Rara Avis

In 2012, the Museum of Mexico City holds a major posthumous exhibition on Bridget Bate Tichenor (1917-1990), an English painter based in Mexico. Her friends, the artists Alan Glass and Pedro Friedeberg, visit the exhibition and comment on aspects of her work and life, such as her closeness to the European aristocracy and her time as a model and editor of Vogue in New York. She painted for 20 years on her ranch in Ario de Rosales, Michoacán.

The artist Wolfgang Paalen was born in Vienna in 1905. In 1936, he joined the Parisian Surrealist movement led by André Breton. At the invitation of Frida Kahlo, he settled in Mexico in 1939. As a painter, he underwent several stylistic stages and had a profound influence on the genesis of abstract expressionism. He committed suicide in 1959 in Taxco, Mexico.

Leon Trotsky was granted political asylum in Mexico in 1937 after escaping Stalinist persecution. He lived in the neighborhood of Coyoacán, in Mexico City, where he wrote his last political works. His grandson Esteban Volkow is the last living witness of the two murder attempts and eventual assassination of his grandfather. Ninety-year-old Esteban recounts family life at the house, now a museum, and shares his memories of the revolutionary figure’s tragic end.