Frida
A Biography of Frida Kahlo
Herrera, Hayden
Paperback
$15.72 + $1.99 USPS S/H
$0.79 of your order (5%) will be donated to the school of your choice.
BOOK SUMMARY
This engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality.
BOOK SYNOPSIS
From the Publisher
Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.
Here is the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman  with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.
BOOK EXCERPTS
Chapter One
The Blue House
On Londres Street
The story of Frida Kahlo begins and ends in the same place. From the outside, the house on the corner of Londres and Allende streets looks very like other houses in Coyoacán, an old residential section on the southwestern periphery of Mexico City. A one-story stucco structure with bright blue walls enlivened by tall, many-paned windows with green shutters and by the restless shadows of trees, it bears the name Museo Frida Kahlo over the portal. Inside is one of the most extraordinary places in Mexico, a woman's home with all her paintings and belongings, turned into a museum.
The entrance is guarded by two giant papier-mâché Judas figures nearly twenty feet tall, gesticulating at each other as if they were engaged in conversation. Passing them, one enters a garden with tropical plants, fountains, and a small pyramid decked with pre-Columbian idols.
The interior of the house is remarkable for the feeling that its former occupants' presence animates all the objects and paintings on display. Here are Frida Kahlo's palette and brushes, left on her worktable as if she had just put them down. There, near his bed, are Diego Rivera's Stetson hat, his overalls, and his huge miner's shoes. In the large corner bedroom with windows looking out onto Londres and Allende streets is a glass-doored cabinet enclosing Frida's colorful costume from the region of Tehuantepec. Above the cabinet, these words are painted on the wall: "Aquànació Frida Kahlo el dÃÂa 7 de julio de 1910" (Here Frida Kahlo was born on July 7, 1910). They were inscribed four years after the artist's death, when her home became a public museum.
Another inscription adorns the bright blue and red patio wall. "Frida y Diego vivieron en esta casa 1929-1954" (Frida and Diego lived in this house 1929-1954). Ah! the visitor thinks. How nicely circumscribed! Here are three of the main facts of Frida Kahlo's life -- her birth, her marriage, and her death.
The only trouble is that neither inscription is precisely true. In fact, as her birth certificate shows, Frida was born on July 6, in 1907. Claiming perhaps a greater truth than strict fact would allow, she chose as her birth date not the true year, but 1910, the year of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Since she was a child of the revolutionary decade, when the streets of Mexico City were full of chaos and bloodshed, she decided that she and modern Mexico had been born together.
The other inscription in the Frida Kahlo Museum promotes an ideal, sentimental view of the Rivera-Kahlo marriage and home. Once again, reality is different. Before 1934, when they returned to Mexico after four years of residence in the United States, Frida and Diego lived only briefly in the Coyoacán house. From 1934 to 1939 they lived in a pair of houses built for them in the nearby residential district of San Angel. After that there were long periods when Diego, preferring the independence of his San Angel studio, did not live with Frida, not to mention the one year when the Riveras separated, divorced and remarried.
The inscriptions, then, are embroideries on the truth. Like the museum itself, they are part of Frida's legend.
The house in Coyoacán was only three years old when Frida was born; her father had built it in 1904 on a small piece of land he acquired when the hacienda "El Carmen" was broken up and sold. But the heavy walls it presents to the street, its one-story structure, flat roof, and U-shaped plan, with each room giving onto the next and onto the central patio instead of being linked by hallways, make it seem to date from colonial times.
Submit a book reviewFOR RELATED BOOKS
Art Books :: History Books :: General Books
Social Science Books :: Women's Studies Books
MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0060085894
Copyright: 2002
Dewey Decimal: 759.972
Library of Congress: BL2002011783
Book Publisher: Harpercollins
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 507
Paper Weight (lb): 1.45
If you like this book, you may also enjoy:
