Book Review: Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist, by Celia Stahr. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2020 (original) (raw)

Fresh out of college in 1977, I travelled to Mexico City and met up with a filmmaker. She had errands to run, so to occupy myself and a doctor friend, she dropped us off outside an old house with an enormous patio. "Go in; it's interesting," she said. "I'll pick you up in an hour." Roaming the building, we saw paintings, dust-speckled furniture and horned paper-mâché figures. We were the only ones there, as far as we could tell. The artwork lacked explanatory labels, leaving us ignorant of the creator's background. When the filmmaker came for us, her doctor friend and my fellow viewer said, "I don't know about you art lovers, but I can tell you that the woman (the artist) was in a lot of pain." Without knowing it, we had visited the Frida Kahlo Museum. At the time, the artist was largely unknown. Today, however, that venue ranks as a leading local tourist attraction, drawing about 600,000 people a year, many of them from abroad. "(Kahlo) transformed her pain into art," the museum's director has said. The artist suffered from congenital ailments, polio and a boneshattering bus crash and underwent an estimated 32 surgeries in her lifetime. Her philandering husband, muralist Diego Rivera, also hurt her emotionally. The detonator for the international explosion in Kahlo interest was the 1983 publication of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, the first English-language account of her life. The 507-page tome has been unequalled since in its scope and extensive documentation. In her research, the author, Hayden Herrera, amassed recollections of more than 70 contemporaries of Kahlo which she contacted.