Frida : A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Frida : A Biography of Frida Kahlo
Book Review: Why Hayek?
Summary: 5 Stars
As a soon-to-be Art History graduate student who has done extensive research on Kahlo, I am obviously impressed with this amazing, seminal text. It is crucial to the study of this artist. I write only to express a *minor* concern. Why is Selma Hayek now on the cover? While Hayek did a lovely job portraying Kahlo, it seems like an extremely inappropriate cover image. This text came out long before the film. Putting an actress' face on the front implies that the book is derivative of the film, when in actuality, it is vice versa. Not to mention - what about Kahlo? Why not put a photograph of the actual woman on the cover? Or better yet - one of her many poignantly beautiful self-portraits. I realize that this review reveals little about the text, but I don't know where else to express my frustration. Book Review: FRIDA KAHLO IS INSPIRATIONAL
Summary: 5 Stars
Hayden Herrera's BIOGRAPHY OF FRIDA KAHLO is one of the very best books on women artists of all times. When I first found this seminal biography, I was a young mother in Oregon painting alone in a 5 x 8' studio with two toddler sons at my feet in the early '80s. Frida's story is inspirational. Her courage in painting about what really mattered has sustained me through years when my own art was too powerful for the market. Frida channeled lots of pain and lust for life into her art. Although she did not attain the recognition her husband Diego Rivera did during her lifetime, today people recognize Kahlo's genius as an artist. I loved the way Frida kept painting until the end despite her pain, even from her bed, like Matisse did in his later years. When the doctor wouldn't let Frida go to her first exhibit in her own country because of failing health, she had them wheel her into the exhibition triumphantly perched on her now famous bed. No matter how much pain Frida was in, she always looked her best. I've often thought of her when I was tempted to rush out of the house with paint splattered jeans and t-shirt. Frida's passion for life and art are inspirational. A highly recommended biography for anyone interested in women, art and stories about courageous extraordinary people.
Book Review: Complete and Complex Like Frida
Summary: 5 Stars
Hayden Herrera has written an excellent portrait of the great artist Frida Kahlo, complete in thought and tender in describing a woman well lived.Frida Kahlo is the ultimate survivor and represents women for their strength, tenderness, fierceness and suffering compassion. She lived during a time when women had few rights, especially Mexican women, she faced the dreadfulness of the Mexican Revolution in her early years, a bout with polio, a horrible bus accident that attempted to cripple her for life, an often unfaithful husband, criticism of her dreams, activism, accused Communism and many exciting adventures in life. She lived a true artistic life and her paintings represent the complicated nature of her inner soul. She loved hard and fought often, for her rights, her dreams and her man. While bed-ridden and suffering in the severest of agony she taught herself to paint, her body encased in a huge white cast, she painted to survive and reached the other end with a unique perspective on art. Her life and home were surrounded with color, a rainbow that never needed the promise of something golden at the end. She danced her own rhythm and never stopped walking her own path. This is a woman to be admired!
Herrera does an excellent job as the biographer of this phenomenally complicated woman. Her research is thorough and her suggestions entirely believable. You will be transported back in time into the life of a controversial woman who deserves every ounce of recognition that Herrera has given us.
Book Review: A thorough rendering of an artist's life
Summary: 4 Stars
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 alegr?a -- 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 alegr?a 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.)
Book Review: Frida Kahlo is Alive and Well
Summary: 5 Stars
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.