Frida Kahlo is one of my favorite artists ever. I've read fictional accounts of her life, biographies, I've purchased books that are just photos of her art... I REALLY like her.
When I saw this book was available on Netgalley, I really hoped to get it because Frida's life in America is not something that I've read a lot about. It was only a few years so it's generally a few paragraphs if mentioned at all. I have no idea why because her 3 years in the US were formative years in her career. She experienced the racial tension, poverty, and anti-semitism of the time. But it was not all terrible, she also experienced the beauty in the US, the sights across the country, the food.
It was vividly written and almost felt like a novel rather than a biography. I enjoyed it and have already been telling my art loving friends to look out for it.
Thanks Netgalley for giving me the chance to enjoy this book!

Frida in America explores the life of famed artist Frido Kahlo, concentrating on her visit to America which was a profound experience for her. I enjoyed the detailed descriptions and symbolism the author used on her paintings which often reflected the physical agony the young artist endured from her injuries sustained in a horrific bus accident. This near death experience changed the trajectory of her life from the medical field to becoming an artist as she never fully recovered from the severity of the bus crash.
Photos of her work would have really added an important dimension to this book. The story read more like a college text book than a biography and the abundance of footnotes I found distracting.
This story does give amazing insight to Frida's strong and independent personality and how events shaped her to become a tortured and brilliant artist. It was just a very slow read and I did find myself skimming through parts. .If you do mind a technical and very thorough view on Frida I feel you will enjoy this book.

This book marks Frida Calo's life in America. It is a bookmarked with antidotes and in-depth analysis of the painting and social structures. As an art history major, I appreciated its attempt to tie in the historical themes of the time and differed art styles, This is the book's strength, but in the same breath, it made its visual assumptions in a way that was assuming of the mental state of Frida, This may be a matter of ARC, but not having easy access to the drawings, painting, and photographs took away from the experience. The writing style was not only choppy but it slowed down the plot. I found myself skimming through the latter half.

As always, thank you, Net Galley, thank you for early access to this book in exchange for this honest review.

An amazing insight into the life of Frida Khalo.
Frida in America is the type of book you read and walk away feeling inspired. This wonderful artist has always appealed to me. Her determination, her struggles, her achievements; they made her an inspirational woman.
I feel privileged to be able to read this book before publication and thank the author for her amazing skills in telling the life of Frida and her husband Diego

In 2015, I saw the Detroit Institute of Art (DAI) exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. I knew Diego Rivera from the DIA court murals but I had known little about Frida Kahol. Reading Frida Kahol in America by Celia Stahr, specifically about Kahlo's time in Detroit, I could clearly remember her painting of her miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital. We listened to the story on headphones and studied the unforgettable painting.

Although the exhibit included works by Rivera, it was Kahlo's that stuck in my mind. Rivera's Flower Seller was more accessible, 'prettier', but Kahlo's self-portraits grabbed my attention--those eyes, so direct and almost challenging, the self-confidence and self-acceptance revealed.

Stahr shares that many who knew both Rivera and Kahlo said Kahlo was the better artist. She stood in the shadow of her husband's charismatic personality, diminished by the press, struggling to develop her artistic voice.

Kahlo was in her early twenties when she married the older, famous artist, and only twenty-three when they arrived in America. Her life had already been eventful, suffering polio, scoliosis, spina bifida, and a life-threatening bus accident when she was a teenager. Pain accompanied her every day. She was a Communist, she challenged society's prescribed sex roles, and had suffered heartbreak as a spurned lover.

It was so interesting to see American during the Depression through Kahlo's eyes. The wealthy industrialists were her husband's patrons--they paid the bills. They also represented a privileged class Kahlo found revolting.

Kahlo wrote to her mother, "Witnessing the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who are cold and have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires, who greedily grab everything, has profoundly shocked [us]."

Of course, I was very interested in the artists' time in Detroit. The city had been one of the hardest hit by the Depression with 50% unemployment. I was shocked to read about the Ford Hunger March. Ford had reduced salaries and laid off workers, and since the workers lived in Ford housing they became homeless as well. Four thousand marched in freezing weather to the gate of the Rouge River plant to be met by bullets and fire hoses, killing four people. River and Kahlo arrived a month after the event.

Stahr addresses each painting created by Kahlo, explaining the work and its symbolism in detail, including the self-portrait made for her estranged lover, the groundbreaking paintings about her abortion and the miscarriage that spurred a traumatic 'rebirth' as had her bus accident had when she was eighteen years old.

Stahr addresses the duality "at the root of Frida's sense of self," part of her "search for a unification of opposites, as the Aztecs and alchemists espoused."

Kahlo's deeply personal art defied convention, delving into female experiences never before depicted in art. In comparison, Rivera's masterpiece murals at the Detroit Institute of Art look to the past, glorifying the pre-Depression industrial worker and the scientists and entrepreneurs who created industry.

American industrialist millionaires were also aiding Hitler--Ford a known anti-semite, and oil companies supplying fuel and poisonous gasses to the Nazis.

After Detroit, the couple went to New York City where Rivera was to create a mural for the new Rockefeller Center; a battle over a patron's control of an artist's content played itself out and resulted in the mural being boarded up.

It could have happened in Detroit, but the scandalous murals drew record crowds to the DIA and turned around their finances.

"Love is the basis of all life," Stahr quotes Kahlo. Love of country, for friends and family, sexual love, for home. Her relationship with Rivera was conflicted, their love affairs rending their marriage, resulting in divorce and remarriage.

This is a revealing and deep study of Kahlo that truly educated me while engaging me emotionally with its subject.

I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

If you are an art history major, this is your book. The life of Frida Kahlo, and, secondarily, her famous painter husband, Diego Rivera, is told in this extremely well researched book. Frida’s artistic life and her marriage to Diego were inarguably influenced by living three years in the United States.

The stories of their travels to San Francisco, New York City and Detroit are interesting. Who Frida and Diego meet and spend time with is important to their overall history. Where the author looses me is in her exhaustive pages -long details on every painting she describes. The minutiae of every detail, such as the placement of a hand to the position of a head and what that means, is mind boggling.

The story, put together largely from diaries and journals, is not a very flattering portrait of Frida nor Diego-their lives were complicated-and you can’t have one without the other.They are immature and temperamental philanderers who despise America, yet are happy to live well and accept money from the wealthy they abhor. Other eye opening facts in the story include those of the Henry Ford and John Rockefeller families.

While Frida was fragile in most of her relationships, she was also an avid feminist. For that she received criticism and little notice of her true artistic prowess until later in life. All in all this is not a very feel good tell-all of Frida and Diego, but it’s one you’ll not easily forget.

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#FridaInAmerica by #CeliaSStahr
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I received a digital ARC of this book via @netgalley in return for an honest review.
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I'll begin by saying that I know very little about #FridaKahlo and I was thrilled at the chance to learn about her through this book. By the end, I was left dizzy and feeling as if I had wandered through a maze in search of the elusive Frida, who I never found.
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Other reviews praise this book as "well researched" but in my honest opinion, any book with over 30 (!) footnotes per chapter is anything but well researched, and is instead chock full of cribbed notes. The book is very shoddily put together, and jumps around so much and so quickly that, as I said, I felt dizzy.
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To sum up, I think I could easily have learned as much, and more linearly, from Wikipedia. I will be getting the #HaydenHerrera biography of Kahlo.
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#bookstagram #readersofinstagram #bookishness #bookstagrammer #fridakahlo #arc #netgalley

I really wanted to learn more about Frida but I never really got a sense of who she was. At 5% in I felt that a lot of the book was she did, she said, she went there and saw that. It wasn't written in a chronological fashion starting with her childhood and progressing through her school years and meeting and marrying Diego. I felt like the author did a tremendous amount of research in order to write the book and that's why I went with three stars but at one point the author is talking about Frida's recovery from the bus accident and then jumps to analyzing her rebirth announcement and then jump back further to her childhood and her imaginary friend and then to a speculation about DaVinci actually being Mona Lisa and then to cross dressing Marcel Duchamp.

I admit that I skimmed most of the descriptions of her painting and what all the symbolism was. The book would be a whole lot shorter without all that and they didn't really give me insight into Frida. Without seeing the paintings that were described it was hard to imagine what it all meant.

In one part she visits the home of Luther Burbank. He has passed away but they are spending some time with his widow. Before they leave they take group photos. All the other women are in dresses and Frida has on pants and a button down shirt. The authors says that perhaps she wore her boyish, proletarian outfit to show solidarity with Luther, a fellow radical who was ahead of his time. Or perhaps she chose the outfit because it was comfortable and they were going to be traveling. That reminded me of an interview I heard with an author where a reader asked her if she did something in the book, say make a character's dress red to represent blah blah blah and the author laughed and said no, she was reading too much into it, she just liked the color.

My sense was there was so much information and it felt like after all that work the author didn't know how to present it.

Frida was a remarkable person. I never did get any idea if she was a kind person but she seemed to love Diego. Maybe someone who is more familiar with her art would like this more than I did.

I received the ebook from Netgalley for an honest opinion.

Frida in America by Celia Stahr

If you are an art history major, this is your book. The life of Frida Kahlo, and, secondarily, her famous painter husband, Diego Rivera, is told in this extremely well researched book. Frida’s artistic life and her marriage to Diego were inarguably influenced by living three years in the United States.

The stories of their travels to San Francisco, New York City and Detroit are interesting. Who Frida and Diego meet and spend time with is important to their overall history. Where the author looses me is in her exhaustive pages -long details on every painting she describes. The minutiae of every detail, such as the placement of a hand to the position of a head and what that means, is mind boggling.

The story, put together largely from diaries and journals, is not a very flattering portrait of Frida nor Diego-their lives were complicated-and you can’t have one without the other.They are immature and temperamental philanderers who despise America, yet are happy to live well and accept money from the wealthy they abhor. Other eye opening facts in the story include those of the Henry Ford and John Rockefeller families.

While Frida was fragile in most of her relationships, she was also an avid feminist. For that she received criticism and little notice of her true artistic prowess until later in life. All in all this is not a very feel good tell-all of Frida and Diego, but it’s one you’ll not easily forget.

My thanks to #StMartinsPress and #NetGalley for an ARC for this review.

Really enjoyed this historical look at a brief window of the life and career of Frida Kahlo. Lots of primary sources cited and some fascinating speculative analysis about her use of symbolism in various areas of her art and life. It was particularly cool to read this right before attending the Frida/Diego exhibit at the NC Museum of Art, showcasing the paintings of both Kahlo and Rivera, and also including works of their contemporaries and personal photographic portraits of one or both artists.

I was given a copy of this book by #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely adored this book and so it goes without saying that if you are looking to familiarize yourself with Frida Kahlo, this is definitely the book to turn to. Celia Stahr goes into so many details, looking in depth at not only Celia's youth in Mexico, but her parents background and upbringing, as well as Diego's, and Diego's family. Stahr also describes and provides detailed analysis of all of Frida's major works and details of Rivera's murals before, and during their stay in America. It was extremely interesting reading about the differences between the art worlds of San Francisco,New York City and Detroit. All in all, I really enjoyed this book and like I said, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about this tremendous artist, who only just in recent times is beginning to get the recognition she deserves. She was definitely a woman ahead of her times during her stay in America. Not even Diego Rivera, with his artist's temperament,was going to tell Frida what to do!

Thank you #netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read #fridainAmerica in return for my honest review.

I had heard a lot about Frida Kahlo but never actually knew anything at all about her. I know I live in a hole. I thought she was a poet cuz she was famous and I thought that's why. But as it turns out she was an artist, a painter. She was Mexican born and shifted to America with her husband, Diego at a very young age. Her husband was a mural artist. The interesting thing was that at young age, Frida was a student of Diego, and teased her about him painting nude women and later came to marry him. There was a huge age difference.

Frida grew as an individual, from being known as Diego's petite wife, she made a name for herself, so much so that it became a brand. She accepted her skin even though she suffered from an injury and pain from it throughout her life but still she was confident about herself. She also highlighted her Aztec Mexican culture. She was politically aware, was gender neutral, had her own sense of style, and did great art.

So this biography explores details along these lines, the author has written in an effortless way and her writing is very interesting. I don't usually like to read biographies but I had finished half of this book in one single sitting. It also was interesting to read how US was separated from Latin America, through a barb wire earlier and now when Trump has brought so much light upon the US - Mexico border wall. This is an honest review.

Frida in America boils down the life of artist Frida Kahlo to a small chunk of time – 1930 to 1933 – and focuses on her life at the side of husband Diego Rivera, following him from New York to Detroit to San Francisco as he paints murals for rich industrialists, and she develops her own foothold as a surrealist.

Kahlo’s feelings about America had always been ambivalent; while she took American lovers and had American friends (and rich art patrons) she always saw it as a land of greed and prejudice and horrifying levels of class disparity; “gringoland”, filled with white faces, “unbaked rolls.”

The book pulls apart both the strained times in which Kahlo lived. She traversed America during the height of the Depression, saw unimaginable squalor and splendor, experienced racist prejudice and saw the way that the privilege and money her husband accrued sheltered her. She fell in lust with women and men but remained obsessed with Diego always, was friends with the maternal grandparents of the Lindbergh baby and store clerk girls.

Though it’s several grades below Hayden Herrera’s perfect Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo, which served as the basis for Salma Hayek’s Oscar-nominated 2002 biopic Frida, Frida in America still does a good job of crystallizing a specific point in time of Kahlo’s life and delivering the details in well-sketched scenes that contextualizes Kahlo’s experiences through those months and years.

The most fascinating fresh tidbits in the book center around Kahlo’s friendships – with other women, with the doctor who would attempt to assist her with the physical problems that plagued her after a bus accident that would define her life, with Georgia O’Keefe, to whom she was attracted but did not consummate that attraction.  While the juicier bits – like Kahlo’s bursts of temper, her miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital, her tempestuous arguments with Rivera – have all already been milled over by many other biographers, Stahr’s ten years of research shows, and she keeps smartly to sources like Kahlo’s letters and the biographies of other artists to show who and what influenced Kahlo’s artistic growth.

And this book is about Kahlo’s art, her ideas, her techniques – in fact it’s one of the finest dives into such territory and it’s beautifully rendered.  Stahr does a perfect job carefully explaining how Kahlo navigated her life.

There is some psychological muddling that doesn’t really come off - dives into Kahlo’s psyche only occasionally come off under Stahr’s pen – but there are also moments of great triumph and good use of the material at hand.  Frida in America earns a solid recommendation.

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Frida in America

Celia Stahr has presented us with a full and well-researched account of Frida Kahlo’s life and loves, troubles and tragedies, brilliance and bloom. Frida seems to have emerged and re-emerged out of her life experience on a daily basis, catepillar to butterfly, by infinity loops.

Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist helped me understand better this woman whose work disturbed me. Having grown up with a mother who painted, my sibs and me were constantly plunked down in front of art and told to report back on what we saw, how we felt and what meaning did we think the artist was trying to express. Mostly toddlers and grade-schoolers, we answered as you would think, monosyllabically – but she was a pusher, was our mom. Once she plunked us down in front of Frida’s work. I loved the colors, bright, saturated and rule-breaking. I didn’t like the people. No smiles, and they looked mad. As years went by, I added her to my not favorite lists.

After I had kids and grew up a little, I ran across Frida's paintings, and her story. I’d fallen in love with Salvadore Dali and found her name mixed with his – I started a leisurely life stroll for more information about Frida. This book answers so many questions! Questions about why she did what she did, and who she did what she did. The book is true to title and focuses on key events in Frida's time spent in America. She grows eyes to see and ears to hear the difference between cultures, people, politics filtered through national aim and direction. What she gathers in her heart she spills out onto every canvas. There is no silence in her work. Frida's hunger, thirst, rage and hope all find their way into the hearts of those who stand and embrace her work. This book is a fine accompaniment to that appreciation – it is a text, albeit with a timeline and narrative that compels page turning with the same drive as a thriller or mystery. The concluding end materials are very satisfying. When you don’t want to be truly done, there is plenty to play with there.

5 stars for this work that Frida herself must be pleased with – finally, someone has loved her just as she is and gets it.

A sincere thanks to Celia Stahr, St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Frida in America by Celia Stahr is a stunning biography into the fascinating and short life of the talented Frida (Frieda) Kahlo. This book focusses on the two years (1930/1932) that Frida and Diego Rivera visited, lived, and traveled throughout America.

Ms Stahr was gracious enough to also give the reader plenty of insight into events that occurred in not only Frida’s life growing up and her earlier years before Rivera, but also the backgrounds of both her parents and many of her friends.

I have been a passionate fan of Kahlo’s for over 20 years, and there were still things that I was able to read about that I did not know. It was amazing to be able to read in depth concerning all of her inspirations and influences, as well as a deep search into the meanings of her pictures, paintings, and her fashion. She was a true genius that was not truly appreciated while she was alive.

This jam-packed biography was just what I needed to add another angle into one of my most beloved artists.

Frida was intelligent, open, passionate, imperfect, beautiful, and sometimes tortured soul that was and emotional yet reserved. She was an amazing woman and artist who was trying to find herself and her place within her family and loved ones and the society that was at the very least judgmental, overbearing, and limited for women at that time.

The author gave us a glimpse into that soul and her meticulously researched book definitely did Frida justice. I am impressed.

5/5 stars

Thank you NetGalley and St Martin’s Press for this stunning ARC and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.

I am posting this review to my GR and Bookbub accounts immediately and will post it to my Amazon and B&N accounts upon publication.