Frida in America

November 18, 2019
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.

January 1, 2020

This first book from Stahr (art history, Univ. of San Francisco) highlights Frida Kahlo's budding artistic years with husband Diego Rivera during their visit to San Francisco, New York, and Detroit from 1930 to 1933. The author heavily mined primary sources, such as Kahlo's letters to her mother and Kahlo/Rivera contemporary Lucienne Bloch's unpublished diary, yet cites frequently from Hayden Herrera's popular biography, Frida. The colloquial tone and frequent short quotes create a clipped exposition despite its otherwise easy-to-read prose. Sometimes plodding personal interpretation of Kahlo's work and heritage detract from "the story of place" Stahr sets out to tell. The author discusses Pan-American sociopolitical issues in the context of the couple's art, an objective of the book, but also takes twisty, tangential routes losing momentum with distracting minutiae. There are endnotes but no bibliography or index for scholarly follow-up. VERDICT For Kahlo fans, not scholars. Devotees may wrestle with the author's in-depth analysis while appreciating its informal voice. Though there are some updated facts provided since Herrera's biography, the latter is more scholarly and better organized. Readers here can expect a more casual if not meandering narrative of Kahlo's own adventurous sojourn to "Gringolandia" and back.--Marianne Laino Sade, Washington Coll., Chestertown, MD

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020
An art historian parses the famed artist's complicated psychological and emotional states while in America as a young wife and emerging artist in the early 1930s. Stahr (Modern American and Contemporary Art/Univ. of San Francisco) captures Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) in all her ambiguity at age 23, when she embarked on her first American tour with her new husband, famous muralist Diego Rivera. As the author shows, she moved into this uneasy public role while also passionately pursuing her own difficult work. Diminutive in stature and unwell due to an early bout of polio and a terrible car accident in her late teens, Kahlo, like Rivera, was deeply devoted to her Mexican identity as well as socialist ideals. These beliefs would both alienate their American patrons, as in Rivera's case, and attract the avant-garde, as in Kahlo's case in New York, where she had her first solo show in 1938. In 1930, visiting San Francisco for the first time, as Rivera painted his commission for the California School of Fine Arts, and then through their stints in Detroit and New York over the next three years, Kahlo devoured the strange sights and used her experiences to inspire her art. She made friends with women artists especially--e.g., Dorothea Lange, Lucienne Bloch, and Georgia O'Keeffe--experimented with her Indigenous (now iconic) wardrobe as she became a darling subject of photographers, grew embittered by her husband's serial infidelities, and had a devastating miscarriage. All of this served as fuel for her early groundbreaking portraits and self-portraits, which were full of symbolism and blood and gore. Stahr sees the emergent artist's powers explode in My Birth, an unsettling painting from 1932 that addressed Kahlo's miscarriage, the recent death of her mother, and her own self-creation. The author's deep study of Kahlo's symbolic layering is highly informative, though some of the detail may be overwhelming for readers not versed in art history. The first major biography since Hayden Herrera's 1983 work presents the artist in all her ferocious complexity.

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Starred review from February 1, 2020
Frida Kahlo traveled outside Mexico for the first time in 1930 at age 23, accompanying her husband, Diego Rivera?older by 20 years, famous, unfaithful, and controversial?as he completed commissioned works across the U.S. Marked by polio and the severe injuries she suffered in a trolley accident, Kahlo was tough, smart, mischievously irreverent, and disconcertingly candid. She had just started to paint, and her commitment to art and to artful self-presentation as a purposeful embodiment of Mexican cultures intensified during her three years in America as the shadow of the Great Depression spread across the land, and Kahlo contended with emotional and physical traumas among strangers. Stahr establishes the foundation of Kahlo's aesthetics--her extensive reading, work with her photographer father, and fascination with nature's interconnectivity, the Aztec embrace of duality, and alchemy--then elucidates the profound impact her sojourns in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York had on the arc of her creativity. By mining Kahlo's letters and the invaluable diary of her friend, artist Lucienne Bloch, Stahr establishes remarkably precise and incisive contexts for many of Kahlo's most shocking and revolutionary works, while also chronicling her complex relationships, including her involvement with Georgia O'Keeffe. Stahr brings new clarity to Kahlo's life and genius for creating audacious autobiographical tableaux which pose resounding questions about history, justice, gender, spirituality, and freedom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)