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Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Page created on March 2, 2018 / Page updated on October 6, 2026
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Introduction

Nickolas Muray’s photographs helped make Frida Kahlo’s face familiar far beyond the circles that first knew her paintings. Their connection was also personal: they wrote across the Atlantic, shared periods of intimacy and remained linked after the romance changed. The pictures are most revealing when seen alongside that correspondence and Muray’s work as a colour photographer, rather than treated as transparent records of Kahlo’s private life. [1] [2] [3]

The surviving evidence is uneven. Museum collections identify particular prints and processes, while some of the most important letters are accessible only through catalogue descriptions, a published rendering or a curator’s account. Those differences matter: a dated portrait does not mark the beginning or end of an affair, and a brilliant printed colour is not proof that every surviving version of the image was made by the same process. [3] [4] [5]

At a Glance

  • First meeting: The Museo Frida Kahlo dates Kahlo and Muray’s introduction in Mexico to May 1931. [1]
  • Colour portraits: Muray photographed Kahlo from 1937; the Met holds a distinct 1939 carbro print. [2] [5]
  • Correspondence: Catalogued letters from Paris in February 1939 connect their relationship with Kahlo’s exhibition work and health. [13] [14]
  • Later friendship: A 1946 carbro portrait and a reported 1951 Casa Azul visit document their continuing connection. [6] [16]

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. A Meeting Before the Famous Portraits
  3. Making Colour, Making a Portrait
  4. Letters Across the Atlantic in 1939
  5. After the Romantic Turning Point
  6. From Private Sittings to Public Images
  7. Related Reading

A Meeting Before the Famous Portraits

The Museo Frida Kahlo chronology places their introduction in Mexico in May 1931, when the artist Miguel Covarrubias and his wife, dancer Rosa Rolanda, presented the visiting Hungarian-born photographer to Kahlo. The Victoria and Albert Museum also dates their meeting to 1931. These are retrospective institutional accounts; neither gives a contemporary transcript of their first conversation. [1] [2]

Muray already had a substantial career of his own. The National Museum of American History traces his training in lithography, photoengraving and colour separation in Budapest and Berlin, followed by work for Condé Nast after his move to New York in 1913. He established a Greenwich Village portrait studio and began regular magazine work after a Harper’s Bazaar commission in 1921. [6]

That background helps explain why his later pictures of Kahlo differ from casual holiday snapshots. He understood how a sitter, light, fabric and colour would work together in a finished print, and his professional life crossed portraiture, fashion and advertising. The Archives of American Art describes a long-distance affair during the 1930s and a friendship that continued after it; the V&A places the particularly knowing sequence of colour portraits from 1937. [3] [7]

The gap between a reported 1931 meeting and the better-documented 1937 photographic phase should not be filled with imagined sittings. Muray was among people who moved between Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Mexican world and New York, but a catalogue date identifies an exposure or print, not the frequency of their private meetings. The 1931 introduction and later portraits are parts of the same relationship without being interchangeable evidence for its pace. [1] [3]

Muray’s interest in the Mexican art world reached beyond the camera. The Harry Ransom Center’s inventory of his Mexican-art collection records 103 items, predominantly works by Covarrubias, alongside three by Kahlo. That finding aid proves an art collection and an enduring material connection; it does not tell us when each Kahlo item was given or bought, or give access to the couple’s private letters. [8]

Watch: Frida Kahlo

Five perspectives to view here alongside the article.

Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas: Great Art Explained

Great Art Explained

A focused visual introduction to the painting and its context.

Making Colour, Making a Portrait

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a specific Muray portrait titled Frida Kahlo, dated 1939 and identified as a carbro print. In the museum’s public image, Kahlo stands against a restrained grey ground, her arms crossed beneath a saturated magenta wrap worn over pale clothing. The dark covering around her hair and the intensity of the wrap make colour and self-presentation central to the picture without requiring a claim about what either participant privately intended. [5]

Carbro was a demanding way to produce colour. The Met’s process glossary describes pigment transfers in yellow, cyan and magenta, brought together in registration to form the final print. Shannon Perich, writing for the National Museum of American History, discusses a 1939 magenta-rebozo portrait made in Muray’s New York studio and the vivid effect of layered colour; without an exact accession match, her studio account should not be assumed to describe the Met’s physical print. [9] [10]

The V&A reads the Muray sittings as a collaboration in framing. Kahlo’s dress, rebozo, hair ornaments, lipstick and nail colour are not incidental details in that curatorial account: they operate within the colour composition. Photographer and sitter had different roles, but the resulting image did not simply happen to a passive subject. [2]

Kahlo’s interest in photography was wider than these sittings. The V&A describes the thousands of photographs preserved at Casa Azul as a collection she exchanged, stored and sometimes inscribed, rather than a passive archive of pictures taken of her. That material does not prove she composed every Muray photograph, but it makes her response to his prints and her attention to how she appeared before his camera easier to understand. [2]

Art historian Nieves Limón Serrano develops this point more theoretically, treating Kahlo’s posing, clothing and choice of setting as expressive participation before the camera. Her analysis of a 1938 picture involving a hand-held frame and a 1941 Muray photograph that juxtaposes Kahlo with one of her paintings invites viewers to see staging rather than unfiltered biography. That is an attributed argument about visual authorship, not a transfer of Muray’s copyright or proof that Kahlo directed every exposure. [11]

Some portraits also circulated as later prints. The Harry Ransom Center’s 36-item Salomón Grimberg Collection of Muray Photographs includes two 1920s gelatin-silver prints, two 1940s dye-transfer prints and 32 colour inkjet prints made around 2005 from earlier photographs. Its listed Kahlo-related scenes run from Tizapán and Coyoacán in 1937–39 to later sittings and New York rooftop images in 1946, but the circa-2005 sheets are not vintage carbro objects merely because the exposures are older. [12]

The Ransom titles also show that Muray did not always isolate Kahlo as a singular icon. The catalogue identifies photographs with Rivera and the Covarrubias circle, domestic scenes and encounters at several locations, alongside individually posed pictures. Titles and dates are a partial map of a social and photographic practice, not a complete account of who arranged a group, how long a sitting lasted or which negative became the version most widely seen. [12]

Letters Across the Atlantic in 1939

The relationship becomes more sharply documented during Kahlo’s trip to Paris in early 1939. A Spanish rendering of a letter from Muray dated 6 February, published with a Casa Azul archive credit, shows him answering a cable from her and writing about the pain of separation and the prospect of seeing her again. It offers his voice, but the original letter has not been directly consulted and the rendering’s editorial choices are not documented. [4]

Kahlo wrote from Paris later that month. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art catalogues letters to Muray dated 16 and 27 February; its descriptions connect illness and hospital treatment with exhibition preparations, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Mary Reynolds and financial worries. These are the archive’s summaries of the handwritten letters, not complete transcriptions, but they show that the correspondence carried her artistic and practical concerns as well as affection. [13] [14]

Art historian Lorena Garrido Donoso reads selected passages from those letters through disability and feminist studies. In her interpretation, Kahlo did not simply offer Muray a tale of suffering: she described illness, reassurance and desire while writing as someone whose body could be painful and pleasurable. Garrido Donoso’s quotations come through Salomón Grimberg’s edited 2005 letter volume, so her interpretation is valuable without turning those excerpts into independently inspected original letters. [15]

Garrido Donoso draws attention to the name “Xochitl” in the lovers’ correspondence and to remembered New York places in Kahlo’s February letter. She interprets the writing as a space in which Kahlo could voice sexual desire while refusing the expectation that disability meant a life without it. That reading complicates the equally familiar image of a woman defined only by pain; it is the scholar’s argument, not a diagnosis of Kahlo’s feelings at every moment. [15]

The painter’s experience in Paris belongs in its own history, but the letters reveal why Muray was an important correspondent during it. The Smithsonian summaries name the people helping or obstructing an exhibition, and the 27 February record also mentions money. Kahlo could write to Muray about professional frustration and physical difficulty within the same exchange that sustained their personal bond. [13] [14]

Their words changed in the spring. Hilda Trujillo, then director of the Casa Azul, described a Muray letter dated 16 May 1939 in which he tried to bring the romance to an end because he understood Kahlo’s attachment to Rivera. That is a museum director’s account of a document, not a full reading of the original or proof that one day settled everything between them. [16]

Kahlo’s letter of 13 June is known in part through the V&A’s published excerpt, in which she responds to a photograph Muray sent and thinks about the magenta of her rebozo. A Parrish Art Museum checklist separately records a facsimile of this letter and another dated 13 October 1939. The surviving, accessible pieces show continued contact, but the checklist does not disclose what the October letter said. [2] [17]

In Garrido Donoso’s reading of the June letter, Kahlo’s response to news of Muray’s coming marriage moves among sorrow, jealousy and attachment to the objects and places they had shared. That interpretation comes from an edited letter text in Grimberg’s book, not from direct inspection of the original manuscript. It helps explain why the V&A’s brief response to a photograph is not merely a note on colour: an image could carry a continuing emotional relationship even as the circumstances around it changed. [15] [2]

The letters therefore resist a simple story in which portraits flourish only while two people are lovers and stop when that relationship changes. A photograph could travel between them, be discussed in a letter, and live on as a print after the moment of sitting. The particular June response also shows Kahlo attending to the appearance of an image made by another artist, without proving how decisions were divided at every sitting. [2] [5]

After the Romantic Turning Point

An Archives of American Art record describes a Kahlo letter postmarked 11 January 1940 from Coyoacán. According to the catalogue, she acknowledged money Muray had lent her, reported a hand infection that kept her from painting and objected to being treated “only as a friend.” Those are unusually direct signs of financial support and emotional strain, but the catalogue does not establish the amount, a repayment, the identity of the unfinished painting or the entire letter’s tone. [18]

Muray’s later pictures keep the relationship visible in a different form. The National Museum of American History owns a separate three-colour carbro portrait of Kahlo dated 1946, in which its catalogue describes her wearing a pink scarf around her head and neck. The reverse bears a Muray label identifying the sitter as a painter, Rivera’s wife and a friend; the words attest to a form of continued association, not to the exact date on which intimacy became friendship. [6]

The contrast with the 1939 Met print is instructive. Both are identified carbro objects, but they have different dates, measurements and museum histories, and the later scarf picture should not be collapsed into every familiar magenta-rebozo image. Muray’s technical consistency across distinct works is more interesting than treating them as interchangeable illustrations of a single emotional state. [5] [6]

The Museo Frida Kahlo chronology also refers to later New York portraits by Muray and Julien Levy, while the Ransom catalogue lists rooftop views from 1946. These records show that Kahlo continued to be photographed after the 1939 rupture described by Trujillo. They do not alone reveal the private terms of each visit, who chose a particular pose or whether a given surviving print was made at the time of exposure. [1] [12] [16]

Trujillo also reported that Muray came to Casa Azul in 1951 with his wife Peggy and their children. In her account, Kahlo gave him a still life at their parting, a reported gesture consistent with later friendship rather than a life cut cleanly into separate photographic and personal eras. The Ransom inventory independently lists a Kahlo still life dated 1951 in Muray’s Mexican-art collection, but it does not verify the moment or manner of the gift Trujillo described. [16] [8]

From Private Sittings to Public Images

The portraits now live in several kinds of collection. The Met’s 1939 carbro entered through a purchase fund in 1978, while the Ransom’s photographic group was gifted in 2020 and contains many much later inkjet prints made from older negatives. Each record tells a different story about the physical object in front of a viewer and the history of the image it carries. [5] [12]

Exhibitions have often reunited pictures dispersed among archives and collections. A 2018 Mexican culture-ministry account described 54 Muray images selected from 1937–46, while the Museum of Latin American Art described an exhibition of approximately fifty portraits. Neither figure is a total for all Muray photographs of Kahlo or for distinct sittings; each belongs to a curatorial selection. [19] [20]

The market supplies another, differently bounded number. Sotheby’s offered 78 early Muray prints in April 2019, but its own description says that the group portrayed Kahlo, Rivera, Covarrubias and a wider circle of artists, performers and friends. It was a window into a social world, not a sale of 78 separate Kahlo portraits. [21]

What endures is a collaboration visible through distinct traces: a painter’s deliberate appearance, a photographer’s technical construction of colour, letters written during travel and separation, and prints remade or collected long afterwards. Muray’s images shaped a public Kahlo, but they do not replace her paintings or give unrestricted access to her interior life. The letters, when read at their actual level of survival, complicate the portraits without turning either person into a character in a single, finished romance. [2] [3] [11] [15]

Frida Kahlo’s fashion and Tehuana dress examines clothing as lived practice as well as visual presentation. Friends and Artistic Networks follows the relationships around the Mexican and New York art worlds, while Frida Kahlo in Paris gives the 1939 letters their travel and exhibition setting. Frida Kahlo in New York follows the American contexts of Muray’s photographs.

Discussion

Use the cited evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. The prompts below are starting points, not fixed interpretations.

Reader Insights

Close Looking

What can the dated portraits establish about Muray and Kahlo’s work together, and what can they not establish about their private relationship?

Context

How do the letters change the way the 1939 colour portraits might be read?

Open Question

Why must the date of a photographic exposure be distinguished from the date and process of a surviving print?

Join the Conversation

Which reading best fits the evidence, and where does uncertainty remain?

References

  1. Museo Frida Kahlo, Spanish artist chronology, May 1931 introduction entry and later New York portrait entry. Institutional retrospective. View source text.
  2. Victoria and Albert Museum, “Photographing Frida Kahlo”, “Nickolas Muray” section and edited extract from the letter dated 13 June 1939. Curatorial interpretation; no image permission. View source text.
  3. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Nickolas Muray papers, Collection Information and Biographical/Historical Note. The archive overview identifies correspondence and the long-distance affair; original letter leaves were not read. View source text.
  4. La Jornada, Casa Azul-credited Spanish rendering of Nickolas Muray’s letter to Kahlo, 6 February 1939, PDF p. 1. Published rendering, not an independently checked original manuscript. View source text.
  5. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nickolas Muray, Frida Kahlo, object 1978.608, Artwork Details and public image observed at screen size. 1939 carbro print, 42.7 × 32.2 cm; image © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. View source text.
  6. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Frida Kahlo de Rivera, object PG.69.247.24, Description, recto/verso fields, Details and Physical Specifications. Distinct 1946 three-colour carbro; use conditions apply. View source text.
  7. Victoria and Albert Museum, “Making her self up”, Muray passage on 1937 colour photographs and relationship chronology. View source text.
  8. Harry Ransom Center, Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, collection overview and Series II. Art inventory, not a general correspondence archive. View source text.
  9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Photography: Processes, Preservation, and Conservation”, technical glossary definitions of carbro and dye-transfer prints. View source text.
  10. Shannon Perich, “Coloring Frida Kahlo,” National Museum of American History, 7 May 2010, discussion of a 1939 New York studio portrait and carbro colour. Its object identity is not assumed to match the Met accession. View source text.
  11. Nieves Limón Serrano, “Frida Kahlo’s Photographic Posing”, author-accepted text, pp. 8–9 and note 14. Interpretive photographic authorship, not image-rights transfer. View source text.
  12. Harry Ransom Center, Salomón Grimberg Collection of Nickolas Muray Photographs, call PH-10244, collection summary and item entries 2020:0007:0001–0036. Exposure dates and circa-2005 print dates are distinct. View source text.
  13. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kahlo to Muray, 16 February 1939, item 491, Overview/Item Information. Archive description only; original leaves not read. View source text.
  14. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kahlo to Muray, 27 February 1939, item 761, Overview/Item Information. Archive description only; original leaves not read. View source text.
  15. Lorena Garrido Donoso, “Discapacidad y autosomatografía en las cartas de Frida Kahlo,” Nueva Revista del Pacífico 80 (2024), §5 and conclusion. Complete Spanish article read; quoted letters there are mediated through an unread Grimberg edition. View source text.
  16. Mónica Mateos-Vega, interview with Casa Azul director Hilda Trujillo, La Jornada, 5 April 2019, paragraphs on Muray’s 16 May letter and later friendship. Director’s account of the archive, not original-letter inspection. View source text.
  17. Parrish Art Museum, Frida Kahlo: An Expanded Body checklist, PDF p. 9, entries 38–39 for June and October 1939 letter facsimiles. Checklist, not full letter transcriptions. View source text.
  18. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kahlo to Muray, postmarked 11 January 1940, item 13535, Overview/Item Information. Archive description only; original leaves not read. View source text.
  19. Mexico Secretaría de Cultura, 2018 Muray exhibition notice, opening and exhibition-description paragraphs. Fifty-four exhibited images, not a complete corpus. View source text.
  20. Museum of Latin American Art, Muray exhibition record, exhibition overview. Approximately fifty portraits describes a selection. View source text.
  21. Sotheby’s, “Nickolas Muray’s Intimate Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Portraits”, opening paragraph and captions for the April 2019 78-print mixed-sitter offering. View source text.