Date: July 22, 2008

Contact: Crystal Walter

 

Wichita Art Museum Presents

Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray

 

Wichita: The Wichita Art Museum will feature the exhibition entitled Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray, December 7, 2008 through February 1, 2009.

 

Photographer Nickolas Muray (1892-1965) came to America in 1913 from Hungary. During Muray’s forty-five year career as a New York photographer, he developed a growing reputation that began during the decade of the Twenties when he photographed everybody who was anybody. At the time of his death, most Americans had seen, at one time or another, Muray’s portraits of celebrities, Presidents or his advertisements. Whether they knew the identity of the photographer or not, these images had infiltrated America’s psyche as icons with which the people readily identified.

 

Between 1920 and 1940, Nickolas Muray made more than 10,000 portraits. He began photographing Frida Kahlo in color in the winter of 1938-1939, while Kahlo lived in New York, attending her exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery; and he continued to do so until 1948. Muray photographed Frida more often than any other single person.

 

Muray and Kahlo were at the height of an on-again, off-again ten-year love affair when he began photographing her using the Carbro technique. (The Carbro process is done by using a camera that exposes three negatives through a red, green and blue filter.) Their affair started in 1931, after Muray was divorced from his second wife and shortly after Kahlo’s marriage to Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. The love affair outlived Muray’s third marriage and Kahlo’s divorce and remarriage to Rivera by one year, ending in 1941. Muray wanted to marry Kahlo, but when it became apparent that she wanted Muray for a lover, not a husband, he took his leave for good and married his fourth and last wife. He and Kahlo remained good friends until her death in 1954.

 

After Kahlo received the first of Muray’s carbro portraits in Mexico, she wrote to Muray on June 3, 1939: “Nick darling, I got my wonderful picture you sent to me, I find it even more beautiful than in New York. Diego says that it is as marvelous as a Piero de la Francesca. To me it is more than that, it is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me of that morning…(when) we went to your shop to take photos. This one was one of them. And now I have it near me. You will always be inside the magenta rebozo (on the left side).”

 

Carbro prints of Muray’s portraits of Frida Kahlo are in the permanent collection of the Frida Kahlo Museum, The George Eastman House, The National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

The Wichita Art Museum exhibition is part of a national tour over a two-and-a-half year period containing 46 photographic prints reproduced from the original negatives. The tour was developed and managed by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, an exhibition tour development company in Kansas City, Missouri. The Wichita venue is made possible in part by the Friends of the Wichita Art Museum Endowment.

 

December 7, 2008 through February 1, 2009

Friday, January 30, 5 to 8 pm during Final Friday festivities

 

 

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