The riveting story of how three years spent in the United States transformed Frida Kahlo into the artist we know today “[An] insightful debut….Featuring meticulous research and elegant turns of phrase, Stahr’s engrossing account provides scholarly though accessible analysis for both feminists and art lovers.” –Publisher’s Weekly Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, … Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental.
Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit.
Frida in America is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn’t always understand. But it’s precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity. With vivid detail, Frida in America recreates the pivotal journey that made Senora Rivera the world famous Frida Kahlo.
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The voracious, and profane, Frida Kahlo, a mix of German and Mexican blood, comes alive through quotes from texts and letters in Celia Stahr’s lovely book, FRIDA IN AMERICA. Frida’s first trip north from her home in Mexico City brought her to San Francisco with her husband, the renown muralist, Diego Rivera. She was a teen-ager when she married the divorced painter, who was bigger than life, but Frida made her own way, adapting indigenous dress and style. She’d been a polio victim, and suffered a horrific street car accident, yet she managed to produce an astonishing number of surrealistic paintings (she defies category). Her father was a photographer, and Frida had an eye for posing, setting the scene, and seeing life from many angles. I’m so glad she did; I revel in her work and in her strength. She was an icon whose color and inspiration live, and Stahr’s book does justice to the artist’s incredible sight and talent.
Artist Frida Kahlo’s Time in America and how it shaped her artistically.
In 2015, I saw the Detroit Institute of Art (DAI) exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. I knew Diego Rivera from the DIA court murals but I had known little about Frida Kahol. Reading Frida Kahol in America by Celia Stahr, specifically about Kahlo’s time in Detroit, I could clearly remember her painting of her miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital. We listened to the story on headphones and studied the unforgettable painting.
Although the exhibit included works by Rivera, it was Kahlo’s that stuck in my mind. Rivera’s painting of a flower seller was more accessible, ‘prettier’, but Kahlo’s self-portraits grabbed my attention–those eyes, so direct and almost challenging, her self-confidence and self-acceptance revealed.
Stahr shares that many who knew both Rivera and Kahlo said Kahlo was the better artist. She stood in the shadow of her husband’s charismatic personality, diminished by the press, struggling to develop her artistic voice.
Kahlo was in her early twenties when she married the older, famous artist, only twenty-three when they arrived in America. Her life had already been eventful, suffering polio, scoliosis, spina bifida, and the life-threatening bus accident when she was a teenager. Pain accompanied her every day. She was a Communist, she challenged society’s prescribed sex roles, and had suffered heartbreak as a spurned lover.
It was so interesting to see American during the Depression through Kahlo’s eyes. The wealthy industrialists were her husband’s patrons–they paid the bills. They also represented a privileged class Kahlo who found revolting.
Kahlo wrote to her mother, “Witnessing the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who are cold and have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires, who greedily grab everything, has profoundly shocked [us].”
Of course, I was very interested in the artists’ time in Detroit. The city had been one of the hardest hit by the Depression, 50% unemployed. I was shocked to read about the Ford Hunger March. Ford had reduced salaries and laid off workers, and since the workers lived in Ford housing they became homeless as well. Four thousand marched in freezing weather to the gate of the Rouge River plant to be met by bullets and fire hoses, killing four people. River and Kahlo arrived a month after the event.
Stahr addresses each painting created by Kahlo, explaining the work and its symbolism in detail, including the self-portrait made for her estranged lover, the groundbreaking paintings about her abortion and the miscarriage that spurred a traumatic ‘rebirth’ as had her bus accident when she was eighteen years old.
Stahr addresses the duality “at the root of Frida’s sense of self,” part of her “search for a unification of opposites, as the Aztecs and alchemists espoused.”
Kahlo’s deeply personal art defied convention, delving into female experiences never depicted in art before. In comparison, Rivera’s masterpiece murals at the Detroit Institute of Art look to the past, glorifying the pre-Depression industrial worker and the scientists and entrepreneurs who created industry.
These same industrialist millionaires were aiding Hitler, Ford a known anti-semite, and oil companies supplying fuel and poisonous gasses to the Nazis.
After Detroit, they went to New York City where Rivera was to create a mural for the new Rockefeller Center and a battle over a patron’s control of an artist’s content played itself out. It could have happened in Detroit, but the scandalous murals drew record crowds to the DIA and turned around their finances.
“Love is the basis of all life,” Stahr quotes Kahlo. Love of country, for friends and family, sexual love, for home. Her relationship with Rivera was conflicted, their love affairs rending their marriage, resulting in divorce and remarriage.
This is a revealing and deep study of Kahlo that truly educated me while engaging me emotionally with its subject.
I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Frida in America by Celia Stahr is a stunning biography into the fascinating and short life of the talented Frida (Frieda) Kahlo. This book focusses on the two years (1930/1932) that Frida and Diego Rivera visited, lived, and traveled throughout America.
Ms Stahr was gracious enough to also give the reader plenty of insight into events that occurred in not only Frida’s life growing up and her earlier years before Rivera, but also the backgrounds of both her parents and many of her friends.
I have been a passionate fan of Kahlo’s for over 20 years, and there were still things that I was able to read about that I did not know. It was amazing to be able to read in depth concerning all of her inspirations and influences, as well as a deep search into the meanings of her pictures, paintings, and her fashion. She was a true genius that was not truly appreciated while she was alive.
This jam-packed biography was just what I needed to add another angle into one of my most beloved artists.
Frida was intelligent, open, passionate, imperfect, beautiful, and sometimes tortured soul that was and emotional yet reserved. She was an amazing woman and artist who was trying to find herself and her place within her family and loved ones and the society that was at the very least judgmental, overbearing, and limited for women at that time.
The author gave us a glimpse into that soul and her meticulously researched book definitely did Frida justice. I am impressed.
5/5 stars