Frida Kahlo by Frida Kahlo & Hayden Herrera

Author:Frida Kahlo & Hayden Herrera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Translator’s Note: The source material for this translation was damaged and some of the words on the first page are missing. The words in brackets are my attempt to determine these words. I have done my best in maintaining the intended meaning.

Simple and complicated, like a candlestick from Metepec. Just as rudimentary, just as delicate, just as Mexican, just as universally popular is Frida Kahlo, a well-established figure in contemporary art.

Her critics speak of her [pain] as well as her strength [to overcome it]. They speak of her frustrated maternity, of how much of an inspiration she is to the [famous] man who is her husband. It is difficult to [isolate] her visceral, deeply dramatic artwork from the life that produced it—for this is one of the few cases in which an entire life completely originates from art.

Regardless, there is much more to say on this joven abuela, the decoder of a hidden Mexico and of that microscopic space where intimacy occurs for humans, things, and every visible subject.

She has painted many self-portraits. Many are familiar with the one of her head which, through the fine neck of a brown woman, seems to distance itself from its body. The eyebrows, groomed to resemble a swallow against a stormy firmament, accentuate this beautiful message: the voracious eyes, half-oriental, somewhat fearful, like those of primitive people; the repulsed, sensual nose; the unsmiling, girlish mouth; the smooth skin, youthful without vaunting opulence. A monumental head that sometimes completes corporeal thoughts. Lately, Frida has followed her own path, which has increasingly grown concrete and real.

Frida Kahlo’s art emanates from two places: an insatiable curiosity for material and an innate talent for superstructure and composition. Natural elements are carefully investigated and reproduced, but the main idea of the composition is a general rearrangement of nature, an avoidance of each of its unimaginative laws. There’s no wonder why [Pieter] Bruegel, [Matthias] Grunewald, and [Hieronymus] Bosch are among her preferred painters. The surrealists will say her work is surrealism, but Frida begs to differ due to both the ideology and the meaning of her work. She does not commune with [Salvador] Dalí, with [Kurt] Seligmann, or any of the others who claim Bosco as their predecessor. For different reasons, she admires Piero della Francesca, [Paolo] Ucello, Clué, and [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir, and others who resemble her work, such as [William] Blake, [Paul] Klée, and Marcel Duchamp. The only female painter who interests her is Leonora Karrington [sic].

“Has any painter influenced you?”

“I don’t think so. The only one who has taught me painting is Diego, without ever placing any ideas in my head, or telling me what I should or should not do. Because, I think, we are different.”

She is a muralist and an anti-muralist.

Besides, she has never resembled anyone, or almost anyone, since she began to paint at age seventeen, without a background or training, just because she found a box of her father’s oil paints in a corner. She became familiar with the retables that many consider

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