Frida Kahlo, “Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (Autorretrato con pelo cortado)” (1940), oil on canvas (Digital Image © 2025 MoMA, N.Y.; © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)Following the bold critical acclaim of her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938, Frida Kahlo set out for her first and only voyage to a war-threatened Europe. French Surrealist André Breton, a friend and collaborator, had invited her to sojourn at home with his wife and daughter in Paris for a few weeks while he launched preparations for Mexique, the French version of the exhibition. However, Breton had not secured a gallery for the show, nor had Kahlo’s paintings’ customs been sorted. Kahlo also caught an infection at Breton’s home that required hospitalization, after which she made arrangements to check into a hotel. “To hell with everything concerning Breton and all this lousy place,” she expressed in a letter to her then-lover, Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray. In a stroke of serendipity, Mary Reynolds, American specialist of bindings of Dada and Surrealist publications and partner of Marcel Duchamp, encouraged Kahlo to stay in her home in Paris following her hospital discharge. The book Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds, a companion to an exhibition of the same name at the Art Institute of Chicago, chronicles Kahlo’s short encounter with the world of French Surrealists at Reynolds’s home.Man Ray, “Mary Reynolds” (1930) (© 2025 Man Ray Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York / ADAGP Paris)Astutely conceptualized as a “Surrealist Drama in Five Acts,” the book was collaboratively written by exhibition curators Caitlin Haskell, Tamar Kharatishvili, and Alivé Piliado Santana, who explain that “Kahlo’s time at 14 rue Hallé gives us a glimpse into the everyday life that is needed to sustain artists’ work.” While preparing for Mexique, which also included photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo and pre-Columbian art at Paris’s Galerie Renou et Colle, Kahlo spent a month communing at Reynolds’s home, a most marvelous meeting space for creatives, generously decorated with unusual materials, objects, and art.Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris, though aiming to centralize the titular figures’ friendship at the peak of European modern art, is ultimately more about Reynolds and her ingenious artistic book bindings than anything else. The publication includes images of a fascinating selection of art books that Duchamp and Reynolds bound for their closest friends in natural and synthetic materials such as leather, silk, vellum, and animal skins. Their interest in organic forms and textures can be seen in a copy of French writer Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi (“King Ubu”), bound in tan goatskin with gold stamping. Another visual standout from the collection is the 1936 Les derniers jours (“The Last Days”) by French poet Raymond Queneau, bound in black calfskin and agate marble with gold stamping by Reynolds. Mary Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp’s binding of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King Ubu), bound in 1935 (image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago, Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries)The book also introduces several people who were instrumental in Kahlo’s career in Europe and entangled with Reynolds, including artists Constantin Brâncuși and Man Ray, art dealer Pierre Colle, and art collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim. Through individuals, art books, letters, and photographs, it vividly encapsulates the vast intellectual, material, and creative sphere Kahlo engaged with in just a month, even as she rejected Breton’s “Surrealist” label for her work.The precise moment when and how Kahlo and Reynolds first met remains unknown, but the blossoming of their felicitous friendship demonstrates a profound connection between their lives and art, one that mirrors the emphasis on chance discoveries in Surrealism itself. Amid Kahlo’s letters and paintings, a 1939 typed letter by Reynolds to the artist acts as a testament to the lasting impact of their brief friendship. “The house is still and doesn’t know itself,” she wrote. “Every single thing misses you tremendously.” Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds (2025), by Caitlin Haskell, Tamar Kharatishvili, and Alivé Piliado Santana, is published by the University of Chicago Press and available online or through independent booksellers.