Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

by Hayden Herrera

Overview

Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals 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; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.

Here is the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman — with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060085896
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/24/2002
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	44,454
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

Hayden Herrera is an art historian. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Mary Frank; and Matisse: A Portrait. She is working on a critical biography of Arshile Gorky. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Blue House
On Londres Street

The story of Frida Kahlo begins and ends in the same place. From the outside, the house on the corner of Londres and Allende streets looks very like other houses in Coyoacán, an old residential section on the southwestern periphery of Mexico City. A one-story stucco structure with bright blue walls enlivened by tall, many-paned windows with green shutters and by the restless shadows of trees, it bears the name Museo Frida Kahlo over the portal. Inside is one of the most extraordinary places in Mexico -- a woman's home with all her paintings and belongings, turned into a museum.

The entrance is guarded by two giant papier-mâché Judas figures nearly twenty feet tall, gesticulating at each other as if they were engaged in conversation. Passing them, one enters a garden with tropical plants, fountains, and a small pyramid decked with pre-Columbian idols.

The interior of the house is remarkable for the feeling that its former occupants' presence animates all the objects and paintings on display. Here are Frida Kahlo's palette and brushes, left on her worktable as if she had just put them down. There, near his bed, are Diego Rivera's Stetson hat, his overalls, and his huge miner's shoes. In the large corner bedroom with windows looking out onto Londres and Allende streets is a glass-doored cabinet enclosing Frida's colorful costume from the region of Tehuantepec. Above the cabinet, these words are painted on the wall: "Aquí nació Frida Kahlo el día 7 de julio de 1910" (Here Frida Kahlo was born on July 7, 1910). They were inscribed four years after theartist's death, when her home became a public museum.

Another inscription adorns the bright blue and red patio wall. "Frida y Diego vivieron en esta casa 1929-1954" (Frida and Diego lived in this house 1929-1954). Ah! the visitor thinks. How nicely circumscribed! Here are three of the main facts of Frida Kahlo's life -- her birth, her marriage, and her death.

The only trouble is that neither inscription is precisely true. In fact, as her birth certificate shows, Frida was born on July 6, in 1907. Claiming perhaps a greater truth than strict fact would allow, she chose as her birth date not the true year, but 1910, the year of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Since she was a child of the revolutionary decade, when the streets of Mexico City were full of chaos and bloodshed, she decided that she and modern Mexico had been born together.

The other inscription in the Frida Kahlo Museum promotes an ideal, sentimental view of the Rivera-Kahlo marriage and home. Once again, reality is different. Before 1934, when they returned to Mexico after four years of residence in the United States, Frida and Diego livedonly briefly in the Coyoacán house. From 1934 to 1939 they lived in a pair of houses built for them in the nearby residential district of San Angel. After that there were long periods when Diego, preferring the independence of his San Angel studio, did not live with Frida, not to mention the one year when the Riveras separated, divorced and remarried.

The inscriptions, then, are embroideries on the truth. Like the museum itself, they are part of Frida's legend.

The house in Coyoacán was only three years old when Frida was born; her father had built it in 1904 on a small piece of land he acquired when the hacienda "El Carmen" was broken up and sold. But the heavy walls it presents to the street, its one-story structure, flat roof, and U-shaped plan, with each room giving onto the next and onto the central patio instead of being linked by hallways, make it seem to date from colonial times. It stands only a few blocks from the town's central plaza and the parish Church of Saint John the Baptist, where Frida's mother had a particular bench that she and her daughters occupied on Sundays. From her house Frida could walk by way of narrow, often cobblestoned or unpaved streets to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a forest park graced by a slender river winding among trees.

When Guillermo Kahlo built the Coyoacán house, he was a successful photographer who had just been commissioned by the Mexican government to record the nation's architectural heritage. It was a remarkable achievement for a man who had arrived in Mexico without great prospects, just thirteen years before. His parents, Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann Kahlo, were Hungarian Jews from Arad, now part of Rumania, who had migrated to Germany and settled in BadenBaden, where Wilhelm was born in 1872. Jakob Kahlo was a jeweler who also dealt in photographic supplies; when the time came he was wealthy enough to be able to send his son to study at the university in Nuremberg.

Sometime around the year 1890 the promising career of Wilhelm Kahlo, scholar, ended before it had begun: the youth sustained brain injuries in a fall, and began to suffer from epileptic seizures. At about the same time, his mother died, and his father married again, a woman Wilhelm did not like. In 1891 the father gave his nineteen-year-old son enough money to pay for his passage to Mexico; Wilhelm changed his name to Guillermo and never returned to the country of his birth.

He arrived in Mexico City with almost no money and few possessions. Through his connections with other German immigrants, he found a job as a cashier in the Cristalería Loeb, a glassware store. Later, he became a salesman in a bookstore. Finally, he worked in a jewelry store called La Perla, which was owned by fellow countrymen with whom he had traveled from Germany to Mexico.

In 1894 he married a Mexican woman, who died four years later as she gave birth to their second daughter. He then fell in love with Matilde Calderón ...

Frida. Copyright © by Hayden Herrera. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
Part 1
1	The Blue House on Londres Street	3
2	Childhood in Coyoacan	10
3	The National Preparatory School	22
Part 2
4	Accident and Aftermath	47
5	The Broken Column	62
6	Diego: The Frog Prince	78
Part 3
7	The Elephant and the Dove	93
8	Newlywed: The Tehuana Frida	101
9	Gringolandia	114
10	Detroit: Henry Ford Hospital	133
11	Revolutionaries in the Temple of Finance	161
Part 4
12	A Few Small Nips	179
13	Trotsky	192
14	A Painter in Her Own Right	215
15	This Pinchisimo Paris	241
16	What the Water Gave Me	254
Part 5
17	A Necklace of Thorns	269
18	Remarriage	295
19	Patrons, Politics, Public Recognition	316
20	The Little Deer	344
21	Portraits of a Marriage	360
Part 6
22	Naturaleza Viva: Alive Still Life	383
23	Homage to Frida Kahlo	405
24	Night Is Falling in My Life	412
25	Viva la Vida	433
	Acknowledgments	441
	Selected Bibliography	445
	Notes	449
	List of Illustrations	493
	Index	499

Editorial Reviews

"A haunting, highly vivid biography."

Ms. magazine

"A haunting, highly vivid biography."

Ms. Magazine

With generous use of firsthand sources including collectors, friends, and fellow artists, Hayden Herrera has produced an exhaustively researched study of the Mexican painter's life, loves, and artistic ambitions. Material from the artist's letters and diaries adds a distinctively intimate tone to a sympathetically told tale of sexuality, politics, and marginalization in the world of art. This bestselling book is considered the primary record of Kahlo's life.

bn.com