Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray

Nickolas Muray was born Miklos Mandl on Febuary 15, 1892 in Szeged, Hungary. Although his name appears in the Book of Birth Registration of the Jewish Community, he was not given a Jewish name. Two years later, his father Samu, who worked as a postal employee, moved the family to Budapest in search of better educational and economic opportunities. His parents favored Miklos over the other children, as he was the most intelligent and unusually handsome, with an engaging personality. Not only did he have a temper, but he was strong-willed, rebellious, and unwilling to accept ‘no’ for an answer. Repeatedly humiliated by rampant anti-Semitism, he resented being denied, for being Jewish, opportunities given other boys. He decided as a boy that he would one day see the world, and never be confined to the limitations imposed upon him by an unfair society.

In August of 1913, armed with $25, a fifty-word Esperanto dictionary, and an unrelenting determination, twenty-one-year-old Miklos Murai arrived at Ellis Island, where he became Nickolas Muray. He immediately found work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at Stockinger Printing Co, doing engraving and color separation. He signed up for English night classes, eager to leave behind any trace of his accent, and he proclaimed himself an atheist.

In 1920, a friend suggested Nick open his own studio. Nick moved to a 2-room apartment at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where he lived in one room and worked in the other. Forced to economize at first, Nick kept all the lights out, except for one bulb. When a client rang the doorbell, he would turn on all the lights. Fortunately, Nick did not have to wait long for his big break. The art director for Harper’s Bazaar commissioned Nick to photograph Florence Reed, who was starring on Broadway.

Overnight, his evocative, soft focus style of portrait photography became a sensation. He was soon photographing everybody that was anybody: actors, dancers, film stars, politicians, and writers. As he grew more successful, he held Wednesday night soirees in the studio for friends and acquaintances to meet, eat, and drink – many brought flasks, as it was prohibition time. It was not unusual for Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Eugene O’Neill, or even Jean Cocteau to make an appearance.

In 1923 Nick met artist Miguel Covarrubias, whose friendship would change Nick’s life. Nick and Miguel contributed to many of the same publications, and became the best of friends. Nick visited Miguel in his native Mexico in 1931. On that trip, Nick met Frida Kahlo, who was married to Diego Rivera. Nick and Frida’s first meeting was certainly serendipitous as Frida was supposed to have been with Diego in San Francisco.

Over the next ten years, Nick and Frida carried on a love affair in which they traveled to see one another in Mexico and New York. Their love affair is richly documented, both in their correspondence to one another, and by Nick’s iconic portraits of Frida. But despite their mutual passion, Nick eventually came to see that Frida would always stay true to Diego. He moved on with his life in New York, but a part of him would always be in love with Frida.

Following the stock market crash, Nick shifted his major focus to advertisement photography. In 1931 Nick pioneered the first illustration from a color photograph to be published in an American mass-publication magazine, a swimming pool advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal featuring seventeen live models wear beach wear in Miami. Even charging $1,000 for a color page, he couldn’t fill the incoming orders fast enough. Soon he also had a contract with Time to do color covers for the magazine. In this period, Nick became one of the leading practicioners of color photography.

Throughout his life, Nick practiced fencing at the highest levels. Even while maintaining his place at the cutting edge of his profession, he found time to train and compete. He was the U.S. Saber Champion in 1928 and 29, and he represented the US in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics.

Nickolas Muray died while fencing in New York City, in 1965. At the time of his death, he had won over sixty fencing medals, and was hailed as “One of the twenty greatest fencers in American History.”

Frida Kahlo (Coyoacán, Mexico City, July 6, 1907–Coyoacán, Mexico City, July 13, 1954). Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, was a Mexican painter whose work developed one of the most distinctive explorations of identity, the body, and Mexican culture in twentieth-century art. Although her career was closely connected to Diego Rivera and to the artistic environment that emerged after the Mexican Revolution, her painting maintained an independent position, far removed from the monumental scale and predominantly public character of muralism.

The daughter of photographer Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderón, she grew up in the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, later converted into the Frida Kahlo Museum. Photography was deeply present in her family environment and played a constant role in the construction of her own image. The photographic archive she preserved throughout her life, also addressed by METALOCUS on the occasion of the exhibition Frida Kahlo – Her Photos, includes works by figures such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Man Ray, Brassaï, Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Nickolas Muray.

At the age of six, she contracted polio, which affected her right leg. She later studied at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. On September 17, 1925, at the age of eighteen, she suffered a serious accident when the bus in which she was travelling collided with a streetcar. The numerous injuries and the prolonged period of immobility that followed had a profound impact on her life, and during her convalescence she began to paint systematically.

From then on, the body became one of the main territories of investigation in her work. Kahlo repeatedly turned to self-portraiture to address identity, illness, physical pain, sexuality, frustrated motherhood, and her relationship with the social and political environment. However, her painting cannot be reduced to autobiographical transcription. Her images incorporate elements from Mexican ex-votos, colonial portraiture, popular traditions, pre-Hispanic art, and modern visual culture, articulated through a deeply personal iconography.

By the end of the 1920s, she had entered the artistic and political circles that included, among others, Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera. Kahlo and Rivera married on August 21, 1929. During the following years, they lived in different places in Mexico and the United States, coinciding with Rivera’s major mural commissions in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. They divorced in 1939 and remarried in San Francisco on December 8, 1940.

Her stays in the United States were also decisive for Kahlo’s independent career. While Rivera was producing his large mural cycles, she continued working on small- and medium-scale paintings that differed radically from muralism’s monumentality. Works such as Henry Ford Hospital (1932), My Birth (1932), and My Dress Hangs There (1933) combined personal experience with a critical view of American society and industrialisation.

Her international recognition consolidated during the second half of the 1930s. In 1938 André Breton visited Mexico, encountered her work, and attempted to place it within Surrealism. That same year, Julien Levy organised Kahlo’s first solo exhibition in New York. In 1939 she travelled to Paris at Breton’s invitation and participated in the exhibition Mexique, organised with Marcel Duchamp’s collaboration at Galerie Renou et Colle. In that context, the French state acquired The Frame (1938), now held by the Centre Pompidou. Kahlo, however, repeatedly rejected the idea that her painting should be understood as a representation of dreams, insisting instead that she painted her own reality.

Mexican identity occupies a central position within that pictorial reality. Kahlo incorporated plants, animals, domestic objects, traditional clothing, and references to Indigenous cultures and popular art into her work. This visual construction also extended to her public presence: traditional dress, pre-Hispanic jewellery, and the deliberate construction of her photographic portraits formed part of a visual identity inseparable from her painting.

Among her best-known works are The Two Fridas (1939), Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), The Broken Column (1944), and The Wounded Deer (1946). In these works, self-portraiture ceased to function simply as physical representation and became an instrument through which she explored questions of gender, cultural identity, politics, and bodily experience.

Her political commitment was equally constant. Kahlo was closely linked to Mexican communism and actively participated in the left-wing political circles of her time. Together with Rivera, she was involved in the efforts that enabled Leon Trotsky to settle in Mexico in 1937; Trotsky and Natalia Sedova initially lived at the Casa Azul. Her political militancy remained present until the final years of her life.

During the 1940s, Kahlo gained an increasing presence in international institutions and exhibitions and also developed a teaching activity. Her deteriorating physical condition required numerous operations and long periods of hospitalisation, although she continued painting and participating in Mexican artistic life.

In 1953, Lola Álvarez Bravo organised at her Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City the only solo exhibition of Kahlo’s work held in Mexico during the artist’s lifetime. Her health was already extremely poor, but Kahlo attended the opening lying in a bed.

Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954, at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, a few days after her forty-seventh birthday. The house opened as a museum in 1958, preserving a fundamental part of her works, objects, documents, and domestic spaces.

In the decades following her death, appreciation of her work grew until she became one of the central figures of twentieth-century art. Beyond the extraordinary popular circulation of her image, her historical significance lies in the development of a highly individual pictorial language in which body, identity, Mexican culture, biographical experience, and politics are integrated without being subordinated to any of the artistic movements with which she was associated.