The Art Institute of Chicago, 2025
Available to booksellers from Yale University Press
In February 1939, while visiting Paris at the invitation of writer André Breton, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) became sick and convalesced at the home of American expatriate Mary Reynolds (1891–1950), an avant-garde bookbinder, collector of Surrealist artist books, and partner of Marcel Duchamp. This book traces the story of Kahlo and Reynolds’s connection and its influence on their work, even after the friendship had elapsed.
Kahlo and Reynolds’s intense encounter unfolds in this volume through their artworks, their shared exploration of Reynolds’s expansive Surrealist library, and letters from Kahlo to her lover, American photographer Nickolas Muray, in which she recounted her time in Paris. Included in this focused study are paintings and drawings by Kahlo, books bound by Reynolds, photographs by Muray of Kahlo, depictions of Reynolds by artists in Paris, and a selection of letters between Kahlo and Reynolds describing their defining experience together.
Edited by Caitlin Haskell with Tamar Kharatishvili and Alivé Piliado Santana
112 Pages, 8 1/2 × 10 1/2 in.
70 color + 20 b-w illus.
Hardcover $30 ($25 members)
ISBN: 978-0-300-279665
