Introduction
“Frida Kahlo through the lens of Nickolas Muray” is an exhibition that offers an intimate and private look at Frida Kahlo, Mexico’s most prolific, well-known and beloved artist, through the photographic lens of her friend and lover, Nickolas Muray.
Nickolas Muray was born as Miklos Mandl on 15 February 1892 in Seghedino, Hungary. In August 1913, armed with only 25 dollars, a fifty-word Esperanto dictionary and strong determination, 21-year-old Miklos Murai arrived at Ellis Island, where he became Nickolas Muray. Thanks to his training in the graphic arts, first in Budapest and then in Berlin, he immediately found work at the Stockinger Printing Co, where he worked in engraving and screen printing.
In 1920 Muray opened his own photographic studio: a two-room flat in Greenwich Village where he lived in one room and worked in the other. Thanks to a commission from Harper’s Bazaar to photograph the actress Florence Reed, from day to night his evocative style and elegant portraiture became a sensation and Muray one of the magazines’ most sought-after photographers. He soon photographed all the most important personalities and his studio became a salon for the most important intellectuals of the time: Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Eugene O’Neill and Jean Cocteau.
The meeting between Muray and Kahlo happened by chance, however: in 1923 Nickolas Muray met Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias who had come to New York on a six-month scholarship offered by the Mexican government. Shortly after his arrival, Covarrubias began working for Vanity Fair – a magazine to which Muray had been contributing his celebrity portraits for several years – and the two soon became friends. In 1931, Muray travelled to Mexico on holiday with Covarrubias and his wife Rosa. Covarrubias had been a student of Diego Rivera and used to frequent the home of the great Mexican muralist and that is how Nickolas Muray met his young, and then almost unknown, wife: Frida Kahlo.
Immediately after their first meeting Kahlo sent Muray a note that read:
Nick,
I love you like I would love an angel.
You are a Lillie of the valley my love.
I will never forget you, never.
You are my whole live
I hope you will never forget this.
Frida
Below, to end the message, the mould of a kiss
The two began a love affair that continued on and off for the next ten years and a friendship that lasted until Frida’s death in 1954.
Not a single picture survives of that first meeting, which is very peculiar since Muray used to always go around with at least two cameras, a Leica and a Rolleiflex, to document his daily life. The first photos taken of Frida by Nick date back to 1937, but the relationship between the two continued clandestinely in those early years, during Muray’s many visits to Mexico, or Kahlo’s visits to the United States.
The photographs that Muray took in the course of his love affair with Frida Kahlo cover a period from 1937 to 1946, and offer us a unique perspective, that of friend, lover and confidant, while at the same time showing Muray’s qualities as a portraitist and as a master of colour photography, a pioneering field in those years. These images also highlight Kahlo’s deep interest in her Mexican heritage, and the most intimate aspects of her life and art.