Stahr brings new clarity to Kahlo’s life and genius for creating audacious autobiographical tableaux which pose resounding questions about history, justice, gender, spirituality, and freedom. By mining Kahlo’s letters and the invaluable diary of her friend, artist Lucienne Bloch, Stahr establishes remarkably precise and incisive contexts for many of Kahlo’s most shocking and revolutionary works, while also chronicling her complex relationships, including her involvement with Georgia O’Keeffe. Stahr establishes the foundation of Kahlo’s aesthetics––her extensive reading, work with her photographer father, and fascination with nature’s interconnectivity, the Aztec embrace of duality, and alchemy––then elucidates the profound impact her sojourns in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York had on the arc of her creativity. She had just started to paint, and her commitment to art and to artful self-presentation as a purposeful embodiment of Mexican cultures intensified during her three years in America as the shadow of the Great Depression spread across the land, and Kahlo contended with emotional and physical traumas among strangers. Marked by polio and the severe injuries she suffered in a trolley accident, Kahlo was tough, smart, mischievously irreverent, and disconcertingly candid.

Celia Stahr illuminates how not only these events but also Kahlos culture shock in the U.S. Frida Kahlo traveled outside Mexico for the first time in 1930 at age 23, accompanying her husband, Diego Rivera-older by 20 years, famous, unfaithful, and controversial-as he completed commissioned works across the U.S. Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist.

Frida in America by Celia Stahr