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Frida Kahlo was one of those rare artists whose face became synonymous with her work. Her iconic self-portraits, showing her measured gaze beneath those famous conjoined eyebrows, are far better known than anything else she painted.
Photographs depict Kahlo in a similar, and yet different, light. Similar, because they capture the same enigmatic visage. Different, because she is reacting to the person behind the camera. And nobody documented the Mexican artist on film better than her friend and lover, Nickolas Muray.
Two dozen of Muray's images of Kahlo, some of them never before seen in this country, will be on display until May at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. The exhibition was made possible with the help of Muray's daughter Mimi, a Utahn who in 1993 stumbled upon undiscovered images of Kahlo in an old family suitcase.
"I was amazed to find this envelope that had about 70 negatives in it," says Mimi Muray Levitt, whose father, one of the best celebrity portrait photographers of the early 20th century, died in 1965. "There were images there that I'd never seen before."
Levitt, who splits her time between homes in Alta and Moab, took the dusty, scratched negatives to a photo lab to be restored. Six of the resulting images, combined with others from private collections and the Eastman House museum in Rochester, N.Y., make up the bulk of the small UMFA exhibition.
Kahlo is the show's draw, of course, but Nickolas Muray was an accomplished artist in his own right. Born in Hungary, Muray emigrated to New York in 1913 at age 21. There he established a Greenwich Village studio and soon found work photographing celebrities for Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair.
Over the next few decades, Muray snapped portraits of Hollywood stars, four U.S. presidents and Hall of Famer Babe Ruth. His famous photo of the Yankee slugger, seated facing the camera with a bat over his left shoulder, is included in the UMFA exhibit and is typical of Muray's natural and direct portraiture style.
In 1931, Muray accompanied his artist friend Miguel Covarrubias on a vacation to Mexico City, where he met Kahlo and her husband, painter Diego Rivera. Muray and Kahlo were drawn to each other immediately; after their first encounter she sent him a note, sealed with a lipstick print of a kiss, that said, "I love you like I would love an angel."
Despite her marriage to Rivera, Kahlo began a long affair with Muray, who visited her often over the next two decades. Their affair ended in 1941, when Kahlo remarried Rivera after a brief divorce, but the former lovers remained friends until Kahlo's death.
Mimi Muray Levitt recalls meeting an ailing, bed-ridden Kahlo on a trip to Mexico with her parents in 1953. Kahlo died the next year. Levitt didn't learn of her father's romance with the artist until later, when her mother showed her a stack of Kahlo's love letters - several of which are part of the UMFA show.
The exhibition photos, in color and black and white, were shot mostly at Kahlo's Mexico City home or on her occasional trips to New York. Each one shows her long dark hair carefully arranged atop her head, often adorned with fresh flowers. Her dark eyes gaze impassively into the lens, betraying no clues about the emotions behind them.
"It's almost like she had an invisible shield around her. She's totally self-controlled and composed," says the UMFA's Bernadette Brown, the exhibition curator. "On this one I think of the Mona Lisa a little," she adds, motioning to a portrait of Kahlo leaning against a wall, arms folded across her chest, lips showing the barest trace of a smile.
While Kahlo's facial expressions reveal little, she surrounds herself with items of personal significance. In one image she holds an Olmec figurine made by Mexico's earliest indigenous people - a tribute to her heritage. The UMFA will complement such photos with pre-Columbian objects from its permanent collection.
Another image shows her stroking a pet fawn. Many photos show her dressed in colorful costumes of traditional Mexico. In several images she's wearing earrings, shaped like human hands, given to her by Pablo Picasso. And in what appears to be a spoof of a turn-of-the-century wedding portrait, Kahlo stands behind a seated Rivera, her hand on his shoulder.
Together, these images offer glimpses into the complex layers of Kahlo's life: her pride in Mexico, her passion for her art, her distinctive personal style. They also reflect her devotion to her husband and her fierce independence, which led her to take many lovers over the turbulent course of their marriage.
"My father was probably better able to capture who she really was through his photographs than almost anybody else," says Levitt, who hopes the exhibition will help remind people of Nickolas Muray's talent as well as his intimacy with his famous subject. "When you see the way she looks at the camera, you get a sense of how she felt about him."
A focus on Frida
"Her Spirit Is Stranger Than the Angels: Frida Kahlo Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray" opened Friday at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The exhibition will remain through May 14.
Admission is $4, $2 for seniors and those 18 and younger. Children 5 and younger are free. The museum is open TuesdayÐFriday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For more information, call 801-581-7332 or visit http://www.umfa.utah.edu.