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Frida in America boils down the life of artist Frida Kahlo to a small chunk of time – 1930 to 1933 – and focuses on her life at the side of husband Diego Rivera, following him from New York to Detroit to San Francisco as he paints murals for rich industrialists, and she develops her own foothold as a surrealist.
Kahlo’s feelings about America had always been ambivalent; while she took American lovers and had American friends (and rich art patrons) she always saw it as a land of greed and prejudice and horrifying levels of class disparity; “gringoland”, filled with white faces, “unbaked rolls.”
The book pulls apart both the strained times in which Kahlo lived. She traversed America during the height of the Depression, saw unimaginable squalor and splendor, experienced racist prejudice and saw the way that the privilege and money her husband accrued sheltered her. She fell in lust with women and men but remained obsessed with Diego always, was friends with the maternal grandparents of the Lindbergh baby and store clerk girls.
Though it’s several grades below Hayden Herrera’s perfect Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, which served as the basis for Salma Hayek’s Oscar-nominated 2002 biopic Frida, Frida in America still does a good job of crystallizing a specific point in time of Kahlo’s life and delivering the details in well-sketched scenes that contextualizes Kahlo’s experiences through those months and years.
The most fascinating fresh tidbits in the book center around Kahlo’s friendships – with other women, with the doctor who would attempt to assist her with the physical problems that plagued her after a bus accident that would define her life, with Georgia O’Keefe, to whom she was attracted but did not consummate that attraction. While the juicier bits – like Kahlo’s bursts of temper, her miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital, her tempestuous arguments with Rivera – have all already been milled over by many other biographers, Stahr’s ten years of research shows, and she keeps smartly to sources like Kahlo’s letters and the biographies of other artists to show who and what influenced Kahlo’s artistic growth.
And this book is about Kahlo’s art, her ideas, her techniques – in fact it’s one of the finest dives into such territory and it’s beautifully rendered. Stahr does a perfect job carefully explaining how Kahlo navigated her life.
There is some psychological muddling that doesn’t really come off – dives into Kahlo’s psyche only occasionally come off under Stahr’s pen – but there are also moments of great triumph and good use of the material at hand. Frida in America earns a solid recommendation.
Buy it at: Amazon or shop your local indie bookstore!
Grade: B+
Book Type: Non Fiction
Sensuality: N/A
Review Date: 20/03/20
Publication Date: 03/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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You guys must read this article. I love the bits about Frida!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/annette-nancarrow-art-mexico.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna”. It’s fiction, but Frida Kahlo plays a large role in the book. She is not always likable but she’s always fascinating.
I haven’t read “The Lacuna,” but I enjoyed reading “The Poisonwood Bible” years ago.
As for Frida Kahlo, her appeal and legacy are interesting. She reminds me somewhat of Andy Warhol. At the risk of sounding like the art snob that I am, I wouldn’t describe either of them as extraordinarily talented, and yet they *resonated.” I often think about this almost mystical quality of resonance. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some people become famous and others- who are perhaps equally or more talented- do not. Or why, for example, is “Fifty Shades of Grey” an icon of erotica when it is hardly the best example of the genre? I don’t say any of this to knock these famous people/works and the people who love them. Far from it. I just find it fascinating that some take the world by storm while most remain unknown or become forgotten… And what is the secret?
Getting back to Frida’s resonance, I know of a Mexican restaurant that has two shrines on the wall: one for the Virgin Mary and the other for Frida Kahlo. Make of that what you will…
I wholeheartedly disagree with your assessment of Kahlo’s talent, and you can’t compare Andy Warhol’s pop absurdities with Kahlo, who is an icon of surrealism and comes from an entirely different place.
Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that. For clarification, my comparison between Warhol and Kahlo wasn’t intended to be toward their art styles per se, but of how they resonated with their respective audiences.
Getting back to Ms. Kahlo, the movie is definitely on my neverending TBW list. :)
I hope you do watch it, it’s quite good.
And I have to disagree with that, seeing how Kahlo resonates both with Latine audiences and with queer ones, as well as disabled persons.
It’s an interesting thing about artists and their art. Sometimes, artists resonate because of who they were as individuals. Sometimes, they resonate because of their art in isolation of their person (i.e. the work of art is better known than the artist who produced it). And sometimes, as in the case with Ms. Kahlo and Mr. Warhol, I think it’s both. Fans of both artists seemed to gravitate toward both their art and the artists who produced them rather than solely one or the other. Regardless of what I think of their art, they were both interesting characters in their own right. Sometimes people on the fringe need their patron saints. Believe me, I know the feeling.
That definitely covers Frida’s personality, so I sense it comes close to her real personality.