The engrossing biography of the celebrated Mexican painter. "A mesmerizing story of radical art, romantic politics, bizarre loves and physical suffering that raises the question, why hasn't someone told it all before?"--"Time." The basis for the new Miramax film. Photos. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The art and life of Frida Kahlo have become the focus of intense admiration in the last ten years, especially following the publication of Hayden Herrera's biography. Two films and a documentary have been made of her life. Kahlo was 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; her association through her husband Diego Rivera with the Communist party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.

In small, stunningly rendered self–portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself cracked open, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage, anesthetized on a hospital gurney, and weeping beside her own extracted heart. Her works are so incendiary in emotion and subject matter that one art critic suggested the walls of an exhibition be covered with asbestos. In this beautiful book, art historian Hayden Herrera brings together numerous paintings and sketches by the amazing Mexican artist, documenting each with explanatory text that probes the influences in Kahlo‘s life and their meaning for her work. Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full–color paintings, as well as dozens of black–and–white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little–known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self–Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.

"A coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of privileged, artistic, hard-drinking, bohemian parents, set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico"--

From the Author of Frida, the Moving and Heroic Story of One of the Central Painters of the Twentieth Century Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky-and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cézanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948. A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-Arshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."

This striking new monograph on the beloved Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, marks the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth and features an impressive selection of her works, spanning from her earliest of paintings to her last, along with snapshots of family and friends.Walker Art Center

"From the author of Arshile Gorky, a major biography of the great American sculptor that redefines his legacy"--