Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist

by Celia Stahr

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

From 1930-1933, Frida Kahlo lived in America. It was her first time away from her homeland Mexico as she and her much-older husband, Diego Rivera, lived in San Francisco, Detroit and New York. The many contradictions of America as "the land of the free" and a country of great wealth was not always seen by Frida and Diego. Their marriage was also being strained for various reasons as Frida grew more miserable and wanted nothing more than to return to Mexico. It was an eventful three years, nicely captured in this book in detail rarely found elsewhere.

The riveting story of how three years spent in the United States transformed Frida Kahlo into the artist we know today

"[An] insightful debut....Featuring meticulous research and elegant turns of phrase, Stahr’s engrossing account provides scholarly though accessible analysis for both feminists and art lovers." —Publisher's Weekly

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental.

Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit.

Frida in America is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn’t always understand. But it’s precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity. With vivid detail, Frida in America recreates the pivotal journey that made Senora Rivera the world famous Frida Kahlo.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250113382
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	522,297
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Celia Stahr is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where she specializes in modern American and contemporary art with an emphasis on feminist art and gender studies, as well as African and multicultural art. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Iowa and lives in the Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

11/18/2019

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2020

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

Library Journal

2019-12-01
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.

Kirkus Reviews

"Listeners experience the disorientation and dismissal that Kahlo encountered in a personal way due to [Frankie] Corzo's evocative delivery. Listeners who want to learn more about Kahlo will sink into these two volumes, which explore a remarkable life as told by a strong voice."
—AudioFile Magazine

From the Publisher

Narrator Frankie Corzo brings an academic gravitas to this exploration of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's time in America. Corzo’s voice is steady as well as measured while guiding listeners through the details of Kahlo's marriage and later artistic development. Fans of Kahlo's art will immerse themselves in this nuanced account of her challenges and inspirations. Her story is in capable hands because Corzo recounts with feeling the sexism that first hid Kahlo's talent behind that of her husband, Diego Rivera. Listeners experience the disorientation and dismissal that Kahlo encountered in a personal way due to Corzo's evocative delivery. Listeners who want to learn more about Kahlo will sink into these two volumes, which explore a remarkable life as told by a strong voice. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile