In 1946, Frida Kahlo was in New York for a spinal surgery in the hopes of relieving her severe back pain. The surgery unfortunately failed, but the world did get this iconic photograph taken by Nickolas Muray.

Kahlo's turmoil over the unsuccessful surgery and the pain she was enduring was expressed in her painting The Wounded Deer, which gives us an idea of what she was likely feeling around the time this photograph was taken. A moment of quiet contemplation, in a traditional huipil and skirt, captured either just before undergoing the procedure or while recovering from it. Muray also took a few photos of Kahlo while in the hospital but he did not colorize and exhibit those, presumably because of their more private nature. This is not the first portrait of Kahlo taken by Nickolas Muray, but the most well-known photographs were captured in 1939, back when they were lovers.

In 1939, Kahlo had visited Muray in New York and the pair were at the height of their decade-long love affair. The portraits from this trip, such as Frida Kahlo with Magenta Robozo and Frida Kahlo on White Bench, New York have her gazing directly at the camera, or more likely, intensely staring at the photographer behind it. Muray’s portraits of Kahlo are some of her most iconic images beyond her own self-portraits. 

As an artist, Muray was known for the rich saturated hues in his photos, as he helped pioneer the onset of color photography, having studied photochemistry and color photography engraving in Munich before coming to America. He was a commercially successful photographer, doing work for Vanity Fair and portraits for several celebrities, but Frida Kahlo was his most common subject besides his children. 

Muray and Kahlo's affair ended roughly, around 1941, but the pair remained friends for the rest of Kahlo’s life. In 1939, Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were in the midst of getting a divorce. Kahlo had confided in Muray about all the troubles she’d been undergoing with Rivera and Muray was likely hoping this would be a clean and permanent break for her - and the true beginning for them as a couple. In a letter Kahlo wrote to her "adorable Nick" from Paris in 1939, she expresses a great deal of playful affection, even providing a list of things to do and not do until they next meet, such as: “Do not take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park…don’t make love with any body, if you can help it. Do it only in case you find a real F.W. [f**king wonder]. But don’t love her."

When they first met in 1931, Kahlo gave Muray two things: a short love letter and a sketch of her holding hands with Rivera, the faint outline of a fetus on her stomach. So, from the very start she’d been clear about her marital status - whether it was done consciously or not. She wanted Muray as her lover, but he held on to the hope of becoming her husband. Sadly for Muray, Kahlo’s divorce only lasted thirteen months before she remarried Rivera, which is probably when it became clear for Muray they’d never have the relationship he wanted. Sometime around 1939/40 Muray wrote to her: “The one of me is eternally grateful for the happiness that the half of you so generously gave.”