I. Loved. This. Book. To be fair, I'm naturally interested in biographies because I love getting to learn about people I will never get to meet, but 'Frida in America' is one of the BEST biographies I have ever read. I didn't know much about Kahlo before reading this book (I could identify her artwork--that was the extent of my knowledge), but I left with an understanding of the early events that shaped Kahlo as an artist. At times, I forgot that Stahr was the writer of this biography and felt like I was in conversation with Kahlo, which is a huge compliment to Stahr as a writer. If you like well-researched, captivating biographies, you simply cannot miss this one.

Extremely detailed biography about her time in America. I learned a great deal, but there were two aspects that could have dramatically improved the book. Half the time, Stahr writes like Frida is a character in a novel, where she assumes Frida's emotions and thoughts and writes them down as happening, without much documentation to prove it. However, the other half of the time, Frida is simply the research topic and her emotions and thoughts are relayed by documenting Frida's own letters or other proof. The inconsistency was a little jarring.

The second issue with the book may simply be the ARC I had. A great deal of the text references documents and especially paintings or other images. It would have been much more helpful to actually have those images in the text and refer to them while reading. I'm not sure if the print version will have the images. If so, I'd bump up my rating to 4 stars. If the print version does not include images that are referenced in the text, I'd lower the stars down to 2 stars because it is vital to look at the images to understand the author's arguments and opinions.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit."

I love reading anything I can about Frida, so when I saw this book I knew I HAD to read it! And I was not disappointed. This book was so great, there arent many books about Frida's time in the united states. So this book was perfect new adventure.

Check out my full video review: https://youtu.be/7M-BwOWqzwc

Frida in America is a non-ficition book following Frida and her time in America and how that time evolved and affected her as an artist!

I always found Frida’s life fascinating and interesting. She was a spectacular woman, that had to a live in a time where being a woman and an artist was not easy. She dwelled into subjects like sex, race, fertility and culture. There is many sides of her life I did not know, and I’m very happy I do now. However, reading a nonfiction was very dry for me that is not used to it. There was some parts that really flew over my head, and in my arc version at least there was no pictures of the painting/drawings that the author wrote about, which made it kind of hard to follow (and I had to google them myself). I don’t know if they are in the finished version of the book though. Overall I do feel like I learned a lot, but the writing was very very flat, which made me not what to pick up that book sometimes because I was bored. Though some parts was as I said very interesting! I don’t regret reading it and I would recommend it for anyone who is interested! 3/5 stars.

Comprehensive and fair examination of Frida's life and time in the US. Pairing this with other Frida novels like The Lacuna would be great for a book club.

This was slow going for me, but very worthwhile.

Frida now has iconic status, but this book goes into depth about a time in her life when she was young and completely unknown (except as Diego Rivera’s young wife).

Stahr does a good job of creating context for this period, addressing her teen years as they shaped her, and her later years as her life and art were shaped by this 3 year interlude in the US. Nevertheless, the book’s focus is on just 3 years of Kahlo’s life, and there’s plenty there!

I will add that I enjoyed this book much more once I started googling the paintings and photos referenced within. I hope the print edition includes them! Stahr is pretty firm about the meaning of each work, but I appreciated viewing them and adding my own thoughts others.

(With thanks to St. Martin’s and to NetGalley for the ARC.)

I had read about Frida’s life and viewed many of her paintings just last month in the Frida Art Museum in Playa de Carmen, and have spent many winters in Mexico, so this was a very special and exciting book for me.
The descriptions of her paintings and her life in America gives great insight into who Frida was and who she became in the 3 years she spent in America.
Despite numerous illnesses as a child and very severe injuries in a bus accident in her youth, that left her in constant pain, she never gave in to it. Frida wanted to promote women and their femininity and rights through her art. Being Mexican, she was all too familiar with male chauvinism. She married a man who was described as pudgy and older. Diego was a well known artist and they went to América because he had been commissioned to paint murals. Her paintings provided Frida with her own identity. The author does a great job of describing her paintings and I took time to look many of them up. (Very worthwhile).

A quote from the book which I found rather sad.
“I have never had anyone who loved only me. I have always shared love with another.”37
Diego was certainly not a faithful husband, in fact she divorced him, but later remarried him.
To Frida love was the main reason for living.
I recommend reading this book, it is not a quick read, but very worthwhile.

This book really takes a deep dive into the life of Frida and Diego, with so much detail on different aspects that I never knew. But after the first few chapters, I found the citations annoying, and despite the citations, much of the information about what Frida was feeling and doing seemed to be pulled from conjecture. While I enjoyed learning so much about the culture and climate of their time in America and Mexico, so much of the story seemed to jump from one event to another without links. After about a third of the book, I wound up skipping ahead to chapters that interested me and skimming the rest.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy for review.

https://smile.amazon.com/review/R76P86DY5C4OS/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Any biography of Frida Kahlo has to begin in the shadow of Hayden Herrera's classic, which formed the basis of the film starring Salma Hayek (which this book made me watch and revisit all over again). While this biography can't resist the temptation to double back shortly after it starts to the bus accident (the blood, the shower of gold, etc) and her adolescent relationship with Alejandro Gomez Arias, for the most part the concept behind the book is strong and the author does herself a favour by sticking to Frida's experience in America, as well as providing some key context for how indigenous fashions and arts were viewed at the time - something also explored by the recent Frida exhibition in London in 2018/19 (?) but neglected by earlier studies. Celia Stahr does a good job of psychonalysing Diego and Frida and showing how the young Frida turned her mischievous side towards the puncturing of self-importance and bigotry, often through comic mispronunciations (I particularly liked 'So help me Goth.') On returning to the film, I paid particular attention to how this part of Frida's life was depicted and this is overall a welcome addition to the beautiful corpus of Frida studies.

Being a huge Frida fan, this book did not disappoint. It covers the time she spent in the U.S and how that influenced her work. Although this book only covers a short period of her life and, these snippets show what she was like both as a woman and an artist. It is an inspiring and fascinating insight into the Mexican artist. I would highly recommend and look forward to seeing the copy in print, complete with illustration and images.
Thank you to netgalley, the author and publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

"Frida in America" describes the life and work of artist Frida Kahlo. The book melds biographical information about her life with analysis of her paintings and the underlying political and national scene. Frida's stormy relationship with her husband Diego made her life interesting but also difficult. The book is well-researched, with many endnotes and bibliographic information. The material for the book is taken from letters and other source material.

I found this book to be quite dense, and it seemed to skip around quite a bit, which made it difficult to follow for me. I would have liked a time line for her life to aid in following through the book. Readers seeking a comprehensive biography with analysis of her art will enjoy this extensive work.

I received this book from the publisher and from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

Thorough research and empathy for her subject make this a thoughtful and insightful biography of Frida Kahlo, focussing on the three years she spent in the US, and exploring how this time informed her art and creativity. There’s a good balance between the details of Kahlo’s daily life and an in-depth analysis of her paintings. My eARC didn’t have illustrations of these paintings and I missed that (although they are easy enough to find online) but I understand that the printed version does, thus making the book an invaluable reference source. There were times when I felt the narrative strayed into fiction, with a bit too much speculation – this was particularly in evidence in the passages dealing with Kahlo’s miscarriage in Detroit - but overall I found the book an immersive and rewarding read, which gave me a deeper understanding of both Kahlo the artist and Kahlo the woman.

I'm a huge fan of Frida Kahlo's and I always love to learn more about her art and her life. "Frida in America" is an interesting book because it focuses pretty much solely on Frida's time in the US. This was somewhat of a brief time in her life, but she did create some of her most powerful works during her stay. I thought Stahr did an amazing job providing context for what was happening in the US during this time (including racial relations during the Scottsboro boys trial and the cookiecutter assembly line work of car manufacturers) to show how Frida's work would have been influenced by these factors. I enjoyed learning more about these historical events in the frame of Frida's Mexican heritage and upbringing. It was also insightful to get more background about Frida's feminist side and how she worked to upend gender stereotypes and biases. There was a little bit more art interpretation than I expected and some of the history of side characters took me too far away from Frida's story. But the main downside was that there weren't any pictures included in this ebook version of the text. So, I was basically stopping to look up images of her artwork every couple of minutes. Including pictures of her work next to the text discussing them would have made this a more seamless reading experience. Overall, anyone looking for a straight-forward biography of Frida could possibly be deterred by this snapshot of her life. But for ardent fans of Frida's work, this offers plenty of insights into her story and the effects of her stay in the US on her art.

It has been too long since there was a new book on Frida Kahlo, but Frida in America was certainly worth waiting for. The book focuses on the three years Frida spent in the United States in the thirties during the depth of the Great Depression. She followed her husband Diego Rivera across the country as he painted his murals, all the while discovering a country she had always been fascinated with and discovering herself as an artist.

Not only does the book describe Frida’s going-ons during those years with very insightful letters and diary entries from both Frida and her friends, but it also offers a perspective and background information on almost every aspect of American and Mexican life Frida came into contact with during that time. You almost get to know Frida and Diego intimately, offering a good balance between the private Frida and the public Frida, and her personality comes through in every page. The amount of research is amazing, and makes this book about much more than just Frida Kahlo.

Another major aspect of this book is the paintings Frida made during that time. Each painting is not only described, but also physiologically analyzed in detail. These parts of the book make for a slow read and bog down the otherwise swift story which sweeps one along. While it brought up certain aspects of Frida’s work I was not aware of, the focus on alchemy, no matter how important, got a little too much after a while.

I thought I knew quite a bit about Frida Kahlo, but this book offers a perspective which adds to the understanding of Frida the woman and Frida the artist. Frida in America is a great addition to any Kahlo fan’s library.

I received an advance copy from NetGalley in return for an honest review of this book.

Frida!

Frida Kahlo. I love her work, her ideas, and the colourfulness of her personality. And yes, when I've visited Mexico I've picked up some wonderful pieces of fun jewelry that represent her, kitsch or not. I enjoy wearing something that harkens to the talented and revolutionary soul Frida was in oh so many ways.
This book covers the years Frida spent in the United States and how that influenced her aesthetically and politically. Celia Stahr has captured the person of Frida.
One idea that struck me was that, 'the duality of life for the Aztecs, as for Frida, was a bringing together of opposites. “Everything is all and one."' Added to this was that that "notion of duality remained rooted in the land, and it shaped Frida’s psyche," and is reflected in her work. In its unpacking, a foundational concept about Frida and her creative spirit.
Adding relevant art works or photographs would have enhanced the production, but despite this, Stahr's quite eloquent work about Frida is very readable.

A St. Martin's Press ARC via NetGalley

As a creative person myself I have long had a fascination with frida so when I saw a book on netgalley about her I jumped at the opportunity to request it.

This book shows just a snippet of Fridas life but even so it is a very in depth view into that small time frame. I enjoyed the break down of her art and the meanings behind them but I sometimes found the writing hard to digest as it seemed to struggle a bit with flow in some parts.

I assume the final copy will have illustrations of her art throughout it so I would he very interested to see or own a final copy as I think with the illustrations it would bring the book to life a bit more and help to understand what some of the book is referring to.

Nonetheless it was an enjoyable and educational book.

I read and own Hayden Herrera's Frida biography and compared this new biography focuses on her time in America. I find Frida absolutely fascinating and I enjoyed the in depth look, her thinking and the quotations.
However I believe this book isn't necessarily for everyone as there are longer passages and detailed analysis about the symbolism in her paintings.
The eARC doesn't contain any images but I believe the finished copy will.
A great addition.
Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an eARC.

As much as I actually like Frida Kahlo´s art, I know very little about her life, apart from the really well known stuff like her accident and her marriage to Diego Rivera. This book was very interesting and while it focuses on a relatively short period of her life, it gives me greater understanding of her, both as an artist and a woman. And it made me want to learn more about Frida. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about art in general, especially the lives of artists. And of course for everyone who loves Frida´s art and surrealism. Thanks to the good people at #Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of #fridainamerica

My thanks to St. Martins Press for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist’ by Celia Stahr in exchange for an honest review.

This biography focuses upon the years that Mexican artist Frida Kahlo spent in the USA (1930-34) when she accompanied her husband, world famous muralist, Diego Rivera, after he was commissioned to paint murals in various cities including San Francisco, Detroit, and New York.

Stahr details how Kahlo’s interaction with other artists as well as the vibrant culture brought about changes in her style of painting. While there she also witnessed poverty further increased by the Depression, racial tensions, and the rise of anti-Semitism. This last element was being propagated by one of their hosts, a man admired by Hitler.

While my eARC didn’t contain any photographs or examples of her art discussed in the text, I contacted the publishers and understand that in the finished edition there will be a full colour insert containing eighteen photos/paintings.

While focusing on Kahlo’s years in the USA, Stahr also touches upon her early life and the years after her return to Mexico and her rising profile as an artist.

In her acknowledgements Stahr outlines her research that including having access to the diary kept by Lucienne Bloch, the close friend of Frida and apprentice to Diego who had been with them during the years covered. In addition, she accessed hundreds of letters that Frida had written to family and friends. The book contains copious notes.

I found this a fascinating account and as a student of art history I appreciated Stahr’s in-depth analysis of the symbolism in Frida’s artworks, especially her exploration of their alchemical imagery.

It is certainly a book that I would recommend to those interested in the life and work of Frida Kahlo.
I have now ordered my own hardback copy.

I initially was very excited when I saw this book available for request. I, like many, admire Frida Kahlo's work and wanted to learn more about who she was and her life. This book takes a deep dive into her transformative years in the US and how they impacted her as a person, her art, and her relationships.

It's clear that the author has done extensive research and respects Frida. However, I really couldn't connect with a lot of the book. It's written in a way that, though factual, is meant to make you feel like you're there with Frida. This was true at times but I often felt like the choppy writing and the tangents the author went off on took away from this closeness. I skimmed most of the symbolic explorations of her work and read on mostly for the looks into Frida's life and experiences.

I enjoyed the author's thoroughness and I did find myself learning a lot, but the structure of the book and extensive tangents made it difficult to concentrate and made me less interested in the book.