An appealing book about Frida, by Frida, providing an origi nal, fascinating insight into her life, thoughts, and feeli ngs.
Repri nted in hardback with a beautiful new cover.
Frida Kahlo, the writer? Art critic Raquel Tibol gathers letters, poem s, notes, protests, confessions, brief messages, and longe r texts written by Kahlo to her friends, lovers and othe rs.
In her writings, Kahlo employs, in Tibol's words, an "unreserved, imaginative language, heart and intimacy laid bare," that reveals her ta ste for neologisms, colloquial turns and the crossing of linguis tic boundaries. The freedom of her language is a path towards sincerity, the origin of Kahlo's pictorial universe, with its recurri ng motifs: the bus 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 fascina ting relationship with Diego Rivera; her illness as destiny; her p olitical engagements; and her uncompromising quest for liberty . Here the reader will find Kahlo "swinging back and forth betwe en 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 cap acity 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.