Lamba returned to Mexico—sans Breton—to visit Kahlo with her daughter, Aube.

Nickolas Muray (1892–1965)

Photographer, friend, and Kahlo’s romantic partner

Born Miklós Mandl, photographer Nickolas Muray met Frida Kahlo in Mexico in 1931 through their mutual friend, artist Miguel Covarrubias. This encounter led to a lifelong friendship as well as a romance that lasted from 1931 to 1940.

Following her exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery, Muray helped document Kahlo’s paintings before they were sent to Paris. While she was abroad, Muray was her constant confidant, receiving long letters that vividly recounted her impressions of the Surrealists, her disappointment with preparations for the Mexique exhibition, her health struggles, and her fondness for Mary Reynolds. Muray’s own letters from New York express his eagerness for Kahlo’s return and offer sympathy for her dealings with the Surrealists in Paris, whom he similarly viewed as indulgent and opportunistic.

A man of many talents, Muray was a US national fencing champion as well as an acclaimed photographer working at the forefront of color photography. He was also a frequent traveler; his 1938 trip to Mexico City coincided with that of Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton. During this visit, as the proposed Paris exhibition was being discussed, Breton asked Muray for a photograph of Kahlo, which Muray sent to Breton in January 1939. This image, known as The Breton Portrait, was taken in Muray’s New York studio when Kahlo was about to depart for France. Muray later produced these photos in color using the novel carbro print technique, creating the most iconic photographic portraits of the artist, wearing her signature magenta rebozo.

Walter Pach (1883–1958)

Artist, art historian, critic, curator, and friend of Kahlo and Reynolds 

It was Walter Pach who, in a roundabout way, facilitated Kahlo and Reynolds’ fortuitous meeting, introducing Kahlo to Duchamp and, thus, to Reynolds, though the particulars of how and exactly when the two first met are unknown.

An artist, art historian, critic, and curator, Pach is most associated with the cultivation of international modern art, especially through his role in helping to organize the 1913 Armory Show. His research extended not only to Europe but also to Mexico. Pach taught at the National University in Mexico City, where he met Rivera in 1922. Together, they organized the first exhibition of Mexican modern art in the United States as part of the Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (City of Mexico) in New York in 1923. By 1939, when Kahlo returned from Paris, Pach was still working internationally, organizing the New York World’s Fair and serving as its director general.

Approximately a month before Kahlo’s exhibition opened at Julien Levy Gallery, Pach received a letter from Diego Rivera encouraging him to visit the show. Pach was so impressed with her work that he purchased the painting Survivor (now in the collection of Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, Mexico City). In December 1938, as she was preparing to leave New York, Kahlo gave Pach a pair of recent photographs of her by Nickolas Muray, including The Breton Portrait, carefully enclosed in a woven-fabric pouch that the Pachs retained.

Man Ray (1890–1976)

Artist and close friend of Reynolds and Duchamp 

Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, photographed Mary Reynolds numerous times throughout the 1920s. The elegant portrait below reflects how he saw her: “Mary, tall, slender, and distinguished-looking,” he wrote in his autobiography a few decades later.

They both arrived in Paris as American expatriates in 1921—Man Ray in summer, Reynolds in November. Intimate friends with both Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray was one of the few people who knew about their romantic involvement early on. He recounted that he and Reynolds “filled in the times” she could not spend with Duchamp exploring Montparnasse’s nightlife together.

Man Ray was a frequent guest at Reynolds’s house on rue Hallé, and she made one of her most iconic and witty bindings for Les mains libres, a volume combining his drawings with Paul Éluard’s poetry. The binding prominently features small, delicate kid gloves, split in half to embrace each cover; they not only reference the work’s title but also suggest an unknown presence already holding the book, symbolically “freeing the hands” of the reader.

In 1939, increasingly apprehensive about the escalating political tensions in Europe, Man Ray decided to depart France for America. He left numerous artworks and other belongings with Reynolds for safekeeping. Three years later, after settling in California, he was surprised to receive his painting Observatory Time—The Lovers in the mail: Reynolds, remembering that he had also stored some larger paintings with art-supply dealer Maurice Lefebvre-Foinet, made her own arduous escape through the Pyrenees in 1942 with few of her own belongings but ensured that these canvases were reunited with Man Ray.

Raymond Queneau (1903–1976)

Novelist and close friend of Mary Reynolds

Raymond Queneau was an experimental novelist whose work received much attention in Reynolds’s book bindings, second only to those of  Jean Cocteau. Over the years, she bound 12 of Queneau’s works, many of which feature tender dedications from the author. The two were very good friends.

Reynolds’s Bindings for Selected Books by Raymond Queneau

Queneau had met André Breton in 1924 and had close ties to the Surrealists in the 1920s. By 1939 he was an editor at the Gallimard publishing company and had begun to devise an idiosyncratic writing style informed by mathematical structures and formal, often playful constraints on the French language. Reynolds used mathematical symbols in the binding for Queneau’s semiautobiographical novel Odile that emphasize these self-imposed rules, which departed from the Surrealists’ love of chance and automatism.

These and other friends and colleagues close to Kahlo and Reynolds were part of a unique moment of international exchange—one that would have a profound impact on Kahlo as she developed into the artist we know today. For a deeper dive into their relationships, illustrated through letters, archival materials, artworks, and ephemera, visit Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds, on view through July 13.

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