The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris

A MEETING  
 
Oscar, a Mexican writer whose name I did not recognize, contacted me on the Internet to arrange a meeting. He said simply that it was about my father. I was intrigued because my father had been dead for more than twenty years. We met in Paris, on the corner of rue du Temple and rue Dupetit-Thouars. He took four typed pages from his leather briefcase and handed them to me.
So, he said, I wrote this article using the archives of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and I discovered that your father had an affair with her when she came to Paris in 1939.
I knew my father had known Kahlo and that she had given him a painting called The Heart, but he had never mentioned any sort of relationship with her.
Frida Kahlo is now seen as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, and she has achieved icon status in Mexico; I was well aware of that. But what really happened between her and my father?
Oscar s piece provided a little information about how the lovers met and the three weeks they spent together, and referred to some letters written by my father after Kahlo left. My Spanish is not good so I did not understand everything, but I felt that the author had overplayed things, using scant material to speculate about the intensity of the relationship. Most likely, no one would ever know what they actually experienced, but I still felt their connection must have been fairly powerful or unusual to justify Frida Kahlo s gift of one of her paintings.
 
I saw Oscar again before he returned to Mexico. We met at the café Zimmer on the place du Châtelet, and I asked him why he was interested in my father. He explained that the idea of this affair appealed to him and he wanted to know more about the artist s time in Paris in 1939. He was convinced that my father had received letters from her, and he hoped that I would pass them on to him. But I had found nothing apart from a telegram sent from the ocean

Marc Petitjean is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He has directed several documentaries, including From Hiroshima to Fukushima, on Dr. Shuntaro Hida, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; Living Treasure, about Japanese kimono painter Kunihiko Moriguchi; and Zones grises, on his own search for information about the life of his father, Michel Petitjean, after his death.

Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than eighty books, including Véronique Olmi s Bakhita and Hervé Le Tellier s Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

Compelling [Petitjean] captures the pop and fizz of artistic circles in Paris during the interwar years The Heart is a distinctively intimate undertaking, which is no small feat considering its well-known cast of characters an unconventional and deeply personal biography. Washington Post

An intimate portrait of the artist and her time in the lively 1930s surrealist scene. New York Times Book Review

This crisp, concise, radiant gem of a book is a delight all the way through, whether you see it as a yarn of multigenerational heartbreak and longing, a beautiful and unlikely father-son chronicle, a classic artist-muse love story, or a cautionary tale about the most obsessively rendered city on earth. Bookforum

Petitjean s unique, frank, and intriguing account details with precision and wonder a rarely examined chapter in Kahlo s extraordinary life. Booklist (starred review)
 
An intimate, unforgettable portrait of a brief but transformative time in Kahlo s life and of the turbulent beginnings of France s Surrealist Movement. Foreword Reviews (starred review)

[A] captivating biography a perceptive portrait of an artist finding herself and learning to love and paint again. Fans of Kahlo s art and of the surrealist movement will want to give this thoughtful and illuminating work a look. Publishers Weekly

A breezy bit of art history about a 1939 affair between the author s father and Frida Kahlo in Paris the story is transportive and dreamy. Kirkus Reviews

Marc Petitjean grew up in Paris with a haunting picture by Frida Kahlo on the walls of his family s modest apartment. Decades later, a stranger asked him about his father s love affair with Frida. This revelation, out of the blue, spurred him to investigate what had happened between them. The result is an intimate portrait, beautifully written, not only of the two lovers, but of bohemian Paris, and its most influential figures, at a turning point in history: the eve of war, in 1939. The