Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes

Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes by Salomon Grimberg. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781858944371.

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is considered to be one of the greatest women artists of all time, and her vibrantly colorful work remains hugely popular today. She is best known for her striking self-portraits, through which she depicted her psychological and physical pain after an accident at the age of eighteen left her disabled and unable to bear children. Until now, Kahlos remarkable still lifes - of which she completed about forty, compared to eighty or so self-portraits - have not been subjected to close scrutiny, despite the fact that they comprised a major part of her creative output. In this groundbreaking study, Kahlo scholar Salomon Grimberg explores in detail all of the artists documented still lifes, including some that have come to light only recently. Grimberg, a psychiatrist as well as an art historian, offers provocative new perspectives on Kahlos creative process, and shows how her still lifes both complement her famous self-portraits and serve to reveal her true self. Full of symbolic imagery drawn from pre-Hispanic Mexico and other cultures and belief systems, these stunning works are illustrative of Kahlos private musings about herself - her loneliness and her preoccupation with death - and the world around her. With beautiful reproductions of all the still lifes, as well as other relevant paintings and drawings by Kahlo and personal photographs, this compelling book is indispensable to understanding the dramatic life and work of an extraordinary woman.