Frida kahlo mini biography video

Reduc­ing an artist’s work to their biog­ra­phy pro­duces crude under­stand­ing.

But in very many cas­es, life and work can­not be teased apart. This applies not only to Sylvia Plath and her con­tem­po­rary con­fes­sion­al poets but also to James Joyce and Mar­cel Proust and writ­ers they admired, like Dante and Cer­vantes.

Such an artist too is Fri­da Kahlo, a prac­ti­tion­er of nar­ra­tive self-por­traits in a mod­ern­iz­ing idiom that at the same time draws exten­sive­ly on tra­di­tion.

The lit­er­ary nature of her art is a sub­ject much neglect­ed in pop­u­lar dis­cus­sions of her work. She wrote pas­sion­ate, elo­quent love poems and let­ters to her hus­band Diego Rivera and oth­ers, full of the same kind of vis­cer­al, vio­lent, ver­dant imagery she deployed in her paint­ings.

More gen­er­al­ly, the “obses­sion with Kahlo’s biog­ra­phy,” writes Maria Gar­cia at WBUR, ends up focus­ing “almost voyeuris