Jack Rummel

Excellent brief work on Kahlo's life while including the importance of her relationship to Diego Rivera. The beginning was a letdown as Rummel presents Kahlo as not being spiritual in the traditional sense. The author addresses Kahlo's spirituality as her search for personal identity. This was sufficient for me to try to get into the book again. For someone who was ill as often as she was, Kahlo traveled much and was in San Francisco multiple times. She was involved with Trotsky of Stalin and Orwell notoriety. Not that fascism is any credit to anyone or anything, but she seemed to have been completely oblivious to how dangerous Communism was to everyone associated with it. Perceptive and useful for understanding her now famous paintings. Rummel says that her art was late discovery of herself where she learned to come to terms with her life in a non-surrealist way. Her depictions were a way of externalizing her interior spiritual life rather than an exercise in surrealist absurdity. Highly recommended, for all its aspects of historical information. Notes, chronology, bibliography, photos.… (meer)