A LETTER SEALED WITH A KISS

A dealer once put a bundle of old letters up for sale. He had no idea what he was holding. The letters were signed only "a French woman." One of them was sealed shut with a lipstick kiss.

That anonymity was the whole problem, and also, it turned out, the whole story. When the Kahlo scholar Salomon Grimberg finally traced the handwriting, he found himself holding something no biography of Frida Kahlo had recorded: proof of a love affair between Kahlo and the French Surrealist painter Jacqueline Lamba, written in Lamba's own hand, in the last months of 1938.

For decades, Lamba has existed mostly as a footnote to a more famous name. She was the second wife of André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. Grimberg has spent years trying to correct that.

The story behind the letters begins in Paris in 1934, at a café called La Place Blanche. Lamba was twenty-four, and she paid her rent by swimming, nearly nude, inside a glass tank at a nightclub called Le Coliseum, where Breton would come to watch. They married two and a half months later, with Alberto Giacometti and Paul Éluard as witnesses and Man Ray behind the camera.

It did not stay that way. Breton wanted a wife who kept the house and raised their daughter, Aube, not a painter with her own ambitions. Lamba kept painting anyway.

In 1938, escaping a Europe sliding toward war, Lamba and Breton travelled to Mexico, where the exiled Leon Trotsky was living under the protection of Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Lamba stayed nearly seven months. Lamba's letters, written after she was back in Paris, describe absence the way people describe a place they cannot get back to.

Breton spent his career writing about desire as though he alone understood its grammar — his book on the subject is even called Mad Love. But the most unguarded love letters connected to his household were written by his wife, to a woman he had brought her to meet.

Lamba and Breton divorced in 1944. When she had her first solo exhibition in New York that same year, he did not come.

She kept working for decades after that. Pablo Picasso himself helped her choose the paintings for her final show, in Antibes in 1967. She died in 1993. The letters surfaced twenty-five years after a full retrospective finally toured the world.

Which raises the only question worth sitting with: was Jacqueline Lamba's most honest love letter always meant to wait a century for someone to finally read it — or was it never meant to be read by anyone at all?