The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

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Shortly after their introduction in 1928, Kahlo asked him to judge whether her paintings showed enough talent for her to pursue a career as an artist. In 1994, American jazz flautist and composer James Newton released an album titled Suite for Frida Kahlo. Her letters show how intertwined her anguish over Gómez Arias’s waning attentions was with her physical suffering. The situation has been further complicated by the fact that an executor of Kahlo’s estate, wealthy Rivera patron Dolores Olmedo, has jealously guarded the diary.

Most of the paintings Kahlo made during this time were portraits of herself, her sisters, and her schoolfriends. The second was the publication of art historian Hayden Herrera's international bestseller Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo in 1983.Even before the first book is sold (the initial print run is more than 150,000) Abrams undoubtedly will have made good on its investment, for Frida-mania has a global reach.

As is typical of Kahlo's obsessive nature, a number of themes recur throughout the journal, in both text and imagery. She painted more "than she had done in all her eight previous years of marriage", creating such works as My Nurse and I (1937), Memory, the Heart (1937), Four Inhabitants of Mexico (1938), and What the Water Gave Me (1938). They created large public pieces in the vein of Renaissance masters and Russian socialist realists: they usually depicted masses of people, and their political messages were easy to decipher.

The school promoted indigenismo, a new sense of Mexican identity that took pride in the country's indigenous heritage and sought to rid itself of the colonial mindset of Europe as superior to Mexico. The Mexicanidad movement claimed to resist the "mindset of cultural inferiority" created by colonialism, and placed special importance on indigenous cultures. By 1984, Kahlo's reputation as an artist had grown to such extent that Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage, prohibiting their export from the country. She became a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, a group of twenty-five artists commissioned by the Ministry of Public Education in 1942 to spread public knowledge of Mexican culture. She seemed to anticipate her death, as she spoke about it to visitors and drew skeletons and angels in her diary.