Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Edward B. Silberstein/Cincinnati Art Museum/© 2018 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Bernard Silberstein photographed the artist with “La Mesa Herida” in 1941, a year after she finished the work. Where is it now?

Here’s a real-life mystery that reads like a detective novel — my kind of thing.

Natalie Schachar writes at the Art Newspaper, “The hunt for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting ‘La Mesa Herida’ (‘The Wounded Table,’ 1940) has been revived in Mexico, where a researcher says he expects to track it down within five years. The work, a holy grail for Kahlo scholars, went missing after the artist donated it to the former Soviet Union. Last seen in an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955, it disappeared on its way to Moscow. …

“Raúl Cano Monroy, an investigator who organised an exhibition at Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s Home-Study Museum in Mexico City last year, says he has uncovered new clues after working with the archive of the National Front of Plastic Arts, which promoted Mexican art abroad during the 1950s. …

” ‘La Mesa Herida’ is Kahlo’s largest painting, measuring around 1.2m by 2.4m, and was done in oil on wood rather than on canvas. The work is a surreal depiction of Kahlo and guests. … The work has been valued at more than $20m today.

“ ‘It’s important because it’s not only a self-portrait, it’s a statement,’ says Helga Prignitz-Poda, a curator and art historian who is working on an updated catalogue of Kahlo’s art. … Prignitz-Poda and the independent curator Katarina Lopatkina outlined their findings about the painting’s history in a recent essay for the International Foundation for Art Research (Ifar) Journal. The authors say that, although Kahlo, a dedicated Communist, sent the work to Moscow as ‘a gift of friendship.’ documents show that Soviet officials considered it to be an example of ‘decadent bourgeois formalist art’ and unsuitable for public display.

“In 1954, the same year Kahlo died, Rivera requested that the painting be shown in Poland in an exhibition with other works by Mexican artists. The show at Warsaw’s Zacheta National Gallery of Art proved so popular that it was sent on tour to other countries in the Soviet Union and even made it to China. However, ‘there was no trace’ of ‘La Mesa Herida’ after the Warsaw leg, Prignitz-Poda says.”

More at the Art Newspaper, here. Wish I could tell you why Mexican-art sleuth Raúl Cano Monroy thinks he will find Kahlo’s missing work in five years, but he’s playing it close to the vest. I mean, why five years?

Stay tuned.