Frida Kahlo's Lost Painting 'La Mesa Herida' May Be Found After 70 Years

A missing Frida Kahlo painting, 'La Mesa Herida' (The Wounded Table), created in 1940 and lost since 1955, may soon be rediscovered. The large work (1.2 x 2.4 meters) reinterprets the Last Supper, depicting Kahlo with a skeleton, a pre-Columbian clay figure, a grotesque figure thought to be Diego Rivera, and her nieces and nephews around a table covered in bleeding wounds and skinned human feet. Valued at over $20 million today, the painting was donated by Kahlo to the USSR but deemed 'decadent bourgeois formalist art' by Soviet officials. In 1954, Rivera requested it be shown in Poland at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. After that exhibition, it disappeared. Researcher Raúl Cano Monroy, who organized a show at the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo in Mexico City, has been investigating archives of the Frente Nacional de Artes Plásticas, which promoted Mexican art abroad in the 1950s. He claims his inquiries will lead to the painting's recovery within five years, though he cannot share details. Art historian Helga Prignitz-Poda, working on an updated Kahlo catalogue, published findings in the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) journal, noting the work is not just a self-portrait but a statement.