Photo: Trevor Lloyd
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo completed a painting titled The Wounded Table for the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City in 1940. As the title suggests, the painting represented multiple traumas — the figures embodied people and events from her personal life that afflicted her, namely her husband Diego Rivera, her sister who he had an affair with, and the fateful accident in her youth which disabled her body for life. Her aspirations of sending the work afterwards to a gallery in New York never materialized, despite optimistic promises from the gallery. Kahlo hung the painting in her home until 1946, when she entrusted it to a Russian ambassador in Mexico, in hopes of having the work shown in a museum in Moscow. An ardent admirer of Stalin, Kahlo believed the work would be in safe hands, but it was lost after 1946 and has not resurfaced since.
