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Summary: Thanks to this book, I discovered Frida!
Review: It was thanks to this wonderful book that I discovered Frida Kahlo, who is now my heroine. I have read many books about her, but this is absolutely the best one. It made me laugh - and weep, too, because I could really feel Frida`s pain in my own body...
Today I am probably Sweden`s biggest Frida - fan, and I drive everybody crazy talking about her all the time! Thanks to her, I have started to paint and draw a lot, I dare to wear crazy clothes - and I dare to be my self.
Thank you, Hayden Herrera, for writing such a great book...
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Summary: Deep but narrow
Review: Kahlo is an utterly capitaviting character, and this book delves deep into her turbulent life to capture some of what made her the painter and the woman she was. She lead an incredible life, battled staggering pain and loss, managed a marriage with a furiously self-involved genius while becoming one herself (a genius, that is), and created her own mythology. Frida's story is incredible, and Herrera brings us into contact with her totally unique energy.But still. After pages and pages of direct citations from Kahlo's diary, after pages and pages of psychoanalytical interpretation of her paintings, the book starts to wear out its welcome. The politics of Mexico are not given any where near as much detail as desirable, and as for the rest of the world . . . forget it. WWII isn't even mentioned, and her relationship with the Communist Party is glossed over. For such a political woman as Kahlo, the absence of any analyis of the world she lived in is pretty stunning, and a major weakness of the book, since it makes it ultimately impossible to understand her. Still, Frida Kahlo was a great painter and an extraordinary woman. To learn both more and less about her than you want, this is the perfect book.
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Summary: The Best Book on Frida Kahlo
Review: One cannot live in the modern world without regularly encountering self-portrait images of the beautiful and tragic Frida Kahlo. Whether on coffee mugs, t-shirts, posters, or Mexican artifacts, Frida's exquisite face with its darkly joined eyebrows and beribboned hair is immediately familiar to most observers, even if they do not know who she was. Yet Frida Kahlo's popularity in the twentieth century can be wholly attributed to her brilliance. Unlike the work of most modern artists, almost all of her 200 paintings depict realist, surrealist, and primitive self-portraits symbolizing the concerns and agonies of her life. Hayden Herrera's fine biography is still, seventeen years after its publication, the champion text on one of the most important, original, and phenomenal painters of our time. Frida was born in 1910 (the year the Mexican Revolution began)to a Mexican mother and German father in the same cobalt blue house in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, where she later worked and shared her life with the great muralist Diego Rivera. Ironically, it is the house where her life also ended. Today it is a museum, open to the public and still festooned with her beautiful collections of retablos, pottery, and Mexican folk art. Frida's life was consumed by pain as a result of suffering polio at age 6 and a bus/trolley collision as a teenager when, thrown from the bus, she was gored by a steel rail. Frida spent most years of her life bedridden and in body casts (which she also painted)after some 30 surgeries meant to alleviate her suffering. Throughout her life,and even while prone in a bed with a mirrored canopy, she painted herself because of the focus created by chronic pain and said, "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone." Her self-portraits suggest deep meanings as her face is always encircled with images derived from her physical and psychological life. The paintings are vibrant and, typical of many of her women contemporaries' works, tiny. Hayden Herrera's book presents a comprehensive life study of the great artist, incorporating photographs, diaries, letters, painting reproductions, eye witness accounts, and local history and politics in the most readable, enjoyable, intelligent work available. An art historian, Ms. Herrera is thoroughly knowledgeable and writes beautifully, as well. One will be as engrossed by this book as by any great novel. Her work convincingly recreates the scenes from Frida's life and populates them with important contemporaries Frida knew and loved, including Andre Breton, Leon Trotsky, Tina Modotti, Pablo Picasso, and, of course, her own Diego Rivera who called her the greatest painter of our time. There isn't a more engaging biography available about Frida Kahlo (in second place is Herrera's other text, Frida Kahlo:The Paintings), and one need not be an art student to be enthralled by this work. Ms. Herrera's compassionate, energetic account will capture anyone who wonders just what Frida Kahlo was like--her inspirations, occupations, and truly vivacious approach to her one very painful and amazingly productive life.
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Summary: Thank you Ms. Herrera!
Review: Thank you Ms. Herrera for writing an art history book that is not only informative and well researched, but also interesting and a pleasure to read.
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Summary: Socialism and Art Combine to Create a Better World!
Review: Thanks to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Leon Troksky was provided with sanctuary in Mexico after leaving Russia. Undoubtedly, he would not have lived as long as he did had he remained in the USSR or gone elsewhere than Mexico. Frida and Diego also provided a safe haven for Fidel Castro Ruz and other Cuban exiles in Mexico and they introduced Ernesto "Che" Guevara to Fidel and they taught Che, Fidel, and the others true socialism which Fidel later adopted successfully for Cuba to set his island nation free for the first time, on January 1st, 1959. Fidel was also introduced to the world of poetry by Frida and she inspired the small band of Cubans. Mexico was the very first nation to recognize the new government in Cuba under the dynamic leadership of Fidel and Mexico has been steadfast in their support, saying they and other Latin American nations wish they were at where Cuba is now. Unfortunately, not enough is spoken about Fidel's sojourn in Mexico with Frida and Diego, but, it is the best thing so far that presents truthful documentation of history from a Latin American perspective. I'd recommend this as reading for community colleges and for high schools. c/s (Companero Heriberto Booker)
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Summary: Frida Kahlo is Alive and Well
Review: The greatest compliment one could offer a biographer is that she has brought to life her subject with honesty and insight. Well, I offer this compliment to Hayden Herrera. It is supreme understatement for me to observe that the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, was a complex person filled with great contradictions. Yet, through liberal use of Frida's letters coupled with Herrera's own insightful analysis of her painting, "Frida" brings this great artist to life for us to bask in her brilliance, energy and strength. "Frida" is one of the most remarkable, illuminating and fulfilling biographies I have ever read. I highly recommend this magnificent book.
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Summary: Frida Kahlo is Alive and Well
Review: The greatest compliment one could offer a biographer is that she has brought to life her subject with honesty and insight. Well, I offer this compliment to Hayden Herrera. It is supreme understatement for me to observe that the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, was a complex person filled with great contradictions. Yet, through liberal use of Frida's letters coupled with Herrera's own insightful analysis of her painting, "Frida" brings this great artist to life for us to bask in her brilliance, energy and strength. "Frida" is one of the most remarkable, illuminating and fulfilling biographies I have ever read. I highly recommend this magnificent book.
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Summary: Fascinating woman!
Review: There is something a bit frightening about a person so intense. Frida Kahlo lived her life with passion and intensity. Hayden Herrera recorded this life in all its colors. I especially liked the critical exploration of her paintings woven in with the story of her life. It is a fascinating life and if you only read one book about Frida Kahlo, this is the one you should read.
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Summary: A thorough rendering of an artist's life
Review: This biography is a complete, engaging 440-page effort of sheer reportage. Herrera, an art historian and curator, has also written a book on Kahlo's art, and books on Mary Frank and Matisse, and you can see evidence of her thoroughness on every page. The book traces Kahlo's life by setting up the lives of her parents (her father was an Austrian immigrant to Mexico) all the way to her death and funeral with great detail. As Herrera follows the path of Kahlo's life, she includes letters to and from Kahlo, Kahlo's journal excerpts (illustrations, words and poems) and explicates Kahlo's art as it becomes relevant to the storyline of her life, either because paintings were done around the time of narrative points or because they illustrate incidents or themes in Kahlo's life. There are two color-plate sections and two black-and-white photo/painting sections to which the reader may refer.
Frida's life is certainly compelling, and Herrera doesn't need to resort to emotional language or hyperbole to make her interesting -- and, thankfully, she doesn't. The narrative is quite matter-of-fact, and illustrated with the subjects' own words, one feels that one can get to know Frida, and her husband, Diego Rivera, pretty well, for being somewhat removed from them (at least I feel that way living in the twenty-first century in Arkansas). The book incorporates the commonly known facts of Frida's life -- her devastating tram accident as a high-schooler in which she was impaled on a shaft of metal handrail, her turbulent and deep connection with and TWO subsequent marriages to Diego Rivera, her Mexicanista loyalties and sensibilities, her affair with Trotsky, her personal flamboyance and her great talent -- with the over-arching idea of Frida's alegrÃa -- or happiness, joy -- in the face of her many hardships. As one of her friends said, Frida was a woman who "lived dying." Her many health problems and her problematic and sometimes painful relationship with Rivera were great obstacles to her, but her flamboyant alegrÃa appears throughout her life as a constant, a will to enjoy, to overcome.
I think what the book offers most is Frida's personality, explicated as carefully and well as the paintings, and the effort helps inform the viewer's assessment and response to her work. Using Kahlo's own words often, Herrera allows Frida to tell us herself her reactions to incidents, events, her successes, her health problems.
She writes to her dear friend and medical adviser, Dr. Eloesser, in the United States when she is struggling with the decision to amputate her increasingly problematic foot: "My dearest Doctorcito: [The doctors] are driving me crazy and making me desperate. What should I do? It is as if I am being turned into an idiot and I am very tired of this f---ing foot and I would like to be painting and not worrying about so many problems. But, it can't be helped, I have to be miserable until the situation is resolved..."
This passage is emblematic of Kahlo, mixing her crass language with her charming endearments to her friends, her concern for her health and her resignation to the situation, "it can't be helped..." She often curses, refers to her reader as "kid" and to money as "dough," in English.
Herrera points out points at which Kahlo is not completely forthcoming with truthful details, for instance her age, the length of time she spent hospitalized at various stages, and her changing view on whether she was a Surrealist painter or not. She also illustrates Kahlo's changes in terms of the political situation of the international Communist party, her views about Trotsky, and her public vs. private comments on Diego's never-ending philandering.
In a book on Kahlo, these life details are relevant to her art because her art is confessional and personal. She's a "Sylvia Plath" of painting and mines her life and emotions for subjects until the end. Not long before she died, she had resolved her priorities, telling a friend, "I only want three things in life: to live with Diego, to continue painting, and to belong to the Communist party."
The people around her were deeply important to Frida Kahlo, and to the end of her life, she adored her friends, wrote winning and charming, caring notes to them, and wanted them around her at the end. Her love of others plays itself out in her political beliefs; she toured the world as an artist, but she drew her subjects and methods from Mexicanista traditions, and popular as well as pre-Columbian culture. Her personal illustrations are appealing because of that understanding of others, and Herrera's sound biography renders Kahlo's work and life even more poignant and remarkable. It's a good book. I recommend it. (I do wish that this book had Frida Kahlo's own art or a photo of her on the cover, rather than a photo of Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo.)
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Summary: Awesome Book !!
Review: This book is a wonderful biography. Hayden Herrera's clever and vibrant writing really captures Frida's personality, and its because of this that the book strays from conventional biographiness. A wonderful read, I recommend it. Not to mention, once you're hooked on Frida, you never return. *note* this book is the basis for the spectacular movie starring Salma Hayek (as seen on cover of book) as Frida.
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