Friedeberg is the last living Surrealist of the Mexican contingent of European expats that included Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen, and Leonora Carrington. “Leonora was like a very bourgeois English lady,” Friedeberg said. “Very correctly dressed, but very crazy at the same time with two very crazy children. The two boys inherited her house, and they made a big mess of it because they fought. They were fighting always. Now they’re old. They must be 60 years old by now. They’re also in Colonia Roma, very close to where I live. All the Surrealists lived around there. Varo, Carrington, Sofia Bassi. All lady painters who if they were alive now, they would be millionaires. They’re selling for so much more than before.”
Friedeberg landed in Mexico City well before it was the epicenter of the art world. “I arrived when I was three years old in 1939,” he said. “Imagine. There were still street cars instead of buses. There were very few cars. There were only like a million and a half people and now there’s like 20 million living in the whole Valley of Mexico. I have a very good memory of what streets looked like. There were no skyscrapers. They built one skyscraper, which fell down in an earthquake.”
