Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Table was lost in the 1950s, but the search continues

The Wounded Table was an act of post-divorce revenge, but it went missing in the 1950s. Is all hope of recovery lost?

Frida Kahlo's The Wounded Table

During her divorce from artist Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo began work on a masterpiece that gave voice to her anger at the infidelities of a man who described himself as a “depraved victim” of his “own appetites”.

At the peak of her career, after her first solo exhibitions in New York and Paris, Kahlo’s work, The Wounded Table, was unveiled in 1940 in Mexico City. An unusually large work with echoes of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, it toured the world before Kahlo, a socialist, decided to donate it to the Soviet Union in 1943 in an attempt to please the Communist Party. Kahlo had once had an affair with Leon Trotsky.

Yet the work, which depicted Kahlo seated at a table that has human legs, surrounded by two children, a papier-mache skeleton, a pre-Colombian figurine and her pet deer Granizo, was never displayed in Russia.

Kahlo’s surrealist style was “alien to the principles of Soviet realist art” and therefore “the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded”, a letter written in 1948 in Moscow said.

It was eventually rescued from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts by Rivera and taken to Warsaw for an exhibition in 1955, a year after Kahlo’s death at the age of 47. It then vanished.

Today, the hunt for the work continues and in art circles has become a mythical fixation. Art historians Helga Prignitz-Poda and Katarina Lopatkina have spent years trying to find it.

In a joint paper, they say the Kremlin would not have wanted Kahlo’s work back after it was exhibited in Warsaw and that it is likely to still be in Poland. Of the 300 or so works produced by Kahlo during her life, more than half are missing, confirmed to have been destroyed or in the hands of private owners who refuse to lend them to exhibitions, they say.

“It’s crazy how many people write to us, even over Instagram, to verify the painting,” Lopatkina told The Times. “But they are all fakes.”

Four years ago, the world waited with bated breath as it seemed that the hunt for The Wounded Table had finally come to an end. Cristian Lopez, a Spanish art dealer who said he represented the anonymous owner of the painting, claimed it was in a London warehouse awaiting a buyer willing to part with €40m.

“Time will give us the truth,” Lopez said at the time. He claimed that specialists had authenticated the painting but declined to identify them. “Whoever proves genuine interest and the ability to pay €40m can spend as much time as wanted with their experts analysing the work.”

Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. Picture: Getty Images

Lopatkina doubts that it was the real thing. “None of the paintings is real,” she says. “The Wounded Table was painted on a big piece of heavy wood. These paintings that keep appearing are on canvas.”

Hans-Juergen Gehrke, an art collector who operated a museum dedicated to Kahlo’s works in southwestern Germany, considered it “implausible if not directly ridiculous” that Lopez, a 22-year-old businessman operating a website from a town in northwestern Spain, was the guardian of the missing painting. “There are thousands of Frida Kahlo fakes,” Gehrke said. “She is possibly the artist who has painted more dead than in life.”

Lopatkina says the painting had been influenced by Kahlo’s marriage to Rivera and her burning ambition. “You needed to paint large paintings to be able to get your own exhibition, so after her marriage broke down she started painting these,” she says.

“I quite like this story because after this exhibition they got back together (and) their second marriage was much, much happier.

“What we know is that it was taken to an exhibition in Poland in 1955, then there are some traces of it in Romania, but I think they just didn’t know what to do with it and it was destroyed.

“It was too ornate, too bourgeois for the USSR. Too subversive. Art was supposed to be realistic. Whoever opened the crate probably had no idea what to do with it.”

Lopatkina, who has worked at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, believes The Wounded Table probably suffered the same fate at the hands of the Soviet regime as other pieces of art.

“I’m sad for all the paintings. We know that there were entire vaults of paintings that were covered in mould and subsequently destroyed. “I know there are people out there who still have hope they can find The Wounded Table but I think it is simply lost forever.”

The Times