The Hidden Portrait

From the author of The Empress comes a sweeping historical novel and Cold War thriller that reimagines the fate of Frida Kahlo’s mysterious missing masterpiece as a Soviet secretary risks her life to save it.

In postwar Moscow, Soviet secretary Olga Simonova is instructed to destroy a painting from Mexico by Diego Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Her boss condemns the surrealist depiction of a woman’s suffering as bourgeois and anti-Soviet. Once a painter herself, Olga has experienced devastating losses and oppression by the Soviet regime, and she identifies with the anguish in Kahlo’s self-portrait. She secretly resolves to rescue the painting, even though her decision could cost her dearly.

Profound betrayal motivates Frida to paint The Wounded Table, and when she decides to donate it to the USSR, her husband is happy to see it go. While experiencing chronic pain and a troubled marriage, Frida struggles to express herself as an artist in her own right.

Unfolding in dual timelines, The Hidden Portrait spans 1930s Mexico to Cold War Berlin as Laura Martínez-Belli reimagines the fate of Kahlo’s lost masterpiece and explores the risks each woman dares to take to preserve beauty and truth in a hostile world.

© 2023, 2026 by Laura Martínez-Belli, all rights reserved. Translation © 2026 by Thomas Bunstead.