Frida Kahlo

This richly illustrated exploration of the sources of Frida Kahlo's inspiration in Mexico's popular arts and folk traditions draws illuminating connections between Kahlo's highly personal creations and the aesthetic traditions that infused her early years: votive paintings, nineteenth-century studio photography (including that of her father Guillermo Kahlo), Catholic iconography, revolutionary corridos and the variegated productions of anonymous craftsmen. Readers will recognize Kahlo's centered parts and moustaches in Jose Maria Estrada's portraits and in anonymous Mexican Catholic paintings. They will see her cutaway, heart-on-sleeve self-portraits, in Jose Maria Velasco's nature studies and butterfly taxonomies. And everywhere they will find the tracks of Kahlo's life, particularly the accident that marred her teen years and the marriage that she described as the second major accident of her life--a passionate union with Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera, of which it has been said that "Each regarded the other as Mexico's greatest painter." Kahlo may or may not have been a Surrealist, and she may or may not have been an early variety of feminist artist or have had ideas about what later became feminism, but there is no denying that she is a star. The realist and Symbolist work whose heritage this book traces is known around the world. Texts by Nadia Ugalde and Juan Coronel Rivera also examine related issues such as the influence of Positivism on Frida's education and the roots of her "indigenist" outlook.