Text by Jessica Maricarmen Serrano Bandala, Gerardo Estrada, Beatriz Scharer Tamm, Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena, Martha Romero, Luis Enríquez, Paulina García, Luz Emilia Aguilar Zinser, Jaime Moreno Villareal, Luis Roberto Vera, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Circe Henestrosa, Marta Turok.
The iconic Mexican painter as seen through almost 300 archival items, from her wardrobe to her personal art collection
Hbk, 9 x 12.25 in. / 240 pgs / 267 color. | 12/7/2021 | In stock $65.00
Edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Text by James Oles, Horacio Fernandez, Masayo Nonaka, Laura González, Mauricio Ortíz, Gerardo Estrada, Rainer Huhle, Gaby Franger.
The fullness with which Kahlo lived her life is seen best here, and her love for rich experience is reflected back at the reader, full of personality and vitality
Hbk, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 524 pgs / 460 duotone. | 8/31/2010 | In stock $50.00
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Layla Bermeo.
The visionary and supremely self-fashioning artist Frida Kahlo (1907–54) drew inspiration throughout her career from arte popular—painted ceramics, embroidered textiles, religious votives, effigies and children's toys, and other objects created in Mexico’s rural and Indigenous communities. The hundreds of folk-art objects that filled her home and studio attest to her nationalist politics and her fascination with the work of carvers, weavers, sculptors of papier-mâché and vernacular painters. She depicted these objects in her paintings and adopted elements of traditional dress and ornament in her own self-presentation, playing on modernist fascination with folk culture and on her own relation to layered Mexican identity. This bilingual book, the first in-depth exploration of Kahlo’s varied and sophisticated responses to arte popular, situates her within the broad artistic and intellectual movements of her time, examines her professional ambitions and illuminates the innovative techniques she used in her lifelong encounter, both playful and powerful, with the folk art of Mexico.
Published by RM/Museo Frida Kahlo – Casa Azul. Text by Jessica Maricarmen Serrano Bandala, Gerardo Estrada, Beatriz Scharer Tamm, Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena, Martha Romero, Luis Enríquez, Paulina García, Luz Emilia Aguilar Zinser, Jaime Moreno Villareal, Luis Roberto Vera, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Circe Henestrosa, Marta Turok.
This compendium presents the rich diversity of themes, ideas, concepts and emotions generated around two fundamental, iconic figures of modern Mexico: painter Frida Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. More than 300 images from the archives of the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City offer readers a glimpse of Kahlo’s distinctive wardrobe and the impressive collections of popular and pre-Hispanic art she assembled with Rivera, her connection with photography and the history of La casa azul, her beloved blue home that now serves as the museum’s main building. This volume welcomes us into Frida Kahlo’s universe, exploring the legacy of an indispensable figure in the world of 20th-century art and culture in her native Mexico and across the globe. Frida Kahlo (1907–54) began painting at the age of 18 when she was immobilized for several months as a result of a bus crash that left her permanently disabled. From then on, art served as an immense source of healing for Kahlo as well as a vehicle for self-expression and cultural exploration. At the heart of Kahlo’s practice was her love for Mexican folk tradition, her staunch communist beliefs and her complex relationship with her body, gender and sexuality. A lifelong activist, Kahlo died of a pulmonary embolism after participating in a demonstration against the CIA’s invasion of Guatemala.
Published by RM/Museo Frida Kahlo. Text by Jessica Serrano, Gerardo Estrada, Beatriz Scharrer, Octavio Murillo, Martha Romero, Luis Enríquez, Paulina García, Luz Emilia Aguilar Zinser, Jaime Moreno Villarreal, Luis Roberto Vera, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Circe Henestrosa, Marta Turok.
El universo Frida Kahlo, coeditado por Editorial RM y el Museo Frida Kahlo, permite refrescar y actualizar la rica diversidad de temas, ideas, conceptos y emociones generados entorno a dos figuras icónicas y fundamentales en el México moderno: Frida Kahlo y Diego Rivera. Esta edición recoge un abanico de ensayos escritos por especialistas en los diversos campos que envuelven a la figura de Frida Kahlo. Aproximaciones, al fin, a las condiciones materiales que marcaban su día a día y sus creaciones. Además, las casi trescientas imágenes de los archivos del Museo Frida Kahlo incluidas en este volumen permiten entrever el armario de Frida, la Casa Azul y su conexión con la fotografía. Este volumen nos da la bienvenida al universo de Frida Kahlo a través de la exploración del legado de esta figura indispensable de la cultura y arte del siglo XX.
Frida Kahlo: Her Universe, published under a joint imprint by Editorial RM and Museo Frida Kahlo, allows us to refresh and bring up to date the rich diversity of themes, ideas, concepts, and emotions generated around two fundamental and iconic figures in modern Mexico: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. This edition gathers a range of essays by specialists on the various subjects that surround the figure of Frida Kahlo. Approximations to the material circumstances that surrounded her day to day and her creations. In addition, almost three hundred images from the archives of Museo Frida Kahlo offer readers a glimpse of Frida’s wardrobe, the collections of popular and preHispanic she assembled alongside Diego Rivera, the Blue House, her connection with photography, and other matters. This volume welcomes us into Frida Kahlo’s universe, exploring the legacy of an indispensable figure.in the world of twentieth-century art and culture.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Jodi Roberts.
Neutral hues, an ill-fitting man’s suit and wiggling locks of cut hair supplant Frida Kahlo’s (1907–54) usual lively color palette, indigenous Mexican dress and long plaits in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940). Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo’s. In the wake of a divorce from artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turns to her favorite genre, self-portraiture, to express her deepest emotional and psychological urges. Inscribed with the lyrics of a popular song that translate as “Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you’re without it I no longer love you,” the work oscillates between evocations of a popular culture shared by many and unflinching forays into the private sphere. Curator Jodi Roberts' essay, too, moves between the public and the private as it situates Kahlo’s painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution’s legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artist’s own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Mieke Bal, Christian Gether, Laura Gonzáles Matute, Griselda Pollock, Helga Prignitz-Poda.
The notoriously complex life and radical, visionary work of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) are inextricably interwoven, at times seeming to constitute a whole theatrical performance. As the daughter of a German-born photographer, Kahlo was used to posing, and from early youth she was adept at guiding the public perception of her person. In her often anguished self-portraits, she dissected her conflicts and her physical traumas, soon becoming an iconic figure and a symbol for Mexican culture. Yet ironically she transgressed many boundaries and shattered taboos in a way that was perhaps shocking to most Mexicans. In portraits by friends and photographers such as Tina Modotti and Edward Weston she wears traditional clothing and features many Mexican folk traditions, transforming her “Mexicanidad” into an indelible personal trademark. Through numerous paintings and photographs, and with articles by acclaimed theorists such as Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal, this book traces the major events of this unique artist’s life, while relating Kahlo’s art to that of her contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco.
Published by Art Gallery of Ontario/High Museum of Art Atlanta. Edited by Dot Tuer, Elliott King.
Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera’s (1886–1957) legendary passion for each other and for Mexico’s revolutionary culture during the 1920s and 1930s have made them among the twentieth century’s most famous artists. During their life together as a married couple, Rivera achieved prominence as a muralist artist, while Kahlo’s intimate paintings were embraced by the Surrealist movement and the Mexican art world--but neither were especially well known in the broader context of art and modernism. After their deaths in the 1950s, important retrospectives of Kahlo’s work enshrined her as one of the most significant women artists of the twentieth century, somewhat eclipsing Rivera’s international fame as Mexico’s greatest muralist painter. Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting offers a new perspective on their artistic significance for the twenty-first century, one that shows how their paintings reflect both the dramatic story of their lives together and their artistic commitment to the transformative political and cultural values of post-revolutionary Mexico. Frida & Diego features newly photographed color reproductions of 75 paintings and works on paper by both Kahlo and Rivera, rarely reproduced archival photographs and new biographical information on the couple assembled by scholar Dot Tuer. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition assembled from three distinguished Mexican private collections on Mexican art, and presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the High Museum of Art Atlanta.
PUBLISHER Art Gallery of Ontario/High Museum of Art Atlanta
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 96 pgs / 80 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/31/2013 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 58
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781894243711TRADE List Price: $35.00 CAD $40.00
Published by RM. Edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Text by James Oles, Horacio Fernandez, Masayo Nonaka, Laura González, Mauricio Ortíz, Gerardo Estrada, Rainer Huhle, Gaby Franger.
When Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) died in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera asked the poet Carlos Pellicer to turn her family home, the fabled Blue House, into a museum. Pellicer selected some paintings, drawings, photographs, books and ceramics, maintaining the space just as Kahlo and Rivera had arranged it to live and work in. The rest of the objects, clothing, documents, drawings and letters, as well as over 6,000 photographs collected by Kahlo over the course of her life, were put away in bathrooms that had been converted into storerooms. This incredible trove remained hidden for more than half a century, until, just a few years ago, these storerooms and wardrobes were opened up. Kahlo's photograph collection was a major revelation among these finds, a testimony to the tastes and interests of the famous couple, not only through the images themselves but also through the telling annotations inscribed upon them. Frida Kahlo: Her Photos allows us to speculate about Kahlo's and Rivera's likes and dislikes, and to document their family origins; it supplies a thrilling and hugely significant addition to our knowledge of Kahlo's life and work.
Published by Editorial RM. Text by Salomon Grimberg, James Oles, Raquel Tibol. Introduction by Carlos Fuentes.
During the summer of 2007, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City hosted the most complete exhibition ever of the work of Frida Kahlo. Marking the centenary of Kahlo’s birth, the Palacio showed 354 works, including 64 oil paintings, both beloved and virtually unknown, 45 drawings, 11 watercolors, 5 etchings, plus scores of letters, photographs and other personal ephemera. It was a labor of love, as well as a loving gesture, for Mexico’s greatest artistic ambassador. It was also timely; Kahlo is in the air again, as young contemporary artists revisit and recast psychoanalytic, Neosurrealistic figuration. In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico--the only one held in her native country during her lifetime--one critic wrote: “It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.” Kahlo herself puts it better: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” This essential catalogue, based on the Palacio de Bellas Artes exhibition, presents brief essays by a wide range of Kahlo scholars, poets, anthropologists, architects, psychologists and experts in many other disciplines, both from Mexico and abroad--as well as a more extended appreciation of Kahlo by the novelist Carlos Fuentes, along with Kahlo’s own paintings, drawings, prints and ephemera.
Published by Editorial RM. Foreword by Raquel Tibol.
Frida Kahlo, the writer? In this new expanded edition of the painter's writings, art critic Raquel Tibol gathers letters, poems, notes, protests, confessions, brief messages and longer texts written by Kahlo to her friends, her lovers and others. In her writings, Kahlo employs, in Tibol's words, an "unreserved, imaginative language, heart and intimacy laid bare," that reveals her taste for neologisms, colloquial turns and the crossing of linguistic boundaries. The freedom of her language is a path towards sincerity, the origin of Kahlo's pictorial universe, with its recurring motifs: the tramway accident that left the artist physically maimed at the age of 18; her anguished and demanding adolescent passion for Alejandro Gómez Arias; her complex and fascinating relationship with Diego Rivera; her illness as destiny; her political engagements; and her uncompromising quest for liberty. Here the reader will find Kahlo "swinging back and forth between sincerity and manipulation, self-complacency and self-flagellation, with her insatiable need for affection, her erotic upheavals, her touches of humor, setting no limits for herself, with a capacity for self-analysis and a deep humility." By gathering this material, until now scattered in archives and various published sources, Tibol offers us "a tacit autobiography and the placement of Frida within the intimate, confessional literature of the twentieth century in Mexico." This is a Frida Kahlo far removed from the distorted image so often found in films, plays and supposedly serious writings and studies--a beautiful book about Frida, by Frida.
Published by Walker Art Center. Foreword by Kathy Halbreich. Edited by Elizabeth Carpenter. Text by Hayden Herrera, Elizabeth Carpenter, Victor Zamudio-Taylor.
Few artists have captured the public's imagination with the force of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as André Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.
Published by Editorial RM. Edited by Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera and Nadia Ugalde.
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.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Essay by Helga Prignitz-Poda.
When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, she left behind a slender oeuvre. It consists of 143 paintings of small size, rarely larger than 20 x 30 inches, many of them now considered icons of 20th century art, most of them self-portraits. The reasons for this ostensible narcissism were closely bound up with Kahlo's biography, with the country and epoch in which she grew up, and with her decidedly eccentric character. It was no coincidence that the major enigmatic minds of the 16th century, namely Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were among her favorite painters. For Frida Kahlo never displayed her wounds directly--be it the physical wounds caused by accidents and illness, or the psychological inner wounds. Hers is a subtly enciphered symbolic language, rich in metaphors drawn from almost all the world's cultures. Aztec myths of creation, Far Eastern and Classical Greek mythology, and popular Catholic beliefs all mingle in Kahlo's pictures with Mexican folklore and the stuff of quotidian life, with Marx and Freud. Andr™ Breton, one of her many admirers among the European avant-garde, once described Kahlo's art as a "colored ribbon round a bomb." Exotic and explosive, sensuous and fascinatingly vital in terms of artistic statement, Kahlo's paintings shed a complex and often frightening light on her soul, her "inner reality," as she called it.
If the incessant commercial marketing of Kahlo's paintings over the past decade has obscured a clear view of her extraordinary oeuvre, this present monograph attempts to make amends. Frida Kahlo: The Painter and Her Work returns to the heart, to 42 select masterpieces, reproduced in full and in detail. The painterly quality, the beauty, and the immense wealth of details in Kahlo's paintings is laid out before the reader's eyes, as is the abyss in which the artist found herself.
From 1926 until her death in 1954, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life. One of four daughters born to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent, in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacn, Kahlo did not originally plan to become an artist. During her convalescence from a bus accident in her late teens, Kahlo began to paint with oils. Her pictures, mostly self-portraits and still-lifes, were deliberately naive, filled with the bright colors and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she loved. At 21, Kahlo fell in love with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera; their stormy, passionate relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of Rivera's career, a divorce and remarriage, and Kahlo's poor health. The couple traveled to the United States and France, where Kahlo met luminaries from the worlds of art and politics. She had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938 and enjoyed considerable success during the 40s, but her reputation soared posthumously, beginning in the 80s with the publication of numerous books about her work by feminist art historians and others. In the last two decades an explosion of Kahlo-inspired films, plays, calendars, and jewelry has transformed the artist into a veritable cult figure. Portraits of an Icon is not another book featuring Kahlo's beloved, tortured self-portraits. Rather, it offers another kind of portrait of the artist, a means of seeing her through the eyes of those who surrounded her: modern masters of the camera such as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Martin Munkacsi; leading photojournalists such as Giselle Freund, Bernard Silberstein, and Fritz Henle; and Kahlo's relatives, lovers, and friends, among them Guillermo Kahlo, Nicolas Muray, and Lola Alvarez Bravo. The images span Kahlo's life, beginning with a photograph of a self-possessed chubby four-year-old, her fists full of wilting roses, and ending with the image of an emaciated, wasted figure laying on her deathbed, dressed in pre-Columbian finery. They follow the artist's trajectory from precocious child to famous artist, bringing into focus the painter, the paintings, the patient, the wife, the daughter, the lover, the friend. They permit a look into her bedroom, a seat at her table, a visit to her hospital room, a stroll through her garden, a view into her collections, and some play with her pets. While many of these images provide us with a unique opportunity to glimpse the woman behind the facade, others, though less revealing, are equally fascinating in allowing us to view one of the most intriguing of the artist's creations--the construction of a self-image as carefully crafted and conceived as any of her works of art.