Frida Kahlo’s Wounded Table: the Lost Masterpiece of Mexicanidad and Surrealism

The Exhibition at Galería de Arte Mexicano, 1940

“Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world," said Andre Breton once. Anyone who has set foot in this strange and wonderful land of cacti and volcanoes, of luchador and matadors, of masks and micheladas, fierce stone gods, dancing calavera skeletons, cemeteries strewn with bones, nuns, and churches teeming with colourful and gory polychrome, has experienced this firsthand.

“Mexico, half-awake of its mythological past keeps evolving under the protection of Xochipilli, God of the flowers and lyric poetry, and Coatlicue, Goddess of the Earth and of the violent death… This power of conciliation of life and death is without a doubt the principal attractive that Mexico offers. This keeps an open record of endless sensations, from the most benign to the most insidious,” Breton famously wrote.

The French artist and writer was the founder of the surrealist movement, but on a visit to Mexico in 1938, he saw that surrealism was much older and deeper than he had ever imagined, thriving naturally outside of the confines of his own definitions.

He was not the only European surrealist to have this jarring experience. Salvador Dali, the great genius of surrealist painting, visited only once. "Under no circumstances will I return to Mexico, as I cannot stand being in a country that is more surreal than my paintings."
​
During his visit, Breton struck up a friendship with the most important artist in Mexico, Diego Rivera, and therefore, also, with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Diego was of course the master muralist painter, but he dabbled constantly with new influences, pumping out a few cubist works after his time in Paris and a visit to Picasso’s studio, and now painting some winding mandrake roots and adding a spider web and skull to a portrait, expecting centre stage for Breton’s planned exhibition of surrealist art in his city at the Galería de Arte Mexicano.

Symbolic Landscape, by Diego Rivera (Mexico) 1940

​Far more important to Breton’s Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Mexico City in 1940, organized along with Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro, was the contribution of Frida Kahlo. Breton was very interested in Frida’s work, describing it as “a ribbon around a bomb.” He also arranged her Paris debut the year before the big Mexican show. 

Kahlo rejected the label of surrealist artist. “I never knew I was a Surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was,” she said. In a letter to Mexican-Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was one of her lovers, she said, “They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” 

Nonetheless, she busied herself with the creation of two important paintings for the exhibition, which would feature work by major artists like Dali (The Persistence of Memory, no less), Rene Magritte (the seminal Treachery of Images painting), Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, and May Ray, and cement Mexico as a recognized hub of surreal art.
​
Frida seldom painted large-scale works, possibly because her intermittent health and mobility issues meant she often worked from her bed or a wheelchair. But both of the paintings in the show were uncharacteristically massive. Clearly she was savvy about positioning herself confidently and memorably in a way that would make an impact next to the mostly-male and European bigwigs of the exhibition, despite her disdain for the surrealist label, and for the surrealists, too.  (In that letter to Nickolas, Frida continued, “They sit for hours in the cafés warming their precious behinds… thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsense, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true… You don’t have even the slightest idea of what kind of old cockroach Breton is, along with almost all those in the Surrealists group.”)

The Two Fridas, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1939

​The first of Fridas paintings created for the exhibition would become her most famous piece. I was lucky enough to see The Two Fridas at its home in the Museo de Arte Moderne in Mexico City. The painting was a larger-than-life double self-portrait of twin Fridas sitting with her upright trademark form, holding hands, against a roiling dark and cloudy sky. Frida took inspiration from a work she saw at the Louvre in Paris that same year, The Two Sisters, 1843, by Théodore Chassériau. Both Fridas have their anatomical hearts exposed for all to see. One Frida is dressed in white, holding surgical forceps to try to stop her own bleeding. The other is dressed in a traditional Mexican blouse and skirt, and holding a tiny photograph of Diego.
​
The timing of the exhibition overlapped for Frida and Diego with a time of great personal turmoil. Their marriage was on the rocks in 1938, following his affair with her sister and Frida’s affair with Leon Trotsky. They divorced in 1939, but it didn’t stick, and they married again December of 1940, later in the same year as Breton’s show. The Two Fridas boldly addressed the artist’s inner turmoil and how love and pain, and Diego himself, were so integral to her identity.

​But it is the second painting, The Wounded Table, or La Mesa Herida, a painting few today have heard of and none or few living people have seen, that is arguably the most important work of Frida’s career. 

The painting showed at a handful of world exhibitions, and was last seen en route to Russia as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union. It was politely rejected and ostensibly shipped to a museum in Poland for a show. The trail stops there. Dealers and scholars have been looking for the painting ever since, and imposters have been trying to sell fake copies on the black market, but the whereabouts of the artwork remain to this day unknown.
​
Frida probably created The Wounded Table, a sprawling, eight foot wide oil painting, with the intention that it would be the wow centrepiece of the exhibition among giants like Dali and Picasso and her ex-husband and again fiancé, Diego. The impressive work was not simply grand in size, but in complexity, theme, and skill. In The Wounded Table, we see Frida’s trademark weaving together of subjects of self-portraiture and Mexican folklore and mythology. Frida unabashed declaration against surrealism was, “I painted my own reality.” In this remarkable depiction of that reality, then, she seats herself audaciously and quite literally at the head of the table of martyrdom, where Christ sat at the last supper, with her wounds on display for all to see. 

Replica of The Wounded Table, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1940

​To the profoundly Catholic society of Mexico, this painting would have been deeply sacrilegious. Yet Frida often incorporated Catholic-tinged images, along with older and indigenous Mexican motifs and beliefs, into her artwork. Frida and Diego were both well-known as Marxist atheists who rejected the colonial institution of the Catholic church, but they were both sympathetic to the vast array of folkloric and religious imagery that meant a great deal to the Mexican masses. They considered Catholicism problematic, but also understood the power of its imagery as a visual language that meant a great deal to Mexicans. They collected and promoted pre-Columbian art and artifacts, much of it used as part of Breton’s exhibition on surrealism, and they also collected exvoto paintings, popular works of devotion by the people that were left in churches and at shrines in gratitude to saints. 

These folk paintings were an essential influence of Kahlo’s work and style. Frida could paint as intricately and realistically as Diego, but the vast majority of her works have a flat, almost-cartoonish affect to them, an aesthetic that is often called “primitive” that was a direct style choice in homage to this folk art tradition. 
​
Very early on in her trajectory as an artist, Frida had come across an exvoto that depicted a scene similar to her experience in a trolley accident. She was still a teenager, recently enrolled in medical school, when she was impaled by a steel rod during a streetcar crash, a kind of crucifixion that changed her destiny completely. The accident that injured her back and speared her uterus was the source of her lifelong debilitating pain and struggle with her legs and spine, and it robbed her of her hopes of having children. Frida altered the folk painting to make it personal, including adding her infamous bushy unibrow. In that year that she was bedridden in a body cast, she entertained herself by painting, ultimately taking her work to show to Diego Rivera. And the rest is history.

​There was only one other known Last Supper painting by a female artist before the time of The Wounded Table, an extraordinary 25-foot wide work by a self-taught painter and Italian nun, Sister Plautilla Nelli, completed in 1568. But it was also lost, rotting away in a forgotten storage, until its recovery and restoration in the 1990s, so Frida, along with the rest of the world, was unaware of its existence. From this perspective, this makes Frida the first known female painter to use this religious motif to fuel her art, and the first to give women a place at the table. 

There would be numerous female and feminist renditions later on. Irish painter Nora Kelly recreated the classic scene by adding women as present at the supper. Mary Beth Edelson famously collaged the work from a multitude of underrated women artists. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table installation was much different but referenced the historic theme in its conception.

There are just a few photos of Frida’s painting in existence, and from these black and white pictures, reproductions have been made, with and without colour.  She holds her head defiantly, sitting straight-backed as always, wearing a traditional Tehuana dress. Under the dress, her dripping blood seeps into the floorboards. The table itself has human legs and feet. At either side of the table are two children to her right, and a baby deer to her left. Frida loved her pet animals, including a deer named Gambizo. She also painted herself later as The Wounded Deer, summoning St. Sebastian with a body pierced by arrows and her own face on the deer. The children shown in The Wounded Table are her niece and nephew, the offspring of her sister Cristina, whom she loved, but by whom she was betrayed in the recent affair with Diego. Perhaps these children represent an even deeper wound than that betrayal: the pain of her own inability to have children. Frida desperately wanted to have Diego’s children, and by this time had already had three miscarriages or medical terminations because of the internal damage from the trolley crash.

The strange figures that flank her blend Mexican folklore with her own mythology. The large paper mache figure of Judas towers over her the way Diego does, in every way, physically and symbolically. The Judas motif figures into Mexican folk practices, with annual burning rituals of Judas effigies. Frida is enmeshed with this figure of betrayal, enveloped and unable to escape him. 

There is an odd Nayarit figurine beside her too, a pre-Columbian sculpture collected by the artist couple. The skeleton we see is a popular Mexican motif. In this case, there is a hole in its pelvis exactly where Frida was impaled. Its foot is also amputated, precisely where Frida herself had several toes removed. The face of the skeleton is not the same as the cartoonish calavera emblems seen everywhere. Rather, she resembles Mictlancíhuatl, the Aztec Goddess of the Dead who died herself in childbirth.

These characters, Judas, the skeleton, the Nayarit statue, and Frida, all appear in her work from the previous year, Four Inhabitants of Mexico, showing that their representation, herself included, mean Mexicanidad to her.

The Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund, Baden-Baden, of Germany, which displays a replica of The Wounded Table, interprets this work parallel to all of her works: the profoundly personal is blended with Mexicanidad. Frida and Diego were both committed to this idea, that the Mexican identity of the people was the essence of their liberation and salvation, the truth that would set them free. The loss of aspects of Mexicanidad was the symbol of their dissolution and oppression.  It's a powerful, magnificent painting. Frida wrote to Nickolas in late 1939 to say she was “working like hell” to have it ready for the big exhibition.
The work was shown a few times and then in 1943, Frida decided she would donate it to the Soviet Union. This was a gesture of goodwill: Frida and Diego were staunch Marxists, but they had been supporters of anti-Stalinist deserter Leon Trotsky, harbouring him and his wife in the Casa Azul. While the couple stayed with them, Frida had a passionate affair with Trotsky, possibly as revenge for Diego sleeping with her sister Cristina. (Trotsky was assassinated several months after the surrealist exhibition.) Frida and Diego wanted to assert their commitment to communism in the aftermath of these complications.

While Russia accepted the painting, they didn’t exhibit it. “It is necessary to bear in mind that we are interested in the works of the realist movement,” a Soviet official wrote in 1948. Kahlo’s work was “alien to the principles of Soviet Realist art…the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded.” The painting was sent to be stored at the Pushkin Museum. Rivera convinced the Soviets to show the painting in an exhibition in Warsaw, Poland, the year after Frida’s death in 1947. 

This was the last time that the work was seen. Experts say it is unlikely it was returned to Russia, which didn’t really want it. But where it ended up is mystery.

In 2020, a Spanish art dealer claimed he was in communication with an anonymous source in possession of the lost masterpiece. They were asking $45 million for the work, stating that the buyer could choose to work with historians to validate its origins after purchase. But art experts expressed concern about the painting’s substrate, suggesting that the original had been painted on wood panels, not canvas. The dealer maintains his conviction of its authenticity, saying that Frida used wood panels only for small paintings, and for her larger works, canvas. Canvas can be removed from its stretchers and more easily shipped to international destinations for display. It is true that the vast majority of her works were on canvas, and relatively few on wood. The Two Fridas, which was also painted for the surrealist exhibition, was on canvas. 

The Soviets dismissed Frida’s painting as, "Bourgeois, formalist and decadent." This leaves me scratching my head, wondering if I quite understand the meaning of these words correctly or need to revisit my definitions. Unconcerned with, or oblivious to, Frida’s feelings towards him, Breton himself stated that her work was “pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of Surrealism.” The Wounded Table went on to exhibition at the Palace des Bellas Artes, a prestigious and, yes, bourgeois museum in Mexico City. Then it was sent to Russia, and on to Poland, and from there the trail goes cold.

It might be said that Frida’s reality personified surrealism: the dominant voice inside us that is the unconscious, the one that ultimately speaks louder than the mundane and real. The Wounded Table is a self-portrait, after all. 

And Mexicanidad is, arguably, itself, surreal: ancient, mythic, contradictory, colourful, and theatrical, rippling with ancient spirits and the everlasting battle between the worlds of beauty and terror, between life and death.
 
 Lorette C. Luzaic

The Last Supper, by Plautilla Nelli (Italy) 1560s