FRIDA KAHLO: HER PHOTOS

The fullness with which Kahlo lived her life is seen best here, and her love for rich experience is reflected back at the reader, full of personality and vitality.  When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera asked the poet Carlos Pellicer to turn her family home, the fabled Blue House, into a museum.  Pellicer selected some paintings, drawings, photographs, books, and ceramics, maintaining the space just as Kahlo and Rivera had arranged it to live and work in.  The rest of the objects, clothing, documents, drawings, and letters, as well as over 6,000 photographs collected by Kahlo over the course of her life, were put away in bathrooms that had been converted into storerooms.  This incredible trove remained hidden for more than half a century, until, just a few years ago, these storerooms and wardrobes were opened up.  Kahlo's photograph collection was a major revelation among these finds, a testimony to the tastes and interests of the famous couple, not only the images themselves but also through the telling annotations inscribed upon them.

524 pages