Frida A biography of Frida Kahlo

Of the many vivid personalities of Mexico's modern Renaissance, none surpassed Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): wife of Diego Rivers; painter of primitivist fantasies; Trotskyite and Stalinist; Mexican-costumed iconoclast. Today, Kahlo is of interest as a woman painter. And what Herrera, a Mexican-born art historian, has discovered in Kahlo's stormy, messy, often wretched life is--without straining--a woman who saved herself through art and recreated herself through artifice. Kahlo was the favorite child of a stiff, cultured, Germanborn photographer and painter--and epileptic--to whom she felt especially close after polio, at six, left her with a withered leg. Later, she would hide the leg under long Mexican skirts and also (in compensation?) become ""the most Mexican of Mexicans."" At the elite Preparatoria, teenage Frida was a madcap and a romantic. Rivers, then painting a mural on the premises, was the butt of one of her jokes; but Hererra dismisses as ""probably apocryphal"" the famous story that Frida, infatuated, announced that she would someday have his child. At 18, disaster: her body was terribly, irreparably crushed in a streetcar accident. Convalescing, she began to paint--often painting her wounded body, thereafter, to express her wounded feelings. ""The confinement of invalidism made Frida see herself as a private world. . . . Wanting to surround herself with people, she accentuated qualities she already possessed--vivacity, generosity, wit. . . . She created a self that would be strong enough to withstand the blows life dealt her."" The harshest would come from Rivera, whom she met again at 20 or 21, charmed, and shortly married. He was 42, a ferocious worker and joyful womanizer. Herrera traces the ensuing quarrels, partings, and reconciliations in eyedropper detail. He had an affair, devastatingly, with her favorite sister; she had affairs with the sculptor Noguchi and their friend and guest Trotsky. There are moments of farce and squalor. But increasingly, she concentrated on her work, which he had always encouraged. And Herrera, showing the late, terminally ill Frida as a bird of paradise in a child's house-and-garden, ventures that regard for one another's work was the strongest bond between them. The writing is juiceless; the art commentary is mostly explication; the book is overlong. But Herrera is careful, sympathetic, undoctrinaire. Less engrossing than it might have been, but impressive nonetheless. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.