Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954 - Pain and Passion, by Andrea Kettenmann

Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954 - Pain and Passion, by Andrea Kettenmann. 2000 softcover. 96 pages, very nice condition.

Suffering and the female experience…the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is one of the most important 20th century painters, and one of the few Latin American artists to have achieved a global reputation. She is so important that in 1983 her work was declared the property of the Mexican state.

Kahlo was one of the daughters of an immigrant German photographer and a Mexican woman of Indian origin. Her life and work were more inextricably interwoven than in almost any other artist's case. Two events in her life were of crucial importance. When she was eighteen, a bus accident put her in hospital for a year with a smashed spinal column and fractured pelvis. It was in her sick bed that she first started to paint. Then, aged twenty-one, she married the world-famous Mexican mural artist Diego Rivera. She was to suffer the effects of the accident her whole life, and was particularly pained by her inability to have children.

Kahlo's arresting pictures, most of them small format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad, her longing to feel that she had put down roots, and her profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, her pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct.