Hayden Herrera Knihy

This biography offers an insightful and intimate exploration of Arshile Gorky's life and work, highlighting his artistic journey and the complexities of his character. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, it presents a lucid and persuasive narrative that captures the essence of Gorky's contributions to modern art. Through clear-eyed analysis, the book delves into his influences, struggles, and the impact of his experiences on his creative output, making it a significant read for art enthusiasts and historians alike.

Frida. The artist-painter known only by her first name is as vibrant in her colorful traditional dresses as her language is bold. But she is also sensitive, damaged, and ill. A bus accident at 18 plunged her into constant physical suffering. Since then, Frida Kahlo has lived in a "conflict between a dead Frida and a living Frida," an excessively human duality that Hayden Herrera presents in this intimate and well-documented biography. A rebellious young student at the National Preparatory School in Mexico, and later a communist activist, she mingled with many muralists and revolutionary artists. She created a unique art that mirrored her life, which garnered admiration from Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro, and Wassily Kandinsky. Through numerous letters and excerpts from her diary, we also discover that she was friends with Nelson Rockefeller, Tina Modotti, and André Breton, and that she experienced her romantic dramas with Trotsky and Nickolas Muray under the irreplaceable and mystical shadow of Diego Rivera. Sixty years after her passing, the story of this woman with overflowing humor and imagination remains as extraordinary and moving as her legend and her pictorial universe.

Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party; her absorption in Mexican folklore and culture; and her dramatic love of spectacle.Here is the tumultuous life of an extraordinary twentieth-century woman -- with illustrations as rich and haunting as her legend.

Frida Kahlo's extraordinary life has been well documented, but until now little has been known about the artist's thoughts on her internal and external reality. In "Song of Herself", Kahlo expert and child psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg introduces and contextualizes an intimate, deeply introspective interview that Kahlo gave towards the end of her life to her friend the psychologist Olga Campos for an unpublished book on the creative process. Kahlo comments directly and starkly as never before on her life, her loves and her art, and expresses her attitudes towards sexuality, her body, friendship, politics and death, among other personal concerns.The most revealing autobiographical text known on this singular woman, this startling interview is accompanied here by Campos' reflections on her relationship with Kahlo and a psychological assessment of Kahlo by Dr James Bridger Harris. The book is illustrated with selected photographs and works by Kahlo, including previously unseen and rarely seen drawings.

Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him from artists, patrons, assistants and lovers, this biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors, presents a portrait of an artist driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own 'essence of sculpture'.