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- "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" at the Art Institute Chicago, US
"Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" at the Art Institute Chicago, US
29 March 2025 | 13 July 2025This exhibition focuses on Frida's first and only trip to Europe and her brief but significant meeting with American avant-garde bookbinder Mary Reynolds, who was at the heart of a thriving Parisian artistic community.
The show highlights this little-known period of 20th-century art history by telling the legacies of Kahlo and Reynolds—both artists themselves and artists' partners—as they dealt Surrealism, identity, and cross-cultural exchange on the eve of World War II. It does this by drawing on the vast Mary Reynolds Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and extraordinary Kahlo loans from public and private collections in the US, Mexico, and Europe.
André Breton, the founder of European Surrealism, invited Kahlo to visit France in January 1939. After visiting Kahlo in Mexico the year before, Breton asked her to think about having an exhibition in Paris. But the French city disagreed with Kahlo. She soon discovered that it was harming both her health and her sense of creative freedom—until she met Reynolds. Reynolds invited Kahlo to stay at her residence at 14 rue Hallé, a gathering place for the city's literary and visual avant-gardes, to recuperate after she was taken to the hospital due to a kidney infection.
Treating this house as a living piece of art, Reynolds and her partner, the artist Marcel Duchamp, filled it to overflowing with their own artwork and one-of-a-kind books, as well as sculptures and paintings by close friends like Jean Cocteau, Yves Tanguy, Constantin Brancusi, and Alexander Calder. In many ways, this rich home and creative setting was reminiscent of Kahlo's own cherished Casa Azul in Mexico City.
From her first solo exhibition to her brief but extremely influential collaboration with Mary Reynolds and the French Surrealists, the exhibition charts Kahlo's artistic development. In 1940, she returned across the Atlantic to participate in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City. About 100 items, including paintings, book bindings, paper works, photographs, and archival materials—most notably, letters from Kahlo to her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray, in which she describes her Parisian experience in her own words—are used to tell this tale.
Read more at the exhibition website below.
Click here for a very interesting article in the travel blog The Not So Innocents Abroad.
Find here an article by Hyperallergic about the book accompanying the ehibition.
