Page 5

KAHLO, from page 3

all women aspired to the white-skinned, blue-eyed, platinum-tressed Hollywood standard of beauty.Flaunting her Mexicanidad, Frida caused a sensation as she flounced down the streets of Detroit and New York with her bronze skin, unplucked eyebrows and exotic Mexican finery.
     While Rivera's celebrated murals were grand, sweeping panoramas of Mexican history and culture and Marxist ideology, Frida's work was intensely personal, featuring her menstrual blood, her lost  fetuses, her broken body, and in self-portrait after self-portrait, the emphasized mustache, the heavy brows, the unyielding, confrontational gaze.  Rivera called Frida's pictures agonized poetry, and proclaimed her the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.  Frida resisted attempts to label

Frida Kahlo

Frida's Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo

and appropriate her art.  When the Surrealists tried to embrace her as one of their own, Frida insisted, I never painted dreams.  I painted my own reality.
     Frida was a study in contrasts.  In her home, pre-Columbian treasures mingled with cheap, gaudy gew-gaws from the market stalls she loved to prowl.  Her bedroom housed baby dolls and skeletons. An intellectual and ardent Communist, Frida preferred rowdy parties with plenty of food, friends and liquor to political and philosophical discussion.   

Related Web Sites

Frida Kahlo Home Page

Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Resource Page

Review: Goodbye My Friduchita