Frida Kahlo

The first 38 pages of this oversized book are devoted to a biography of Frida Kahlo's life and a discussion of some of her most famous paintings. Several vintage color and black & white photos are also included in this section. The remaining pages of this book are the plates...large full page images of her paintings reporduced in full color and detail...some of the best quality reproductions I've seen. Each painting is titled and dated, the medium used and the current whereabouts of the original piece.

Salomon Grimberg's compilation of Frida Kahlo's book is an ideal place for those who saw the movie-bio starring Salma Hayek. Apart from the art, there's a written text of her life that gives one insight into her life and what aspects the movie emphasized or omitted. There are also black & white and colour photographs of her as well.She mostly did self-portraits, and looking through them, I see more and more that Hayek was the best choice to play Kahlo. Many of the paintings realized and duplicated in the movie appear here. The Two Fridas, one wearing the white dress, the other a blue dress, with a blood vessel connecting the two, are included, as is her stark representation of the miscarriage which in the movie, causes Diego to weep.The title of each painted, the medium used, e.g. oil on canvas, the year painted, and the current whereabouts of the original are listed on each page.Many of them are simple but brutal, others demonstrated the cathartic release of the pain she felt, whether it was the lifelong spinal injury gained from the train accident in 1925, to her divorce from husband and artist Diego Rivera. The main reason for her painting was to compensate for the inadequacies she felt, i.e. her shorter right leg and her spinal condition. The Broken Column, which is a cutaway picture of her with a fractured Greek column representing her spine and nails hammered into her body, sums up her pain very well.As for painting other people, the portrait of her sister Cristina, her husband Diego, and Lupita and Mariana Morillo are simply stunning.She's remembered as the best known female painter ever, whether it be for her surrealist pictures, the Mexican culture embodied in her paintings, and how she was able to project her feelings through her art, stark, brutal, and poignant. After this volume, a next possible step are the books by Hayden Herrera that served as the basis for the film, which is the route I'm taking.