After an interlude of several decades, two new biographies of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo have recently appeared. Each book focuses on a more limited time period than the comprehensive biography Hayden Herrera published in 1983. Celia Stahr’s Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist examines the years Kahlo lived in the United States between 1930 and 1933 — and Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris addresses the brief period the artist spent in Paris in 1939. While both books offer valuable new information about the artist’s life, their emphases on her love affairs and tragic personal circumstances perpetuate rather than challenge the biographical approach to understanding the artist’s work established by Herrera. Knowledge of life events is crucial to interpreting any artist’s oeuvre — but Kahlo’s paintings have been perpetually and inextricably tied to her biography in ways that hamper evaluation of her contributions to the development of modernism in the Americas. Kahlo is an important artist, but many scholars have avoided serious inquiry into her work because her life story has so consumed the popular imagination that it has become difficult to distinguish the originality of her approach from the often-shocking content of the imagery. These books, unfortunately, do little to move the study of Kahlo’s art in new directions.
From the outset, the title of Stahr’s book Frida in America is problematic. While Kahlo was Mexican and thus born in North America, Stahr’s choice to employ “America” to refer to her time in the United States assumes a cultural superiority that has long been challenged by scholars of Latin American art. Moreover, by using Kahlo’s first name only, Stahr perpetuates the biased tendency of referring to male artists by their professional surname and female artists by their more familiar and accessible first name. The regrettable choices continue in the first sentence of the prologue that reads, “Frida was lying in a blood-soaked bed,” a gruesome description that sets the stage for the book’s frequent emphasis on tragedy, personal injury, and graphic imagery. While drawing the reader in, this sensationalistic approach undermines a reading of the artist as an autonomous intellectual and creative being. It is disappointing that an art historian would perpetuate this clichéd vision of the artist. Indeed, Stahr criticizes Herrera for “the merging of Frida the person with the Frida depicted in the self-portraits,” but repeats this same perspective with assertions such as, “Frida’s child had to die in order to give birth to Frida the mature artist.” While many of Kahlo’s paintings contain obvious biographical references, emphasizing the trope of the long-suffering artist precludes other more nuanced methods of analyzing the artist’s work.
But Stahr’s manuscript does provide a rich contextual framework. It is meticulously researched and documented. The author probed deeply into the letters and archives pertaining to Kahlo’s time in the United States, finding many new details on her contacts as well as her thoughts about art-making. One of the book’s greatest strengths is Stahr’s astute description of cultural and historical context in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York to support her central argument that Kahlo’s time in the United States stimulated her maturation as an artist. For example, in her discussion of Kahlo in San Francisco, she focuses on the artist’s fascination with Chinatown and offers a brief history of the Chinese presence in the United States. She relates Kahlo’s portrait of African American Eva Frederick to the emerging construct of the New Negro, and in her chapters on New York, Stahr examines the impact of the Great Depression and the city’s burgeoning homeless crisis on Kahlo’s perceptions and depictions of the city. Also insightful is Stahr’s consideration of the many artists and individuals Kahlo met while in the United States such as Dorothea Lange, Georgia O’Keefe, Luther Burbank, and Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias. Situated against these richly described contexts, the paintings and drawings Kahlo created in each city come to life.
Despite Stahr’s extensive research, however, her book doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Is it biography, art history, or historical fiction? The narrative mostly follows a chronological format tracing Kahlo’s journeys with her husband Diego Rivera to San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, but regresses in the second chapter to cover her early years in Mexico, background which seems superfluous for those expecting a deep dive into the U.S. years. The extensive endnotes indicate that the book is a scholarly text, but the casual tone and the author’s tendency to assign thoughts and feelings to the artist align it more with historical fiction. For instance, in reference to Kahlo’s experience of miscarriage Stahr writes: “She wailed in agony and despair. Diego, frantic, didn’t know what to do” and in her description of Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926), she asserts, “She’s saying ‘my heart aches for you, just as my breasts long for your touch.’” Perhaps this painting can be read as a seductive image, but to articulate the artist’s thoughts like this is problematic. Elsewhere, Stahr claims that while painting Kahlo “was free from emotional pain of separation.” Clearly, there is no way to know what the artist was thinking or feeling at these moments and to do so shifts the text into the fictional realm.
From an art historical perspective, the book also falls short. One of the most notable aspects of the narrative is Stahr’s detailed discussion of many little-known photographs and drawings of and by Kahlo. Few scholars have analyzed these images, and Stahr’s work could have filled in this gap. Yet almost none of these images, such as the drawings Kahlo made with Lucienne Bloch combining human and animal forms, is reproduced in the book and they are not always easily accessible elsewhere. The inclusion of high-quality images, particularly of the lesser known drawings and photographs, would have greatly enhanced the usefulness of the text for students of Kahlo’s oeuvre. The dearth of illustrations made it extremely difficult to follow Stahr’s detailed discussions of Kahlo’s work, and when images were reproduced in the central insert, there were no figure numbers, so it was impossible to know which images were available for reference without flipping back and forth.
Stahr also has a tendency to overread many of the images, extrapolating from the objects depicted to draw implausible conclusions. For example, Stahr’s writes about Self Portrait—Time Flies (1929): “The phrase ‘time flies’ and the airplane flying above convey that time has passed quickly now that she’s married to Diego.” She then proceeds to interpret the color combinations in the painting according to alchemical principles. Although Kahlo was familiar with alchemy, this reading is a stretch. Is it possible that the airplane doesn’t refer to her relationship but instead represents Mexico’s burgeoning modernity and that Kahlo chose her colors according to their relationship to one another? This over- or misinterpretation occurs quite frequently throughout the text. In her discussion of Self Portrait on the Borderline (1932), Stahr interprets Kahlo’s color choices according to contemporary norms, describing the pink high-rise as “feminine” and the blue-gray one as “masculine,” but pink and blue were not perceived as gendered at the time Kahlo painted this work; this alignment did not emerge until the 1940s. In another instance, she reads the male lion “with the gorgeous mane and eye-liner” in Window Display on a Street in Detroit (1931) as “Frida’s ‘androgynous’ alter ego.” Why foreground a vague allusion (if it’s there at all) to Kahlo’s gender identity instead of discussing Kahlo’s obvious commentary on U.S. patriotism and consumer culture in the work? Indeed, Stahr generally avoids situating Kahlo’s work in relation to emerging notions of cultural modernism in the Americas, instead focusing on biography as her primary interpretive mechanism. Similarly, in her discussion of My Dress Hangs There (1933), Stahr suggests that the painting is about Kahlo’s relationship with Rivera asking, “Would the cool waters be enough to restore balance to Frida and Diego’s fiery relationship?” without connecting her innovative use of collage to modernist movements. Kahlo therefore seems to stand alone outside art history.
I had high hopes for this book, since there is scant high quality literature on Kahlo, but unfortunately, it did not move Kahlo studies in a new direction. Stahr’s book traces in extreme detail Kahlo’s reputation and contacts in the United States, but perpetuates a biographical mode of interpretation that fails to situate the artist’s work within the scholarship of modernism in the Americas.
The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris, while also biographical in nature, is written from a different perspective. The book is a quick, light read that offers a vivid picture of Kahlo’s days in pre-World War II Paris. The author, Marc Petitjean, is the son of Michel Petitjean with whom Kahlo had an affair during her brief stay in Paris. Michel Petitgean was a dilettante, becoming the ward of the art patron Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles to integrate himself into the art world. This arrangement led to associations with Marcel Duchamp and surrealist André Breton, who asked him to assist with the organization of the Mexique exhibition for which Kahlo had traveled to Paris. Petitjean is not an art historian, but rather a filmmaker and writer who undertook his research in an attempt to understand better his father’s past by investigating Kahlo’s time in Paris. Unfortunately, he was not able to locate any letters from Kahlo in his father’s papers, meaning that most of the text derives from secondary sources and an imagined reconstruction of events rather than new documentation. Like Stahr’s account, Petitjean also highlights Kahlo’s affairs, sexuality, and flamboyant personality.
The title of the book derives from the painting, The Heart (1937), that Kahlo gave to Michel Petitjean as a memento of their time together. The painting, which hung in the author’s childhood home, was sold at auction after his father’s death and its current location is unknown. Unlike Stahr’s book, the text includes very few citations, making it is hard to determine whether the author’s assertions stem from primary sources or personal assumptions. For instance, he quotes Kahlo saying upon her meeting with Breton in Paris, “You wanted me to come to Paris. Well, here I am. I’m here and I’m going to be so famous.” Without a note, the reader must assume that Petitjean has invented the exchange. As the text progresses, it becomes clear that much of the description of interpersonal dialogue and relations is imagined and only loosely tied to documentary evidence.
The book does, however, go into much more detail than Herrera’s original biography on Kahlo’s time in Paris and provides some interesting anecdotes about Kahlo’s friendships with artists Jacqueline Lamba, Dora Maar, and Mary Reynolds as well as Kahlo’s and Petitjean’s attempts to assist Spanish Civil War refugees. Written from the perspective of a Paris-native, Petitjean brings the city alive, with vivid descriptions of the streets, galleries, cafés, and theatres Kahlo frequented. Of most interest to scholars is the section that deals with the Mexique exhibition. Petitjean provides an illuminating first-hand account of the event narrated by his father, but unfortunately, there is no footnote detailing where and when the statement was made, diminishing its scholarly worth. While many quotes and statements go uncited, Petitjean does include some interesting primary source documents such as telegrams and postcards sent from his father to Kahlo. One particularly interesting revelation was his unearthing of previously unknown reviews of the exhibition, such as the very negative review published in Beaux-arts magazine that helps illuminate the broader reception of Kahlo’s work in Paris. Petitjean also corrects an error in Herrera’s biography, confirming that it was the Jeu de Paume not the Louvre that acquired Kahlo’s painting The Frame after her exhibition, noting that the French national collection was the first in the world to acquire a Kahlo painting.
The Heart is an intimate account of Kahlo’s little-known affair with Michel Petitjean and the friendship and contacts she made in his company. While the book fills in several gaps in current knowledge of Kahlo’s time in Paris, the lack of citations and liberal incorporation of imaginative speculation align it more with historical fiction than biography. I imagine that both Stahr’s and Petitjean’s books would have a great deal of popular appeal, but from a scholarly perspective these texts should be consulted with caution.
[Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist by Celia Stahr, published by St. Martin’s Press on March 3, 2020, 370 pages, $29.99 hardcover. The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris by Marc Petitjean, published by Other Press on April 28, 2020, 193 pages, $25.00 hardcover]