Un ruban autour d'une bombe: How Frida Kahlo Spurned André Breton and the Surrealists

Frida Kahlo y André Breton 

(Mexico,1938) 

 

They are so damn intellectual and rotten that I can't stand them ... 

I'd rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, 

than have anything to do with those Surrealist sons of bitches ...[1] 

 

 

I. 

 

The more I read about Frida Kahlo - and I've been doing nothing else but read about this Ballardian Angel for the past week - the more my affection for her increases ... 

 

She loved animals, collecting dolls, drinking tequila, and wearing traditional Mexican dresses - all things which immediately put a person in my good books. 

 

She also spurned the High Priest of Surrealism, André Breton, when he attempted to draw her into his artistic fold - and this significantly boosts my admiration for her.

 

So, as much as I'd love to chat about her pet spider monkeys, her drinking habits, or her fashion sense, it's Frida's relationship with Breton and her contempt for the Surrealists that I've chosen to focus on here ... 

 

 

II.

 

There are several reasons why I don't like André Breton; why I instinctively side, for example, with Bataille and his base materialism over the former's idealism. 

 

For one thing, while Breton was not mistaken to call Bataille an excremental philosopher, Bataille was spot on to characterise Breton as a false revolutionary with a Christ complex.   

 

Anyhoo, whatever the reason, the point is I don't like him. And so I'm glad Kahlo had the good sense to reject his (slightly creepy) overtures to her, when he visited Mexico in 1938. 

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, upon seeing her work Breton was immediately captivated. He declared Frida to be a natural born surrealist, describing her art as like a ribbon around a bomb (i.e., superficially pretty, but with a violent emotional reality at its heart). 

 

Eager to co-opt her unique vision, Breton offered to promote her work in Europe and organise a major exhibition of Mexican art in Paris that would include some of her paintings. And, to be fair, he did do this [2].

 

But while Kahlo gratefully accepted his help, she fiercely resisted Breton's attempts to claim her as one of his own, making it clear that she had no intention of becoming merely an exotic muse who fulfilled male aesthetic fantasies. 

 

She famously stated: "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." 

 

 

IV. 

 

For Kahlo, her art was a deeply personal and material reflection of her lived experience. She found the European Surrealists' preoccupation with symbolism and accessing the subconscious mind at odds with her goal of processing physical pain and trauma.

 

Furthermore, her trip to Paris in 1939 for the Mexique exhibition [1], completely soured her view of Breton and his circle. In letters to her lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, she scathingly dismissed Breton and the French Surrealists as pretentious, disorganised good-for-nothings who sat in cafés all day [3]. 

 

In fact, she went as far as to call Breton a cucaracha - which is not a nice thing to be called in any language.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm slightly paraphrasing from a letter written by Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray on 16 February 1939. As one commentator notes: 

      "Her letters to him are the sharpest, funniest and most brutally honest accounts we have of her time in France. She wrote to Muray not just to update him, but to release steam - to unload her frustrations about the Surrealists, the filth of the city, her failing health, and her utter disappointment in Breton's empty promises." 

      See the post titled 'Frida Kahlo in Paris', on (the excellent blog by Wally and Duke) The Not So Innocents Abroad (21 April 2025). See also the post by Verity Babs on Artnet titled 'Art Bites: Why Frida Kahlo Hated the French Surrealists' (14 May 2024) for a further info and analysis. 

      Finally, note that Kahlo's handwritten letter to Muray - in English and containing a lipstick kiss - is preserved in the Archives of American Art, at the Smithsonian Institution.    

 

[2] The Mexique exhibition took place in Paris from March 10 to March 25, 1939, at the Galerie Renou et Colle (aka the Pierre Colle Gallery) and was organised by Breton and Marcel Duchamp. 

      Intended to provide a window on to Mexican culture in general, it nevertheless featured eighteen paintings by Frida Kahlo and marked her European debut. Her self-portrait, The Frame (1938), was acquired by the French state, making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a work included in their collection. 

 

[3] It should be noted that there were exceptions to this: Kahlo did have time for Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, whom she praised for keeping his feet on the ground. But the rest were, in her eyes, pompous windbags and lunatics.   

 

 

Frida Kahlo and D. H. Lawrence: Mexican Monobrow vs English Red Beard

Frida y Lorenzo (SA/2026) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and English writer D. H. Lawrence never met. 

 

For while he spent a significant amount of time in Mexico between 1923 and 1925, Frida was just a teenager then, even if already moving in the political and artistic circles of Mexico City [2].

 

But they could have met. And one suspects that if Lawrence had died in 1940 rather than 1930, they may very well have crossed paths at some point.

 

It's doubtful, however, that they would have got along ...

 

 

II. 

 

For while they moved in overlapping bohemian circles and shared close mutual friends, they were very different characters belonging to different generations, classes, and cultures, who held very different views on politics, religion, and sex: she was a Marxist atheist who liked to screw around; he wasn't and didn't. 

 

Oh, and Lawrence had been rude about her husband, Diego Rivera, judging his artwork as a failure that stripped the indigenous peoples of Mexico of their complex history and humanity by viewing them through an ideal political lens and turning them into little more than avatars of socialism [3]. 

 

Somehow, I can't imagine that would have endeared him to her ... 

 

 

III. 

It's ironic, therefore, that when Vogue published a review of Kahlo's solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery (NYC, 1938), the reviewer gleefully reported that people were discussing her paintings as "looking like D. H. Lawrence on canvas, all fertility and gore" [4]. 

 

This widely circulated quote permanently linked their names in art history, leading many to assume a personal connection between Kahlo and Lawrence which - as we have indicated - didn't actually exist. 

 

And so we are left to fantasise a meeting between them and overlook the likelihood that they would have detested each other. Indeed, it's easier to imagine her smashing a bottle of tequila over his head (or vice versa) than the two of them playing nice together or making whoopee. 

 

Having said that, I think it's highly likely that Frida Kahlo and Frieda Lawrence would - despite a 27-year age gap - have hit it off had they had the opportunity to meet ...

 

 

IV. 

 

Why do I say that? 

 

Well, for one thing, not only did they share the same name [5], but Kahlo was, in fact, half-German. And so, while Spanish may have been her primary language, Frida konnte Deutsch sprechen und schreiben [6] and would have been able to chat with the German-born Frieda Lawrence in her native tongue.

 

More than this, there were striking similarities in their temperaments and each fully embraced an unconventional lifestyle: Frieda Lawrence was defined by her fierce commitment to emotional honesty, sexual liberation, and the rejection of bourgeois conventions [7]. 

 

She would have admired Kahlo's unapologetic approach to both her art and her love life and found Kahlo's fierce intelligence, sharp wit, and dramatic flair captivating. 

And Kahlo, for her part, would surely have found Mrs Lawrence a kindred spirit - one who valued living with vital intensity and knew how to guard her own identity and freedom whilst married to an internationally famous artist. 

 

The fact that Frieda also spent many years living in Taos, New Mexico and was deeply immersed in the landscape and the culture of the American Southwest, would probably have intrigued Kahlo also.  

 

It's a shame that their mutual friend, Georgia O'Keeffe, never thought to arrange a meeting ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The image is based on a passport picture of Lawrence taken in 1921 and Nickolas Muray's iconic photo of Frida Kahlo wearing a traditional Mexican shawl (known as a rebozo in Spanish) taken in New York, in 1938, prior to her solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery. Visit  artsy.net to view the original colour portrait. 

 

[2] Kahlo was born in July 1907 - so was almost 22 years younger than Lawrence, who was born in September 1885. When she had her fateful accident on 17 September 1925 in Mexico City, aged eighteen, Lawrence had just turned forty and was on board a steamship bound for England. 

      Coincidentally, however, he had almost died in Mexico City himself earlier that year having contracted typhoid, malaria, and a severe bout of flu. He fell so ill that he entered the American Military Hospital and it was there that doctors officially diagnosed his advanced tuberculosis, bluntly informing his wife, Frieda, that he had less than two years to live. 

 

[3] Lawrence didn't produce a dedicated essay on Rivera; instead, his commentary is scattered across fictional works, travel essays, and private letters from his time in Mexico and New Mexico in the 1920s.

      His most sustained (if veiled) critique of Rivera is found in chapter III of The Plumed Serpent (1926): the protagonist Kate Leslie visits the University in Mexico City to look at some newly painted murals (a direct reference to the real-life murals Rivera and his contemporaries were painting on the walls of public institutions at the time). Channelling his own disdain through Kate, Lawrence describes the works as full of caricatures of wicked capitalists and saintly proletarians and notes that the Indians painted on the walls look like flat wooden symbols rather than living human beings. For Lawrence, Rivera was ultimately just another bourgeois bohemian engaged in lazy political posturing. 

      Finally, it is worth noting also that Frida Kahlo's extensive personal library is still preserved at her home turned museum - La Casa Azul - in Coyoacán, and while she owned a vast collection of international literature, Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent is not noted by historians or curators as a prized volume in her collection. 

      In fact, her friend, the American photographer Edward Weston - who also knew and photographed Lawrence during the latter's visit to Mexico City in 1924 - noted in his diary that the intellectual elite in Mexico at the time largely rejected Lawrence's novel as an inaccurate and exoticised view of their nation. 

 

[4] See Bertram D. Wolfe, 'Rise of Another Rivera', Vogue (1 November, 1938).

      Wolfe was an interesting figure: highly active as a communist, art critic and biographer, he later rejected Stalinism and became a fierce anti-communist intellectual. While living in Mexico in the 1920s, he befriended Rivera and wrote extensively on the Mexican mural movement. He also recorded conversations with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, which remain vital primary sources for researchers into her life and work. 

 

[5] Frida's father, born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo in the golden city of Pforzheim, moved to Mexico in 1891 (aged 19) and changed his name to Guillermo Kahlo. She permanently dropped the 'e' in her name in 1935 as a political gesture (naturally enough, she wasn't keen to be seen as half-German following the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933), although she also wanted, as an artist, to align herself closely with the people and culture of Mexico. 

 

[6] The multilingual Miss Kahlo also spoke French and English fluently and had familiarity with the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl. Spanish was the main language used at home when she was growing up with her three sisters primarily because her mother, Matilde Calderón, was of Oaxacan and Spanish descent and did not speak German. 

 

[7] Frieda famously abandoned her children and her status as a professor's wife in England to run away with a penniless and relatively unknown young writer (Lawrence), in 1912.  

 

 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for suggesting this post.