B-SIDE-ART

  Before the public was let in, a curator walked the empty galleries one more time, checking the sightlines between paintings worth, by one dealer's rough guess, somewhere under ten billion dollars combined. Getting them all into one room had taken Carmen Bambach seven years and a wish list sixty-eight pages long, single-spaced. "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which just closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a three-month run, was the first exhibition of its kind ever mounted in the United States: more than two hundred works by the Renaissance master, on loan from seventeen Italian institutions and museums across Europe, assembled for a single engagement that will not travel anywhere else afterward. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Raphael, Self-Portrait (ca. 1504–06), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Raphael himself would have found the scale of the operation almost as strange as the show's opening wall text, which introduces him, in its first line, as "one of th...

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 wou...