Description

"[Herrera's] expressive and fluid prose is able to keep pace with Kahlo's riveting canvases and adds to the experience of viewing them. . . . A superb tribute." — Booklist

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 Kahlo, 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.

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.

Praise For…

“Hayden Herrera’s name has become inextricably linked with that of Frida Kahlo...[This book is] a useful popular introduction to one of the most singular artists of the twentieth century.” — New York Times Book Review

“[Herrera’s] expressive and fluid prose is able to keep pace with Kahlo’s riveting canvases and adds to the experience of viewing them....A superb tribute.” — Booklist

"Engaging and well illustrated." — Wall Street Journal

"Perhaps the most direct analysis of Frida Kahlo's life and art within one volume to date." — Library Journal