Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), as an artist and a woman, has a unique international appeal. Her instantly recognizable work draws extensively on her life and her extraordinarily personal reflections upon it. On Kahlo's death, her husband, Diego Rivera (1886-1957), ordered that her most private possessions be locked away until 15 years after his death. The bathroom in which her belongings were stored in fact remained unopened until 2004. Through this incredible...

This volume relates Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's (1919- 1954) images of pain, loss, mutilation and transcendence to Mexico's historic cycles of revolution and reaction. This work reproduces her personal journal that she kept during the last 10 years of her life -- handwritten, colored-ink entries and accompanying self-portraits, sketches, doodles and paintings, which fuse surrealism, pre-Columbian gods and myths, biomorphic forms, animal-human hybrids,...