Exhibition Opening - Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds

Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds
The Art Institute of Chicago – Mar 29 to Jul 13, 2025 Chicago (USA)

Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, this exhibition focuses on the celebrated Mexican artist’s first and only trip to Europe and her brief yet pivotal encounter with Mary Reynolds, an American avant-garde bookbinder who stood at the center of a rich Parisian artistic community.

Mary Reynolds.

Drawing upon the extensive Mary Reynolds Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago and extraordinary Kahlo loans from public and private collections in the US, Mexico, and Europe, the presentation sheds light on this little-known chapter of 20th-century art history, recounting the legacies of Kahlo and Reynolds—both artists themselves and partners of artists—as they navigated Surrealism, identity, and cross-cultural exchange on the eve of World War II.

January 1939.

Kahlo traveled to France in January 1939 at the invitation of André Breton, the architect of European Surrealism. Breton had visited Kahlo in Mexico the year previously and invited her to consider an exhibition in Paris. The French city, however, did not agree with Kahlo. She quickly found it eroding her sense of artistic freedom and her health—until she met Reynolds. When Kahlo was rushed to the hospital with a kidney infection, Reynolds invited her to convalesce at her home at 14 rue Hallé, a hub of the city’s visual and literary avant-gardes who regularly communed and dined there.

Marcel Duchamp.

Reynolds and her partner, the artist Marcel Duchamp, treated this home as a living work of art and abundantly installed it with their own artworks and unique books, as well as paintings and sculptures by close friends, such as Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, and Jean Cocteau. This rich creative and domestic environment in many ways reflected that of Kahlo’s own beloved Casa Azul in Mexico City.

Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City.

Our exhibition traces Kahlo’s artistic trajectory from her first solo exhibition to her short but highly consequential engagement with Mary Reynolds and the French Surrealists and then back across the Atlantic in 1940 with Kahlo’s participation in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City. The story is told through approximately 100 objects, including paintings, book bindings, works on paper, photographs, and archival materials, notably letters from Kahlo to her lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, where she recounts the experience of her Paris sojourn in her own voice.