Frida in America
The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stahr, art professor at University of San Francisco, examines the creative evolution of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo during her time in America in this insightful debut. Coming to the U.S. in 1930 as an inexperienced artist and the much younger bride of renowned muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo turned personal experiences into artistic statements and "was able to transform the personal into something universal, allowing people the world over... to see and feel themselves in her paintings." Living in San Francisco, Kahlo picked up a new visual language while straddling two cultures, employing indigenous people and alchemical symbols in her portraits. After seeing the "magical" home of botanist and horticulturist Luther Burbank, she added surreal touches to her work. She traveled throughout the U.S., visiting New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which influenced her use of color. Georgia O'Keefe, whom Kahlo met in 1931, helped her synthesize complicated feelings into visceral images. A devastating miscarriage in 1932 while in Detroit led her to insert third eyes in paintings, drawing on her raw physical and emotional pain and garnering international recognition two years before she returned to Mexico City. Featuring meticulous research and elegant turns of phrase, Stahr's engrossing account provides scholarly though accessible analysis for both feminists and art lovers.
