DIARY OF FRIDA KAHLO, THE - AN INTIMATE SELF-PORTRAIT

Frida Kahlo's diary, like her art, is painted in breathtakingly vivid colors. It covers her tumultuous last decade and encompasses love letters, political musings on Communism, and resplendent paintings. The paintings, peopled with mythic figures, self-portraits, and monsters, articulate Kahlo's fantastic visions. One drawing melds a procession of crying faces onto an intertwined couple surrounded by body parts, only to dissolve into a mass of roots and dendrites. In the introduction, Carlos Fuentes writes, "...a streetcar crashed into the fragile bus she was riding, broke her spinal column, her collarbone, her ribs, her pelvis.... The impact of the crash left Frida naked and bloodied, but covered with gold dust." Her paintings depict her bodily experience, from anguish to sensuality. Kahlo said, "I never painted dreams, I painted my own reality." This visionary ability earned her a place among the surrealists. Kahlo's prose delves into the associations between images and words, feelings and thought. Her writings shed welcome light on her active intelligence and provide an outline of the events of her life. This Abradale edition features plates reproducing the pages of the diary, and essays by Carlos Fuentes and Sarah Lowe that place it in the context of Mexican art, politics, and history. It is a magical work that adds to an understanding not only of Kahlo's work, but of her interior world as well.