NICKOLAS MURAY & FRIDA KAHLO

"Nick darling, I got my wonderful picture you send to me, I find it even more beautiful than in New York. Diego says that it is as marvelous as a Piero de la Francesca. To me it is more than that, it is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me that morning... [when] we went to your shop to take photos. This one was one of them. And now I have it near me. You will always be inside the magenta rebozo (on the left side)."

-Kahlo, in a letter to Nickolas Muray, June 3, 1939

During Nickolas Muray's forty-five year career as a New York photographer, he developed a growing reputation that began during the decade of the Twenties when he photographed everybody who was anybody. At the time of his death, most Americans had seen, at one time or another, Muray's portraits of celebrities, Presidents, or advertisements. Whether they knew the identity of the photographer who had created these images, these had infiltrated America's psyche as icons with which it readily identified.

Between 1920 and 1940, Nickolas Muray made over 10,000 portraits. Who would have thought that the one of Frida Kahlo, c. 1939 would bring him greater acknowledgment than any? But it did. The portrait, made in the winter of 1938-39, while Kahlo sojourned in New York, attending her exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, became the best known and loved portrait made by Nickolas Muray.

Muray and Kahlo were at the height of a ten-year love affair in 1939 when the portrait was made. Their affair had started in 1931, after Muray was divorced from his second wife and shortly after Kahlo's marriage to Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. It outlived Muray's third marriage and Kahlo's divorce and remarriage to Rivera by one year, ending in 1941. Muray wanted to marry, but when it became apparent that Kahlo wanted Muray for a lover, not a husband, Muray took his leave for good and married his fourth and last wife. He and Kahlo remained good friends until her death, in 1954.

After Kahlo received the portrait in Mexico, she wrote to Muray on June 3, 1939: "Nick darling, I got my wonderful picture you send me, I find it even more beautiful than in New York. Diego says that it is as marvelous as a Piero de la Francesca. To me it is more than that, it is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me that mornig...[when] we went to your shop to take photos. This one was one of them. And now I have it near me. You will always be inside the magenta rebozo (on the left side)."

Carbro copies of the portrait are in the permanent collection of the Frida Kahlo Museum, The George Eastman House, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

-Salomon Grimberg