B-SIDE-ART

The excavators were not looking for anything old. They were clearing ground for a nuclear reactor. Beneath the topsoil on England's Suffolk coast, where two power stations already hum and a third is under construction, the sand held a shape that shouldn't have still been there: a faint rectangle, its edges gone soft after nearly six thousand years, but still legible enough for archaeologists to trace. Nobody had stood inside its boundary since roughly 3800 BCE. Oxford Cotswold Archaeology, the charity conducting the dig ahead of the Sizewell C nuclear station, has identified the shape as a long enclosure — a rectangular earthwork bounded by ditches, measuring about 165 by 65 feet. Stonehenge didn't have a single stone standing yet when someone was already digging this rectangle. Long enclosures like it are rare. Unlike burial mounds or settlements, they typically held no bodies and few possessions, because their purpose wasn't storage or shelter. Most archaeologists bel...

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...