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In small, stunningly rendered self-portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself cracked open, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage, anesthetized on a hospital gurney, and weeping beside her own extracted heart. Her works are so incendiary in emotion and subject matter that one art critic suggested the walls of an exhibition be covered with asbestos. In this beautiful book, art historian Hayden Herrera brings together numerous paintings and sketches by the amazing Mexican artist, documenting each with explanatory text that probes the influences in Kahlo's life and their meaning for her work. Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full-color paintings, as well as dozens of black-and-white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little-known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.

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Library Journal Review

Frida Kahlo's extraordinary life and revolutionary art continue to bear fruit with two superb new books, coming quickly on the heels of Martha Zamora's acclaimed Frida Kahlo: The Brush of Anguish ( LJ 1/91). Lowe's biography, the first in a promising new series on women artists, is a succinct, insightful profile of the Mexican painter, combining a biographical chapter with an extended discussion of the self-portraits that make up the core of her oeuvre. Without becoming mired in florid language, Lowe cogently describes the biographical contexts of individual paintings and draws our attention to Kahlo's frequent employment of pre-Columbian symbolism. Lowe goes on to separate Kahlo's art from her biography in an extended analysis of the art historical setting within which she worked. This approach revitalizes the paintings, placing Kahlo's work in such explicitly Latin American traditions as retablo iconography and agitprop from the Left and also demonstrating the obsession of European Surrealists with ``primitive'' art. Herrera's ( Frida , LJ 1/83) beautifully produced book is laden with large color plates and dozens of photos of Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and their cronies. It improves upon Zamora by providing perhaps the most direct analysis of Kahlo's life and art within one volume to date. The two books are essential for any library without a Kahlo monograph, and for those having already purchased Zamora's biography, Lowe's economical paperback is an excellent supplementary text.-- Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Frida Kahlo's fame and influence continue to grow. Herrera, her biographer (Frida [BKL F 1 83]), does accomplish the goal implicit in the title of this lushly illustrated volume--to discuss Kahlo's paintings--but the autobiographical nature of Kahlo's works calls for biographical context, making this a book as much about Kahlo's life as her transformation of it into image and symbol. Herrera is frank and specific as she reveals the intensity of Kahlo's dramatic personality and sexuality and decodes the "ferocity" of her self-portraits. Her expressive and fluid prose is able to keep pace with Kahlo's riveting canvases and adds to the experience of viewing them. More than 200 paintings and sketches are reproduced, 80 in color, while numerous photographs illustrate Kahlo's painful, passionate, and creative life. A superb tribute to Kahlo, an "example of persevering strength" and considered by many to be "Mexico's greatest artist." ~--Donna Seaman